Believe it! You can check off maintenance, meet a deadline and still get a remodel that enhances your home’s MCM charm and suits your life and family! Listen to my new workshop for all the speedy remodel planning skills.
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- That it is 100% possible to create a remodel plan in just 30 days.
- What you MUST DO before reaching out to a professional so that you can work efficiently with any designer or contractor
- How to get on the same page as your partner and stay there while you plan FAST.
- How to cut analysis paralysis OUT OF your remodel planning for good (everyone should do this!)
- Where to focus FIRST, NEXT, and LAST when you’re facing a time crunch.
Listen Now On
Resources
- Start planning today with Master Plan in a Month! Sign up now for four weeks of live Architect Chats plus a free spot in my next mid-century design clinic, More than a Mood Board, on June 1.
- Looking for the full Ready to Remodel course?
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
What do you do when you need to plan a home update in a hurry? Not having enough time or feeling like you don’t is the reason most people give for jumping straight to picking up the phone and calling a contractor without taking time to ask themselves a crucial master planning questions.
But if you find yourself in this situation, whether you’ve got an imminent life change like a new baby or household member coming or a move, or something sudden happens to or in your house, a tree falls on the roof, a flood destroys the bathroom floor.
Or to be honest, sometimes you might just have an urgency of time that’s not about a deadline, but about having no available free time over the next amount of days, weeks or months.
Like I say, if you find yourself in this situation, do not despair. You can still benefit enormously from even a small amount of selective masterplan thinking, and today I’m going to talk to you about exactly how to focus your energy in the right direction.
When your remodel planning time is extremely short. Hey there, welcome back to the modern model. This is the show about updating MCM homes helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host Della Hansmann architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, you’re listening to Episode 1706.
Okay, so last week, at the end of the episode, I invited you to join me live at 2pm. For an experiment, I had just put together a brand new workshop 30 minutes on the steps to take to plan a remodel in 30 days or less. If you were able to join me for that workshop on speedy strategies to plan a perfect MCM remodel. Thank you! We had such a grand time.
But I want to make sure this is available as widely as possible because actually, this is the situation we find ourselves in from time to time. And the shorter your planning horizon is, the more important it is to know how to use that time. Well. Without further ado, I’m going to share with you the audio of that live 30 minute workshop. Of course, it did run over by 20 minutes answering questions at the end, but I was able to deliver on my 30 minute promise so precisely I impressed even myself.
As per usual, you’ll find the typical show notes page at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1706. Or if you’re realizing right now you would rather watch me deliver this talk rather than listen to it. I did make you some pretty slides, you can find the recording at mid bond dash midwest.com/month. Here you go.
Okay, so welcome to speedy strategies for planning and MCM remodel, you will love and we’ll get a couple more people showing up along the way. This is a middle of the day working session, I’m excited to test this out this whole thing is an experiment because planning a remodel well, is an experiment. It’s part of a process of getting to know yourself getting to know your house and making good choices.
And if there’s maybe a first thing I want you to take away from this workshop today it is that this doesn’t need to be. It’s not rocket science. It is important, but it’s not impossibly hard. It’s not some distant, unattainable future, you’ll never get to planning a remodel large or small, even in a small amount of time. Is personal is. Is fun, I hope it’s something that you can really lock into key into and make some personalized choices that are just for you.
And that’s what we’ll do more than anything else we can do about how to be more effective or more efficient. We’re going to talk about making personal choices, choices that are about the things that matter most to you. So as we get into them, I want you to know that there are two things I believe as a designer, and the first one is that you everybody, but you specifically deserve to live in a home, you absolutely love one that is tailored to the life you want to lead in it one that helps you wake up better, move through the day more smoothly, get along with your family, remove clutter from your life when you don’t need it and just go forward.
By the way, if you are just popping in now, I would love it if you pop into the chat and say hello, where you’re from who you are, what your vast project is. And this is going to help me carry the energy of this class forward. So Belief number one, you deserve to live in a house you love. And the second belief I have is that your mid-century house, which is as soon as the reason you’re here talking to me right now deserves love too. Because mid-century homes are a really remarkable type of house. They are small, they are right size, they are in great locations.
Generally speaking, they are built with limited resource materials that we often have no access to anymore. The old growth forests that make up the studs and the cabinets of our mid-century kitchens are gone. We put them into the kitchens. So we want to make choices for our homes that adapt them to the future that our long term thinking. I mean, these houses were meant to build, to build to last for decades for coming up on a century now and we can make choices that are going to last just as long and be just as effective if we put a little bit of time and thought into it.
Hey Courtney 1960s kitchen project. Great. Julie from Manitowoc. Great to have you here. I’m so excited. So here’s what It’s true. No matter how much or little time you have to plan your project, you and your home deserve some solid planning time. Doesn’t matter if it’s a really solid day, or it’s a really solid month, or it’s a really solid year. They deserve the planning time you deserve it, and your home deserves it. So my mission with this business with mid Midwest is to save every mid-century home in America from mediocre remodels, that includes yours, because mediocre homes don’t last mediocre. remodels need to be redone again and again.
And eventually a home that’s not cared for or appreciated, gets knocked down and thrown into the landfill, which I hate. But you can make a solid plan in a hurry if you plan effectively. And that’s what we’re here today to discuss. So before I go too far into that I want to know where you are and let you know where I am. If you want to reach out, you can respond to any of the messages you’ve got about this workshop, when to come to it, the sort of confirmation emails, they all come from us.
