Tag: mid mod style

Why are you updating your bathroom?

20 min readWelcome to Season 25…all about bathrooms! If you’re craving a tactical, “do-this-then-that” checklist, hold tight. We’ll get there. But before I talk about materials, layouts, or fixtures, I want to start with something more fundamental. Philosophy. Today I’m challenging you to stop asking how and start asking why.

Our productivity economy constantly bombards us with advice focused on how to do a thing. How to remodel faster, how to do it cheaper, and how to get the current look.  

But when you prioritize how above all else, you are likely to fall into trendy choices that don’t fit your house or how you live in it. How pressure pushes you to act fast based on aesthetics rather than need. You could end up ripping out vintage elements that you don’t yet appreciate (or even a not so great update) and replacing them with “improvements” that feel dated the moment you’re finished. And then you want to do it all over once you’ve had some time to explore the “why”.

Listening to Tara McMullin’s What Works podcast recently, I was struck by a quote from philosopher Alan Jacobs, “We live thinly in our instant, and we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Focusing strictly on the how of anything, especially a remodel, often ends with us value-engineering the soul out of our homes. But when we start with the why, the entire horizon shifts.

Bathrooms are often the first rooms to fall victim to our best intentions. Because they are small and discrete, it’s easy to hire a contractor to simply “replace-in-place” or to tackle a right-sized early DIY project yourself. Heck, I’ve said (and stand by my opinion) that a bathroom is the perfect first project. But if you tackle it without considering what will work for your home and your life, it may end up being your biggest remodeling regret. 

So how do you find your why? By asking questions. By living in your home. By exploring possibilities. 

What’s your why? (It could even be a combination of things)

  • Is it preservation? Could you keep that charming 1950s tile and just update the vanity to make it more functional for your kids?
  • Is it longevity? Do you want to focus on making choices that will still look good in 20 years and how do you avoid chasing a trend that will feel tired by next spring?
  • Is it stewardship? Your mid-century home has already stood for 70 years. How can you make choices that allow it to last another 70?

One way to avoid how and figure out why is to slow down. I’m a huge advocate for a slow remodel. This doesn’t mean the project takes longer than you want. It means you aren’t rushing and making compromises just to get it done now.

Whether you’re in your forever home or planning for a five-year horizon, your house is going to serve as someone’s home for years to come. When you treat your renovations as an act of stewardship, you save style and stop participating in the “replace everything” cycle that plagues the remodeling industry.

This season, we are going to dive deep into:

  • Regrettable choices (and how to fix them).
  • Tight-space logistics that actually function for modern life.
  • Preserving vs. Updating: How to identify those vintage gems that should be kept at all costs.
  • Conversations with experts like Aletha of True Home Restorations, who shares how she adjusted her own past remodel choices to better fit her home.

Before you pick out a single tile or faucet, I invite you to do some renovation philosophizing. Let’s make sure the changes you make to your bathroom are actually worth it for you and your home.

Listen Now On 

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

This season of the Midmon Remodel Podcast is going to be all about charming bath updates. But I’m not kicking us off with a handy how-to advice episode. Instead, let’s do some renovation philosophizing. Because the most important question in any remodel process is why. And yet most of the advice we find is focused on how and what. 

Starting from a clear why is the first step in my mid-century master plan process because coming back to what matters is how we determine what to do at every stage, even in a space as small and specific as a bathroom. Why we choose one change over another, preserve a vintage surface here, invest in a bigger modification there, consider sourcing a more durable fixture in this spot. All of these questions will help us plan a remodel that really works well for us. Hey there. Welcome back to Midmod Remodel. 

This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2501. And really, welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel, because we’ve had a little break between seasons, and now we are diving in with season 25. 

We’re going to be focusing on mid-century bathrooms, how to update them, how to love them, what happens if you feel like you’ve made a mistake on your bathroom in the past. I’m going to have some practical, how-to, how-based advice, some common recommendations I make for my clients and students, uh, conversations with fellow members of the mid-century remodeling space on what we’ve done in our bathrooms and whether we regret it, spoiler alert, sometimes we do. 

And that’s something I want to talk about in the broader sense, how to avoid today. But before I get into that, a quick bit of business. If you have larger, grander mid-century remodeling plans floating around in the ether right now, then I want to tell you that right now is a great time to start getting your ducks in a row. Because we’re remarkably booked out this year. We’ve had a very busy spring and looking to have a very busy summer. 

