kitchen renovation Archives

Hands-On Kitchen Design with Aletha VanderMaas

30 min readKitchen design is a hands-on endeavor.

That’s why my friend mid-century Kitchen Designer Aletha VanderMaas takes every one of her clients on a kitchen field trip.

There’s a specific kind of magic that happens when you stop looking at Pinterest and start touching real-world materials.

No amount of internet research or saved magazine photos can substitute for putting your hands on an object to know if it’s truly right for your home.

This week, I’m thrilled to dive deeper into mid-century kitchens with Aletha! I love her unique perspective on how to do right by a mid-century home while matching it to your modern lifestyle.

A flipped house is not a final answer with Un.flipping

55 min readI was thrilled to chat with Dana Jenkins and Colin Davis of the Instagram account @un.flipping,(who may have coined the phrase!) and have blown up online by sharing their five-year journey to add the soul back into their thoroughly flipped mid-century home.

We all know the story. You find an MCM ranch in your perfect neighborhood, only to click further into the listing to discover a flipper has been there first. They’ve ripped out the character and replaced it with trendy, generic finishes.

It’s a tragedy…(well, to us it is).

And many mid-century lovers believe it’s also the final answer for the home. Remodeling something that has been “updated” is wasteful, isn’t it? And it’s almost impossible to undo the damage to original finishes or find replacements for pieces that ended up in the dumpster.

Avoid the Kitchen Renovation Industrial Complex

43 min readYou’ve heard of the military-industrial complex, and maybe even the wedding-industrial complex, but what about the kitchen renovation industrial complex?

What is the kitchen renovation industrustrial complex? This is the system that pushes us toward renovations designed with a built-in expiration date. It encourages us to follow trends seen on HGTV or Pinterest, leading to homes that look like everyone else’s and feel dated just a few years down the line.

The solution? Push back by focusing on a renovation that is timeless, personalized and designed to fit your home and your life.

Finding the right mid-century home for you with Susan Halla

44 min readSusan Halla, founder of Make It Mid-Century and mid-century enthusiast, joins me this week to dish about her own recent house hunt.

If anyone knows what they’re looking for in a mid-century home, it’s Susan Halla. She has spent the last decade making retro-focused DIY doable for mid-century lovers of all stripes.

When she had to move, she knew she needed another perfect mid-century house to make her home. And she’s just completed a multi-city search that was laser focused on finding a relatively untouched, not too high end mid-century home.