So just hit reply, and we’ll get that message or even better reach out to me on social media. In fact, you can do that right now pick up your phone, open up Instagram, send a direct message to mid Midwest. That’s me. I’m always on the other end of the Instagram. And I would love to hear about your project, what’s got you going What’s got you wondering what is holding you back and what is moving you forward, I’d love to know about it. So when you’re remodeling in a hurry, you need to be clear, we need to have a lot of clarity about a couple of things. So I love to take stock. And I don’t know if we’ve got enough rapid fire continuity in the comments. But I would love to see your engagement. So if you want to hit yes or no and type it in the comments, I’d love to hear it. But I want you to be asking yourself these questions in your head right now when I say them.
Have you ever remodeled before? Yes or no, there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. No, of course there isn’t. If you have remodeled before, you’re going to have a certain amount of insight into it. If you’ve never remodeled before, you’re going to be in a fresh place, just taking this one step at a time. But one way or another knowing that about yourself and sharing that with anyone else you work with is important. Yes and no.
Okay, we’ve got we’ve got people in multiple situations, how about how confident are you that you’re on the same page with your spouse or partner, if you’ve got one about the goals for your project? This is a really important one, this one gets skipped or pushed back to way late in the process way too often, I have spent my career in residential remodeling. And let me tell you, there are times when I feel like architects should be trained as marriage counselors. Because we get to a lot of endpoints in a project and start seeing conflict between partners.
The best thing you can do to avoid that, especially if you’re in a hurry is talk about your priorities at the start when you’re a little bit more calm about them even when time is tight, because it will remove infinite hassles as you go forward. Okay, next question. I’ve got a maybe in the comments. That’s the first partial credit. Maybe you want to have a few more conversations and clear that up. We’ll talk about it in a minute. Here’s a question. I know my house really well. Do you feel like you know the basics of your house the year it was built when and if it’s been remodeled in the past?
What it has in terms of maintenance headaches that might pop up on you what things you know, need to be repaired in the next couple of years. This is sometimes more applicable than others. If you’re remodeling a bathroom, you don’t necessarily need to know the status of your roof. Although it might be that if you’re remodeling your bathroom and your roof needs replacing within the next five years, you want to think about is this the time to bring a little more daylight into a dark bathroom?
Is this the chance to pop a skylight or a light tube in there, those two projects can be put together. Knowing more about your house always opens up the possibilities for Win choices, or two for one. Design results when you’re making necessary things happen in the House have to replace the roof when it needs replacing. And you’re going to do the bathroom project. So why not marry those together? You can make connections like that when you know more about your house. You also want to know question and again there’s no right or wrong answer.
Can you right now clearly define what you mean by mid-century style? Can you show me a picture and you show me a couple of pictures? Can you give it a name? I love Jetsons modern. I’m a bit more of a Brady Bunch family. Knowing these things, being able to give yourself a catchphrase often a TV shows a really easy signifier if you like a particularly vintage style. Or you might say you know I don’t like real mid-century I like fake looking back mid-century I like madmen style very few people actually lived in it houses as cool as a madman sets. It’s a little bit more of a modern conception. So that’s fine too. Knowing where you feel about these things is really helpful. If you’ve not taken it before, check out my free like three minute long mid-century style quiz.
You can go to mid mod dash midwest.com/quiz. You could do it right now but I’d like you to keep paying attention. And it’ll tell you where you fall on the spectrum of total vintage Time Capsule preservation to Yeah, mid-century but with a bit more of a modern twist. That’s also really important to know. When you know those things about yourself you’ll have a better answer to I feel ready to weigh my options or I get overwhelmed by choices. I don’t Know what I like, I don’t trust my own taste I feel in the woods here. The more you know the answers to some of these other things and the more you go through the process we’re going to talk about today, the more you will feel ready to weigh your options and make quick decisions. Because again, we’re making our decisions in a hurry.
Do you feel ready to sprint, because planning is something we want to take seriously, it’s fun. Running a sprint can be fun if you like it, but we want to feel like you are ready to go. I’d love to know I love these answers that I’m getting, by the way. Thank you. I’d love to know what is the cause of your hurry, because there’s a couple of different reasons why people come to me needing to speed through their remodel process, or sometimes with the belief that they don’t have time to remodel. And in that case, I hope I can reframe your perspective.
Sometimes people in a hurry because of a live event. They’re going to move, they’re going to have a baby, they’re going to get married, someone is coming into the household, they need a mother in law suite. These are real life deadlines that are hard to work around. Sometimes it’s a little bit of a fantasy that you can get an entire remodel planned and completed before a baby comes. But sometimes it’s what you need to do. So knowing that that life event is what’s driving you that’s really important to keep in mind.
Sometimes it’s an external force. Something has broken in the house, a tree fell on the roof. The toilet is leaking right through into the basement. You just can’t stand hell rundown something I see where I’ll put that under the category. So the house needs it right now. It’s maybe an open question of is it this week? Is it this month? Is it this year, but there’s something compressing your timeline, you don’t have forever to do this? You need to get it done? Yeah, okay, we’ve got a life event moving into the house.
Want to get the remodel done before moving and not taking care to prevent this is so familiar, this happens to a lot of people, you’re not alone there. And then there’s actually a third category of people who might be here today or watching this video in the future, which is you don’t actually have a life event but is compressing your time your life is compressing your time you’re just busy, you’re maybe too busy to remodel, I would argue that you are not. But you’re certainly very busy while you plan a remodel. Yeah, summer is another real deadline.
And you’re on the calendar for instruction. That’s a real deadline. So you want to make your decision. You want to get ready to make decisions as competently and smoothly as possible. So whichever one of these three reasons and outside life event, external horses have the house going wrong, or just your life is super busy, and you need to make decisions really quickly. You’re in the right place right now. So once you know what’s rushing noon, let’s try to quantify it. Do you have? Jim says we can take time for a quick remodel to plan for a quick remodel? Yes, you can.
