flooring Archives - MidMod Midwest

Designing Accessibility into Your Mid-Century Home

44 min readMid-century Ranch houses are pretty easy to get around for people with disabilities, especially with few key upgrades to add accessibility!

Designing accessibility into your mid-century home during a remodel is easier than you might think.

Mid-century houses have enormous potential to fit every stage of life.

They make great first homes for young couples and singles, were built for and are adaptable to the needs of growing families, and serve owners who choose to age in place.

They also work well for people with living disabilities … especially with a few essential updates.

Let’s talk about how to design accessibility into your mid-century home to fit your life and the lives of the people you love.

What are the best mid-century flooring choices?

31 min readThe best mid-century flooring for your house? It really does depend – on your taste, the size of your pets, the age of your kids and even your tendency to be a little bit of a butterfingers.

What is the best mid-century flooring for your house? I get this question ALL the time and I have a lot of opinions about it. But before I tell you about what I like and what I’d choose … we need to focus on you.

Short version: it depends on what you want

That’s because my answer to you, to my clients, to my students and to everybody who asks me this is …

It depends.

Now, when I answer this way, I’m not hedging or hesitating.

I do have opinions about and experience with many types of flooring in all sorts of applications. And strong personal preferences of my own!

But when people ask “What’s the best mid-century flooring?”, what they actually mean to ask is, “What’s the best mid-century flooring for me and for my house?” And that’s where it really does depend.

Mid-Century Hardwood Floors (MAY BE) hiding under your carpet

If your MCM home is older than 1954, you may have a surprise in store. There might be original wood flooring lurking under tatty old wall-to-wall carpet! Today let’s learn the history of Mid-Century Hardwood Floors and find out if you might have some in your home!

Mid-century design is all about simple, natural materials – often wood. Wood floors, wood panel walls, wood trim, and wood furniture abound.

Quick Change: Replacing the bathroom toilet and flooring at the same time

3 min readThis is actually a project from a few months ago I forgot to report on. Here’s how I chipped out the old vinyl floor, pulled the existing toilet, snapped in the new floor and popped in the replacement all between 8am and 8 pm.

Before I let the drywall team go to town on the basement, I wanted to exchange the upstairs toilet JUST IN CASE there would be an leakage during the process which might undo the nice clean ceiling below. Since the basement bathroom can’t be finished until after the drywall is complete, this meant taking out the house’s only toilet. I decided to forge head and replace both the despised green vinyl flooring and the old toilet in one fell swoop. Continue reading “Quick Change: Replacing the bathroom toilet and flooring at the same time”

Revealing the gorgeous hardwood under my (hated) Wall-to-Wall Carpet

3 min readI finally pulled out the tired green wall-to-wall carpet in my living room and revealed … a lovely warm toned and dense grained hardwood floor underneath. I’m so happy I can’t stop rubbing my hands together in glee.

I actually can’t believe it took me a year and a half to get around to this step. I always knew I was going to rip out the terrible green wall-to-wall carpet and expose the hardwood underneath.

Note: For ranches of this era hardwood floors were standard issue since nylon wall-to-wall carpet was invented after WWII as an alternate way to keep the war industry producers in business. It was not common in Wisconsin in 1952 when my house was built. I had even pulled back a small corner to confirm that it was down there. But somehow I just didn’t get around to getting it out! Continue reading “Revealing the gorgeous hardwood under my (hated) Wall-to-Wall Carpet”

New Cork Flooring Delivered!!!

2 min readYesterday the new flooring for the basement was delivered. I’m not quite ready to install it but I do have a sample on the floor already!

It came FedEx freight and the pallet weighed in at 1200 pounds so I was very grateful that the delivery guy was nice enough to help me get it up the driveway and store it in the garage with his pallet jack. That said, it took all of his pulling and my pushing to make the slope! Now the pile safely ensconced in the center of the garage and I will work on moving it down to the back corner of the basement for temporary storage at my leisure. Continue reading “New Cork Flooring Delivered!!!”

Tap in the SubFloor, One Tile at a Time

3 min readThe old basement walls were built from the vinyl tile flooring straight up to the ceiling and attached to 2×2 furring strips that were bolted straight to the painted concrete walls. I want to improve the insulation of the basement and also the air circulation so that no mold will form in dead air cold spaces. First step: install a DriCore sub floor system.

I’m working with a dry basement (generally) but I did notice a little mold on the back of some of the knotty pine and drywall I moved from the original “finished” space. The walls I took out had been built from the vinyl tile flooring straight up to the ceiling and attached to 2×2 furring strips that were bolted straight to the painted concrete walls. I want to improve the insulation of the basement and also the air circulation so that no mold will form in dead air cold spaces. Continue reading “Tap in the SubFloor, One Tile at a Time”