design tips Archives - MidMod Midwest

An Architect Chat – The secret to planning your Dream Remodel

27 min readWhen you find yourself in a remodeling time crunch, the most frequently skipped step in the process is actually the most essential part of any well planned and executed remodel.

Planning your dream remodel takes time. It takes introspection, at least. There’s no getting around that. But often, time is exactly what you don’t have. Life happens. You might need to move or have sudden changes in your family’s scope and scale. You might have an opportunity to take advantage of that requires fast action.

When you’re in a hurry, do you sometimes skip important steps?

Same!

So … when you find yourself in a remodeling time crunch, watch out for THIS! Because the most frequently skipped step in the planning process is actually the most essential part of any well planned and executed remodel.

How Do I Get the Best Value in a Remodel?

14 min readMake sure you get the best value in your remodel and JUSTIFY your time, energy and expense by considering how you can tweak the layout of your home to fit your life!

Here’s how you can get the best value in a remodel … you can super charge any remodel using adjustments to your home’s layout. By the way … this episode and topic are the PERFECT preamble to this weekend’s Mid-Century Design Clinic. Listen up here and then go save your seat for the Workshop!

Look, beautiful finishes can make your life so shiny and pretty.

You can wake up in the morning and smile because of the color of your bedroom wall.
Touching the surfaces of your kitchen cabinets can bring you genuine joy multiple times a day.
The perfect paver stones under your feet on the patio can be warm, smooth, and classy.

But just changing the surfaces of things doesn’t have a power to change your life the way adjusting your layout can-do.

Don’t forget to improve your Passive Solar Potential when you remodel!

2 min readRemodeling is your opportunity to improve all kinds of layout flaws – tight corners, inadequate kitchen storage, not enough privacy for bedrooms – AND improve your relationship with the sun.

Don’t let yourself think of existing walls as immutable or hyper-focus your attention on the surface of things. Gilding the lily won’t fix an awkward, dark or segmented floor plan.
Continue reading “Don’t forget to improve your Passive Solar Potential when you remodel!”

Micro Update: Matching the Front Door to the Mailbox

2 min readOne of the most fun (and easy) things I did to the house last year was painting the front door. Here’s how I exactly matched the mailbox.

This is one of those curb appeal updates that gets tossed around when thinking resale. For me, it is just too-long-delayed improvement for every day life.Granted, part of the reason it was so satisfying was that I’d devoted countless hours to fixing up the rest of the exterior, but this felt like the element that tied everything together. Continue reading “Micro Update: Matching the Front Door to the Mailbox”

Testing Paint Colors in Natural Light

< 1 min readI recently realized that I’ve been living among wall colors I DON’T LOVE for way too many months and that it is time to make some of my planned color changes now while I can appreciate them rather than at the end of the project when I’m just about to pass it off to someone else.

After grabbing a really unreasonable number of swatches at the paint store, I set them up next to the wood trim – which I don’t intend to change – and was really surprised how most of the ones that seemed perfectly plausible in the light of the paint store were way to harshly blue grey in the house. The outlier I had almost rejected as terribly taupe was the winner. Continue reading “Testing Paint Colors in Natural Light”

Basement: the Midwestern Ranch House’s Secret Weapon

6 min readA basement is the secret weapon of the midwestern ranch house
(This is one clear advantage we have over all those cool, glassy California Pinterest ranches.

Upper midwestern basements secretly expand square footage, storage and differentiation of spaces all without bulking up the house to the street or eating up the building site.

Sure, basements CAN be your extraneous junk space. They CAN be your quick and dirty work out or project space. But they they COULD be the inner sanctum – the most private and cosy spot in the house, insulated from temperature, sound and other people’s view. The secret of an effective basement is not to treat it like part of your home, not a second class space.