Anybody want to tell me their exact timeline? Are we trying to come up with a master plan in a weekend? It’s plausible. It’ll be a really snug one. Do we want to do a master plan in a month? Do we want to do a master plan this summer? What is your planning scale? We’ve got to this summer. I’m going to move forward. But I want to hear your answer. So I’ll shut them out when I see them.
Because knowing what our quantity is going to help us figure out what’s going on. So we’ve got this summer, July this summer question mark July. Okay. We have got some deadlines here. So reality check. Whatever your deadline is, no matter how setup you are with a contractor, all of these things, to go into a remodel without any plan whatsoever is not going to be an easy life. Because these are the two matches. I think at these problems at the too much too many. They are true for everyone who’s remodeling.
They’re particularly true for we who love mid-century homes. Because there are too many options out there. We live in a world where you can literally get anything from the internet. And if anything is technically available for video higher or lower price. How on earth do you choose from any of the hundreds the 1000s of kitchen faucets of Bath showerheads of types of tile, it’s overwhelming. And this is going to be remodeling without a firm plan incredibly scary.
There are also just in any process, even a bath update to many individual decisions to make so not just all the possibilities that are out there. But you have to decide on a bath faucet and a showerhead and the sink faucet and then what kind of countertop would be well that’s affected by the built ins that you’re going to choose. What type of toilet Do you want? You’re going to need to choose what the flooring material is do you change the wall or wall color? What’s the whole theme? That’s just one room.
You’re also going to be asked questions that have to do with structure plumbing, electrical that don’t really affect the way you look at the space but will absolutely mattered the way you use it every day. Do you want a dimmer switch? A three way switch for the lights to be modified from alternate sides. yes and no answers that you make on the fly can end up having a big effect on the smoothness of your day in the future. That’s just the first two too many two matches.
For the mid-century lovers among us there is way too much bad for mid-century advice out there all of HGTV most of the things you’re going to hear from friends family and contractors is going to be steering you away from the mid-century features of the house that you love that drew you to the house in the first place that gave the house its timelessness its longevity.
So it’s really important to have a plan so you can stay on track and avoid the pressure of all those destabilizing influences. And when you go to take on a remodel, even a small one, even if you’re mostly DIY, and a bunch of people are going to be involved, people, you pay contractors and subcontractors, people who know you, your friends, family who want to give you a some of that not so good advice. There may be more than one person, two people in a couple, maybe you’ve got parents who are interested in your project and weighing in whether or not it’s really their place to do.
So. There are just a lot of factors that are going to happen to make noise around you while you’re trying to focus up and make a decision. And our homes are personnel. They’re expensive. They are the way we present ourselves to the world and the way we protect ourselves in the world. That’s a big deal. There’s a lot of pressure on this. And remodeling is expensive. It all costs too much. So how can we set aside all of the too much too many, and move forward really quickly?
My best advice is to take some deep breaths. And actually, the faster you need to remodel, the more you need to just let it feel easy. If you believe you don’t have time, you won’t have time. But remodeling isn’t homework. And it’s not work. You don’t have to sit at your computer and hunched over your desk to do it.
You can fit remodeling thinking, especially the kind of things we’re going to talk about in the rest of this talk today into going for a walk with your dog, having a glass of wine with your spouse or partner going out for friends and just chatting about what’s going on in your life, you can be fitting good pre design thinking into that process, it doesn’t have to be something that you need to make an appointment with yourself to get done. Although having an appointment with yourself isn’t a bad idea. So I want to hit a couple of quick concepts.
The Pareto principle is a productivity idea that, in any situation, about 80% of the good results that come out of a process come from only 20% of the work, that means we’re doing a lot of busy work going off in other directions, doing unnecessary things that don’t contribute to the end result of what we wanted to have happen. So when we’re thinking about speed planning, we want to get rid of all the extraneous processes and thinking that’s not going to move us towards our goal.
There’s also to consider Parkinson’s Law. And that is that work will always expand to fill however amount of time you have to do it. So if you’ve got a deadline that it’s a month from now, for getting a thing done for work, you’re probably not going to get too worried about it right now, I don’t know your personality, if you’re going to make a checklist, divide that task into 30, bite sized pieces and do one every day, but much more likely, you’re going to put it off a little bit.
And also even if you did divided into 30, bite sized pieces and do it every day, was it really a 30 step task. If you had a day to do that same task, you would probably still get it done. And the example that I want to put into this for maybe more daily life terms is if you had to clean up your house, before company came over tomorrow, and you had from now until tomorrow to do it.
You might spend part of the entire time that you’re not sleeping, doing a little tidy and putting a little things away and maybe vacuuming, swiping down counter surfaces. But if you were out of town, and you were arriving at your house, 30 minutes before company came, you wouldn’t say Oh, I don’t have time to clean to bed, you would still swipe some things up, you would still put some things away, you would clean before company.
So this is we’re going to do figure out what are the most essential clean before company tasks of planning and do those. When time is short, we need to use it effectively. Focus on your goal every time you have time to plan, think about what am I trying to get out of this session? What do I need to decide at the end of it? What I need to feel more confident about at the end of this conversation at the end of this dog walk after the session of using Pinterest.
If you’re familiar with the mid mod Midwest to the mid mom remodel podcast, anything that I say to the internet about making good choices for mid-century homes, you’ve probably heard me talk about the Master Plan method. And this is broken into five steps, all of which begin with a D five d thinking means you’re going to start with predesign you’re going to dream, discover and distill so that you know exactly what you want to happen. I’ll get into these more in a moment, then you’re going to draft and compare options possibilities for what’s going to go on in the house expanding what you might think about as possible comparing one option against another.
If you know me, you know I love to say have three options for every layout or every material. So you can sort of weigh Yes, this one, maybe this one of that’s the one. And then finally focus down until you’re developing a plan you can share with yourself keep for your own records and share with other people in your building team. But these first three steps, these are the things you need to do the most These are often overlooked.
People focus so much on how can I change the layout of this room? Or how can I pick the perfect finished materials that they often overlook these organizational these foundational steps dream, discover and distill. So when time is short, we want to feel focus on forming a strong start. Really, if you had time to do nothing else, I would ask you only to dream.
Now what do we mean by dream? I don’t mean your dream house, I don’t mean a fantasy pie in the sky thing. Done right, asking the right questions of the dream phase gives you control of your budget. Because you can prioritize, you can decide where you want to spend your time, money and energy and where you don’t. It gives you the confidence to ask for other people’s opinions. When you know what you need done the most, you can say, I’m looking to change my kitchen in such a way that I can have conversations with my kids while they do homework.
And I can see eye to eye to the dining room table so that when we have company over, I can come back and prepare dessert and see what’s happening with people and not walk away from the conversation. Or maybe you need the opposite. Maybe you’re saying I can’t do anything in the kitchen, because it’s completely open to the living room. And I don’t want to make a mess in there or a smell at all, I need more of a visual separation.
Maybe I need a stronger exhaust fan. That’s something you might know in dream, I need better walls around this room, I need a block a built in a wall something so that when people walk up to my front door, they do not see the kitchen sink. Knowing that allows you to ask for exactly what you’re looking for. Whether you have time to plan the layout things or not, you can talk to your contractor and tell them exactly what you need. It will also allow you to respond to options much more quickly, because it’s going to simplify choices, you’re going to know what matters most.
And you won’t get caught up in the fussy details about these parts of the house that are being offered to you. We could give you a fancier trim, do you care, we can give you more space for a rec room. You didn’t ask for that. So you can basically yes, no things more effectively. When you really have done your dream homework, you’ll have a strong priority list where you can set down the order of things you’re going to go in. And sometimes a lot of masterplan projects get broken into phases. This will help you divide what happens in phase one from what happens in phase two.
And like I was talking about earlier about bringing a skylight into a bathroom remodel, because your roof needs replacing, dreaming knowing that the whole house you feel slow in the morning, you feel grumpy, and it’s hard to get going. Because even though you look out at beautiful windows all around the house always feels dark. You’ve got oak trees everywhere, and you just don’t get light in the side windows. This tells you you’re looking for bringing in more daylight you need to think about places to bring in a skylight. So the questions you answer for yourself about what works and what doesn’t in the house tell you they whisper to you the secrets that you need to fix.
When you have dreamed properly, the choices you’ll make in your remodel won’t be generic, they will be personalized to you to a house to a lifestyle that’s going to grow with you and suit all of the needs that you have. So how do you dream effectively, you ask yourself the right questions, you list your real priorities not your TV dream life wish list, not that Oh, my neighbor has this kind of built in fridge. I wish I had it too. I mean, sure is that as the thing that’s gonna make you happiest in the world.
Absolutely. But I’m also talking about, we need more space for people to have quiet time in the evenings away from each other, or we need a space that everybody wants to hang out in. I want the kitchen to be a place where homework gets done and work gets checked on. And lunch gets made. While dinner is being prepped, this needs to be the hub of the household. That kind of lifestyle priority. You can also make a list of what’s bugging you most in the house. It’s fair, I don’t want you to focus on the negative too much but knowing what’s working what isn’t.
And this is a great place by the way to check your priorities with your partner to make sure that what’s bugging you is bugging your partner or if it’s not that they know where you are intersecting on your most important areas. You can assess what’s working in your daily routines and what’s not. And this is a place where I really do think you want to let the house talk to you. It’s sometimes whispering sometimes shouting in ways you might not be used to listening for but if you do the dream phase right, you will see where clutter builds up.
That’s a place you need more storage, or you need a different flow point through the house, you’ll see where there are disagreements between people about tidiness or chores. Because there isn’t a place to separate two activities from each other, or there isn’t easy visibility of something that needs to get done, you’ll see where people are, where you have a tendency to drop off things that don’t belong, because there isn’t the proper adjacency between as you go from here to there.
You always want to need to leave this item behind your work backpack outside shoes, and so they end up in the wrong place. Looking for these things is the language that your house is speaking to tell you what needs changing what needs adjusting and what should be folded into your plans as you make them.
The other important predesigned step that you have to do even if you have only a little bit of time after you’ve dreamed is to distill and distill is all about focusing your style. This isn’t about picking out the perfect kitchen tile. This is about picking the visual style of the kitchen. It’s not about products specifically although it will guide you to specific products. It’s about knowing are you choosing more vintage or more modern choices, what is the woodgrain and stain color that’s going to happen throughout the house.
What one two or maximum three metals are you going to use for every lamp, every faucet, every appliance? When you know those basic questions when you’ve distilled your style, then you can yes, no quickly through any contractor supplied list of fixtures, flat finishes and appliances as decisively as possible, it’s also going to result in a cohesive finished look.
So you don’t have the style of the bathroom model from 2024. And the style of the kitchen remodel from 2025. And it just goes forward and each piece feels in cohesive, you’re going to have one coherent style that feels like a designer put it together you did.
The thing I want you to remember is that there will never be a right or wrong answer for most things in your house. When you get asked a question by a contractor or suggested something. It’s true always that the right answer depends. It depends on you on your preferences on your lifestyle, on your budget on how likely the kids or pets in your household are to be hard on a surface. You need to be able to know these baseline things and be able to factor those in so that you don’t freeze when someone says okay, we got to pick kitchen flooring today.
And you think every type of flooring that has ever existed ever is a possibility. I don’t know what to do. Instead, you can boil it down and think well, I have an elderly mother who’s a bit of a Butterfingers and will always drop plates, and so my five year old so we need a bountiful surface, we need cork, we need laminate, we need marmoleum. Or you might think I’ve got a tendency to spill boiling hot things on my floor, I want a floor that is cleanable AF and impervious to any damage itself. I want to terrazzo tile floors, I want them to be spic and span all the time to be able to wet mop them without regard for anything else.
And for them to just be like the shiny fixture that makes the kitchen clean. Knowing these things about yourself is how you take the it depends and turn it into the right answer for you. So if knowing your priorities is half the battle, you’re focusing on those first two or three steps the dream, the Discover the still, you also have to be able to communicate to someone else to the contractors that are going to work with you to the suppliers that are going to help you find the right material, you need to have a visual reference, it needs to be written down on paper or digitally documented in a way you could send to someone or print off and show to someone.
So that might just be a bullet list of what your priorities are and a couple of Pinterest images that show the style you’re looking for. That’s the short, short, short version of a master plan. But the more you can develop this, the more that you can add clear details that aren’t overly confusing, but are very much adding up to the whole vision you want for your house, the more you’re able to get people to give you exactly what you want quickly and on budget. So if you take one thing away from today, I want you to see how completely doable it is for you to plan a great remodel for any space in your home large or small, even if time is super short.
The way to win at a remodel is to stick to the steps. And to go in order. Start with a big picture of the priorities and the style guide first, and then go forward from there. And let this planning process feel fun. Have these conversations about your priorities. While you’re doing things you would already do. One of the most effective ways to kick off a plan even when you know time is tight, but you’re sort of putting it off is to make a date with yourself.
Not to plan. But to plan when you’ll plan. Make a date to say I’m going to look at my calendar, I’m going to realize that my quietest day is always going to be Wednesday for the next couple of months. So Wednesday evening, or Wednesday morning or Wednesday. Well, everybody is off a day camp, that’s going to be my moment to check in on priorities and to think about how this project is going forward. When you fit your plan to the realities of your actual life, you’re much more likely to keep it going. And then there’s just momentum.
Once you have started. I really encourage you to keep going forward. Try not to let anything derail you even a vacation. Do it on Wednesday on vacation, even if it was just have a conversation over wine or coffee about what is mattering most right now. Keep up the momentum of your planning so you don’t lose track. Here’s a metaphor I like to think about when I am planning a great remodel. You could think about remodeling without a plan like throwing darts in a bar with your friends. This can be really fun, but you’re very unlikely unless you are naturally talented dart thrower to hit the bullseye and you want to hit the bullseye with your remodel.
But in that fun, crowded bar, you’ve got a lot of noise and distraction. You’ve got all the advice of everything that’s going around in the world. You’ve got the gusting blowing of the air conditioner, modern trends blowing you off course and you’ve got your least fun, drunk friend. HGTV who does not care about the results just wants a big show and they’re gonna spin you around and cover your eyes when you try to throw.
So don’t throw darts at a dartboard. Walk one step at a time up to the dartboard and stick your dart in the bullseye because this is your model and it matters to you So the five steps of the master plan and the most important part starting off right with your priorities and dream is what’s going to keep you going and asking the right questions.
Speaking of questions, I’m going to answer questions that you might have, because you showed up today after we’re done in just a few more minutes, but I wanted to say if you need help to stay on track to follow the steps that I’ve been talking about today to ask yourself more of the specific questions that I recommend asking, we’ve got a couple of ways that we help homeowners to make great choices for their mid-century homes.
The first one, the one we do the most thoroughly is our custom master plan service. We study your home, your life, your style, and we offer options put together packages for what you could do. This is a wonderful way to design a remodel, it is not the fastest.
However, we also support homeowners to go through this process on their own inside of our custom home program, ready to remodel where you can follow every single step in detail that I’ve just listed at your own pace. This is the way to go as deeply as you can into all of the whys to thinking about what you need to know about your house to all the experts you might consult to pulling together a style guide that’s going to work for you, and developing options.
And then a final vision for the house. It’s great, but again, it’s not the fastest way to do it. It does offer ongoing connections to me monthly support calls in perpetuity, so you can always check in on your plan. But if you’re here today, because you need to do the speediest possible paths through the Master Plan method steps, then I put together this smaller condensed program master plan in a month, which will help you hit every step as quickly as possible.
With master planning a month, you can go through the lesson content one or two lessons for each of those steps. You can listen to them, you can read them, you can look at them on your computer, there are videos, whatever format works best for your life, you’ve got it, it’s got some bonus workshops, they’re going to help you to plan the right time to plan and to get the right tools to document and think about design questions.
And we also throw in an invitation to the style guide clinic, I’m going to be giving it a month where we go from mood board to actual minute decisions you’ll make for every product, you’re going to need to pick as effectively as possible. All of that fits into the master plan in a month program. And if you’re curious about that, you can just go to mid mod.midwest.com/month. And sign up.
As soon as we get your sign up email will email you back and you’ll be in the program, you can start watching the videos, you can start planning just like that. And that is 30 minutes to talk about how to plan a remodel in 30 days or more or less. Wow, I did it. I wasn’t sure I could hit time.
And I’m actually really proud of myself, who’s got a question about the speed of your plan about what you’re planning for. I would love to give you a little one to one feedback right now about what’s going on with your mid-century home update right now, what is on your mind as you look down the deadline of July or this summer, which seems to be the consensus for this workshop right now.
What’s holding you back? What’s getting you started? Okay, we’ve got a question that’s just come in. And it is, can you make a master plan for us using the blueprints? We’re not living in the house? Oh, yeah. So if we do a custom master plan for our clients, when I first began doing this, I worked like most architects do only on projects that I could visit myself and do the documentation for. But during the pandemic, we had to develop an entirely new way of working with our clients.
So we now work remotely with people all over the US, Washington State, Washington, DC, the South Minnesota. And we have people submit plans that they have made by scanning their house with an app and also Yes, blueprints. So if you’ve got the blueprints for your house, you’re in amazing luck not most mid-century homeowners do not often have access to their original homes blueprints.
So that’s wonderful. When we have a remote project, we take that plan information, we also need a lot of photos of what’s going on in the house so we can understand what it looks like in 3d. And we use that to understand what the house is right now to do our own discovery step. And then we ask you for the information about what your priorities are and your mid-century style is and we prepare multiple options. I’m a big believer in the power of the number three.
So we do multiple, three possibility areas for the kitchen dining area for the owner suite for how the exterior can be upgraded the things that have been asked for the master plan, and put those all together into documentation. So that’s part of our master plan service. If you’re curious about that, you can watch a little video about it at Bid my desperate vets.com/services.
But you can also just apply to work with us right away that’s in the same spot and we would love to talk to you a little bit more about your project. Let’s see Rob asks any opinion about trying out a contractor on one room versus committing them to a whole remodel? That is such an interesting question. It depends a little bit on you know your time needs. If you have the kind of timeline can be broken apart.
It is a nice idea to work with someone the best way to know what it’s like to work with someone is to work with them. It’s perhaps not necessarily the most cost effective way is always the ultimate dollar cost of a project is always less if you do everything at one time. That said it’s often Not the most realistic way to live in a house while work is done or to finance a project, if you’re going to be doing it with bridge loans or HELOC or what have you.
But I think you can get a reasonable idea of what it’s like to communicate with a contractor just in the typical get to know your process. If they come to your house and have meetings, if you ask to meet the whole team, you’ll get a good sense of how quickly they communicate how responsive they are, what good listeners they are. But you will also learn a lot more about them if they go through the process of all space.
For example, a small bathroom, I wouldn’t start with just to get if I was going to do a kitchen, I would do more than a kitchen. But if you wanted to do a basement or garage, a bathroom and just see how it goes, it’s definitely a good way to know for sure what it feels like to work with that person or that team. Kim asks, what is the color the background of my slides.
This, you know, I could tell you the hex code for the yellow that I always use off the top of my head. This one I don’t know as much, although it’s a color I go to as a as a secondary color, I thought it’d be fun. Rather than doing yellow, which is my default to do teal for this master plan in a month program.
I can just sign up and right now, oops, sorry, messing up the recording. It’s I can send you the color code for this. But if you’re asking about the specific color for putting it somewhere in your mid-century house, then I have to tell you my philosophy of color, I’ll get to you in a second, I have to tell you my philosophy of color, which is that you can never ask someone that perfect color, particularly in this example, a digital environment, you’re seeing it on your screen, I’m seeing it on my screen, if you put it on your wall as paint, it will have a completely won’t be backlit, it’ll have daylight on it, it’ll have the artificial lights in your room on it, if you put it on the outside of your house as paint, it’ll have the reflections of plant life, the sky, the grass, your neighbor’s houses.
So I think you can get close to a good color with an example from the world. But then you have to go to the paint store gets swatches and test them on the actual walls that you’re going to use or you know, on the cabinet doors, get samples for everything and test them in real life. Because there’s always going to be some variation based on the other things in the environment around them. If you want more detail on that concept, you want to grab my free mid-century color guide.
And you can get that at mid mod dash midwest.com/colors. I’ve got a PDF handout that has examples of colors for mid-century homes and actually had also emails to ask advice on color choosing exterior pink colors. I think you want to think about any existing materials on your house for exterior paint colors, the siding, the brick, stone, the color of the things that are in your yard in different seasons. And then you want to test swatches. So I will. While I’m at it, look up what that exact Teal is for you because I love it. But I’m going to let’s see. I found it.
Well, I can I can multitask, sort of. Oh, Rebecca’s Got it. Thank you, Rebecca. Okay, and then I’ll go back to your follow up question, Rob. Why not just a kitchen. Because the kitchen is everything a kitchen is the core of the house. It’s not, it’s not the same as your entire house. But it has every single decision that will go into your remodel is in the kitchen, you could choose the kitchen and then do just it and then go back out into the house and say the stain color I chose in the kitchen that goes everywhere else in the house.
The color I chose for the light fixtures, the metal that happens in them, that is the color for the metal and the light fixtures everywhere in the house, the light switches that I chose, they go everywhere. But I think when you’re going as far as a kitchen, I would bundle it together with some adjacent spaces, particularly because for most people in mid-century homes, we’re trying to create a little more openness around the kitchen. And it makes sense to let them go at the same time if you’re replacing trim in the kitchen, to have that matched into the adjacent social spaces. To knock off the work when you’re having plumbers come and electricians come and H back guys come and work on all of the mechanics of the kitchen to have them do a bathroom at the same time.
So there’s economies of scale that will Thanks Rebecca for that to Xcode that will go forward in bundling a kitchen with other things. Also, the stakes in the kitchen are high if you wanted to do a test project with someone to make sure you liked them. I think once they’ve done your kitchen, they’ve made an impact on your house. So if I was unsure about someone, I’d start them on a little project. And if I was going to do the kitchen, I would just do to the best of my ability, have confidence in the person that I chose based on having a really solid master plan, no matter how quickly put together and then really having super clear communication feeling like you really have a simpatico with the person that you’re working with the lead on that project for managing it and trying to meet as many of the people to be involved in it. possible. But great question.
Julie asks, do you recall helping me look at my sunroom kitchenette and suggest an island placement? Now I’m thinking of making this my kitchen and making my kitchen office. You know what? Surely I don’t I sorry, I don’t remember that. But I’m, I’m a big fan of putting islands into kitchens. But do you think you’d have more space, if you switched the two of them, this might be a really good idea. And this is an example of the kind of creativity we can get when we think a little bit more outside the box, when you know what all the various spaces are in the house.
Sometimes, you need to shoot for the moon and do a move one room to another space move, I will say it’s not inexpensive to move a kitchen from one part of a house to another. But on the other hand, sometimes it makes such a big difference to the way you live in the space, the way it connects to other things and the way that different parts of the house work together that it can be worth it. If unless cost is no object, this is definitely the kind of question you would want to sort of work out the option of one and work out the option of another and then maybe get the both priced by one or ideally, several contractors. But I don’t discourage you from that because it might be exactly the move that you want to make.
Yeah, great. Great, great question. Anything else anybody else, I want to get everybody walking away from this feeling empowered and excited and ready to go, Oh, I forgot to tell you a thing. Um, there’s one more quality of master plan and a month master plan in a month is an evergreen program, its course it’s less than Makonnen that you can follow at your own pace. So you can just go along, and you can do them. In a weekend. It’s five hours of video lessons, you can do the workshops while you watch the videos, you can go right through and catch everything.
Or you can spread it out over more than a month if you need to. But for the literal next month, the next four Thursdays at this very time slot, I’m going to be doing live pep talks that walk you through if you only have 30 days to plan a remodel, here’s where you want to be right now, here’s what you want to be thinking about right now. And it’s going to be really helpful to keep people online and in line and on track with the remodel process. So if you want to join me for a chance to get a pep talk and probably ask a few follow up questions, because I always answer questions.
You’ll want to sign up and join us and ready to remodel right away so that you can come along to the next four Thursday’s of live calls which will be recorded and fold into the program the future so they’ll exist in the future. But you can ask your questions on the calls over the next four Thursday’s. If you join master plan and math right now. I don’t know why I forgot that. I’m excited. And then I have a follow up question from Kim. Did I say I was a fan of an island in the kitchen. I’m a big fan of islands in the kitchen.
They’re not a very common mid-century move. Although certain high end more architect design houses in the mid-century era had islands. Here’s why I like an island because you can stand on either side of it and people can face inwards and make eye contact with each other while they do something prep something stir something someone can be on one side doing something someone can be on the other side doing their homework. peninsulas also work. Islands are also nice because most mid-century kitchens were designed for one person to sort of move around the space and treat it like their work zone. Usually the homemaker and the family.
But now, much more often, we’ve got multiple adults who are trying to work on food prep and trying to get involved in things and we’ve got kids who are staying in being supervised doing homework coming in to get a snack, an island gives you room to kind of always go around the other side and get things done. Islands don’t have to be really big in my opinion. It’s fun, the sort of dwell magazine or atomic ranch magazine kitchens we see always have like a big four foot wide by 10 foot long island at the center of a big wide open space.
That doesn’t have to be what you do. In order to get the effectiveness of an island you can also have like a little two foot by two foot freestanding piece of butcher block furniture. That could be an island that bridges the gap between an eight foot wide sort of U shaped kitchen that otherwise you’re carrying heavy objects from one side to the other gives you a little more counter surface a little more turned inwards face inward space it really can make all the difference to a snug kitchen to have space like that.
Let’s see Rob asks thinking about converting a bathroom into a Japanese spa style space with a soaking tub. Do you feel this would fit within the MCM aesthetic? Absolutely. And I love it I many basically all of our bathroom models these days are also are either one of three things loving the colored mid-century tub because it’s a cute color and keeping it or hating the fact that there’s a silly tub shower when all people want to the shower or we have a family who really likes to soak and they want to soak they want a real soaking tub.
So we’re putting in and taking out tubs all the time. I’m a big fan of the you might be thinking of that sort of taller, rounder, Japanese Onsen style tub, I love it. And I can actually fit into some spaces that a regular pedicels stub can’t. If you want to go with a Japanese aesthetic you are thinking going more towards, it’s not going to be like a vintage 1955 Midwestern mid-century bath.
But there’s still room to think about a sort of a modern minimalist slab front cabinets, simple step on tile, white fixtures and bring in the soaking tub, I think you just need to make sure that the rest of the pieces you choose, feel aligned with that and yet still tie back to some of the original design DNA of your house. Maybe the same stain color of the wood turns up in the woodwork in the bathroom that you find in the trim of the rest of the house.
But we’ve definitely done Japanese inspired bathrooms from its entry homes in the past and haven’t turned out really nicely. Yeah. Tammy says how to stop second guessing my decisions, tiles selections, paint colors, Tammy, I want to invite you to the style guide clinic more than a mood board is the name of the clinic I’m getting a month from now Rebecca helped me with the date. This is going to be a two hour workshop I’ve given once before. That boils things down from the mood board level from the I Have Pinterest board levels.
And lets us focus your choices. As we get closer and closer and closer to what you want. It’s going to help you to weed out the this tile versus this tile, we’ll think about what is the overall style goal, and then the price point and then put it together to find it could be this one. This one is our backup if we can’t get this one. But this is the one and it really it cuts that sort of overwhelm. in half.
We were talking at the top of the of this lecture about the problem of too much too many, too many options. You’re not alone, Tami and feeling overwhelmed by there’s just so many decisions and how could you possibly choose. But it’s okay, you will be able to force things together when you have more of a clear cohesive vision for the whole house and then room by room. And we’ll talk through the process of exactly how to do that at that clinic. I hope you’ll join us for it. But generally, if I had to give you a philosophical answer, it’s also just trusting yourself. Like you have good taste, you have your own taste you like the things you like.
And sometimes you just have to sort of bring it down to a few options and then do a gut check. Also, you can find a friend, you can ask your most mid-century loving friend you can ask me it’s a it’s a really hard thing, particularly for tile because it’s permanently adhered to the house. I know you’re not alone in feeling freaked out about it.
But my best advice the system I have created for this based on working with hundreds of clients who get freaked out about the same things is the style guide system that just sort of funnels you down from everything as possible to one single right for you answer. If you join us a master plan in a month. One of the bonuses is that you are invited. We have the recording of the style guide clinic, the master of more than a midwife clinic from last year, but I’ll be doing it again in live on that date.
June 1 Oh, yeah, one week before my birthday, Saturday, June 1 at 11am Central and it’s going to be so much fun to do it live again and we’d love to have you there. Let’s see. Oh, okay, couple more questions. Have I designed many plywood kitchens, pros and cons. I love a plywood kitchen. There’s a great company out west that we’ve recommended to clients in the past curve that does raw edge plywood. Inset frame kitchens that are just gorgeous.
And there’s a company called Ply-KEA that started in England, but now does serve some American homes that has plywood faces and cover plates for IKEA kitchen boxes. plywood is a perfect mid-century material. The mid-century was not about high end, Luxe. Luxury.
If you look at the advertising literature from the mid-century era, it’s all about practical, comfortable, easy to clean, livable. So they worked with modular things all the time. They loved plywood, they used simple, effective materials that made the best use of the wood that well, they used a lot of wood, but they cut out a lot of old growth forests. But some of them they turned into plywood and they did beautiful things with so yeah, absolutely I am thumbs up on plywood kitchens, I put them into our style guides for clients.
Basically, whenever I’m not told not to, and we just see if we can get it yet. kerf ke RF if nothing else, just CO has been through their Pinterest, Instagram and website. It’s, it’s very pretty, it’s gonna make you it’s gonna make you want a curve. Not every local builder is capable of doing that not every local cabinet maker is, but there are there are options like that around. So it’s worth asking around and thinking about is that something that’s worth investing in. And it’s such a beautiful detail because it really just shows what the material is it’s honesty of materials, which is the rock bottom core of the philosophy of modernist design, which is of course appropriate for mid-century modern houses. Excellent. I don’t want to cut anybody off.
So if you’re in the process of typing a comment right now, go ahead but this thing you for joining me for this spontaneous experiment to see if I could spend 30 minutes talking you through what you need to do if you only have 30 days or less to plan to remodel, you need to know what matters to you. You need to get clear about your priorities with your partner so that you can answer questions on the fly when they come up so that you can depend on the skills and talents of your contractor. And to trust your contractor.
You also need to trust but verify the mid-century choices. And so your dream and your distilled steps of the mid-century master plan or what you must do if time is short. If you need more help, if you’d like to join us a master plan in a month but don’t have but have more questions. If you’d like to join ready to remodel we would love to have you if you want us to think about putting together a master plan for you fill out the apply to work with us form I’d love to chat with you one to one about your project. But right now I just want you to believe that it is possible to plan in a small amount of time, and that you and your mid-century home both really are worth it.
Oh, that you’re welcome. And thank you. Thank you so much for showing up today. It’s been really a pleasure. And that is all have an enjoyable Thursday afternoon.
So that’s all for this week, folks. Remember, you’ll find the show notes page at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 1706.
And if you find yourself needing help to plan a remodel a whole house update, or a little upgrade in some specific spot quickly or thoroughly, or both. Like I say in a live workshop, there are a number of ways that mid mod Midwest can help you. We are always delighted to design your master plan for you. Although we can’t do that in less than 30 days.
Or if you need help and support to plan your own remodel, you might want to go all in with a ready to remodel program that includes ongoing check ins with me every month on the first Monday for as long as you need them that’s available filled with workshops and detailed experiments and design exercises to run for yourself.
But if you are in a hurry, if you came to this episode, specifically looking for fast planning action, then we have boiled down the steps you really must take in order to feel calm and in control of your remodel, as it proceeds quickly in the master plan and a month mini program. That is of course an evergreen program.
So you can start and finish it whenever you would like. But I have to remind you that there is a live component happening just right now for the next four weeks. Starting today. On the day this episode drops, I will be delivering a live master planning a month pep talk on Thursdays at 2pm Central only for people in that program.
So if you wanted to join us, sign up immediately for day one. Or if you’re hearing this later on Thursday or later in the week, and you still want to jump in and join us. You can watch the recording of that first pep talk and join us for three more by just going to mid mod dash midwest.com/month
I really hope you will because there is nothing like the encouragement and the accountability of having a regular check in with other people who are following the same process that you are. I wish speedy but accurate thoughtful planning to everyone who needs it.
And I will see you all next week for a discussion on how to focus on the myriad material and finish choices that are going to come up when you take on any remodel project large or small. So gather your how to pick up material questions and hold them in your head when I’ll check in with you next week. That’s all for now mid mod remodelers.