The next open design spot in our queue is for this fall. So that means that actually, even though it’s the middle of summer right now, I think that if you’re hoping for a casual deepened timeline, more on that later in this episode, to think about what you might want to do, prioritize, plan, perfect, and then make your plans happen in the next year, then reaching out right now to chat about a master plan is the perfect opportunity because it means you’re going to get to get cooking on your design homework. That starts right away, no matter how long our design queue is. 

The questions that we ask our clients to think about are always infused with a lot of why. What matters to your family, what’s going to be really important to you, what have you loved in other places? Um, that I just said the word what a lot, even though I said why. Really basically, we’re seeking out what are the underlying desires you have. Why will making a change to your house make an improvement to your house? Uh, there we go. 

Back to the why questions. But anyway, you’ll begin cooking on that design homework right away. And then in a few months, jumping in with our master plan kickoff meeting in October, very possibly September for the next person that signs with us. But really, that’s only if we work remarkably fast or if one of our currently scheduled clients needs a pause in the meantime. And then getting your design schemes back probably in November. 

That will give you a perfect jumping-off point to pull together a final set of schematic drawings with us and then get onto the build calendars of your best local contractor option for the new year. So, yes, it is tank top weather right now. It is summer, it is air conditioning time. Um, but it’s time to look forward to cozy sweater season and getting things on the calendar for construction in the spring. If you’re planning horizons to stretch even further than that, then good for you. I’m about to explain why I think that is a fabulous idea. 

But the right time to start dreaming, to prioritize, to research, to contemplate, to kick things around from a design perspective, to see what might work best for you and for your home is always right now. So, long story, not that short. I would love to chat with you about what you’ve got in mind for your house, your questions about what’s possible, plausible, how a master plan process works, and more in a Zoom call. 

So you can go on over to the work with us page at midmodash midwest.com to apply to work with us, and we’ll get back in touch with you to set up a call as soon as we’re free. Anything else to share at the moment? No, I don’t think so. I think we can go on from here. As always, you will find show notes with links to the references I’m going to make and a transcript of the episode at the show notes page, midmodest.com/2501. 

So I was recently listening to an episode of Tara McMullen’s excellent What Works podcast. If you are not already familiar with her, she generally focuses on the care and feeding of small businesses, or maybe the care and feeding of small business owners. So obviously, her topics apply to me running and creating Midmond Midwest, but I think of her more as a kind of modern-day philosopher. She’s considering always the way that technology, media, societal expectations, and more affect the choices that we make in our lives and specifically in our work. Her website, whatworks.fyi. What a great web extension, by the way. It’s very easy to check out. So go scroll around. 

I was specifically inspired by listening to her recent episode, I think June 4th, on rethinking the long term. She begins it with a quote from Alan Jacobs to wit, We live thinly in our instant, and we don’t know what we don’t know. She spends the intro to this episode talking about our penchant for focusing on how in all of our modern life, and certainly in like the productivity economy. We’re always thinking about how something could be done. And when we focus on how, we can value engineer it. We can make it go faster, we can make it cheaper, we can make it smoother, we can make it shinier. We can do a lot of things that don’t actually get at what it is worth to us. 

And that is very contrary to a lot of the things that I try to pursue in my life, and certainly that I try to do in my work of helping homeowners to plan good remodels for mid-century homes. So she puts up against that, or I think she’s taking it from this philosopher, Alan Jacobs, the question of why or why-based questions, as opposed to how-based questions, and how that can really shift your whole approach. When we think just about how, we focus on tactics, on what we could do. But why is a question that opens up broader horizons and certainly seems more in line with my philosophy of remodeling. 

Taking a bigger, a wider, uh pulled back approach allows us to be more interested in long-term goals, in the way that our home contains us, for example, rather than strictly what it looks like. Particularly how questions in a remodeling context often come down to what’s possible to change about our homes quickly, easily, cheaply, and right now. 

So I listened to this episode back in June, and I was immediately on fire over how I could translate it into the context of this podcast. And then I thought, oh no, the next season is going to be about bathrooms and bathroom remodels. That is perhaps the most tactical, the most how-based component of a house. You know, when I, as a designer, when I sit and look at a bathroom that a client has given me their marching orders for, the first question I have is, you know, one of dimensions, one of logistics. What’s what’s possible to fit into this space? It’s a very, very, very how-based question that I ask about it. 

But you know what? That’s not true, actually, because I always begin from a conversation with my client about what is the purpose? You know, are they are they trying to make separations between family spaces and public spaces? Uh uh, is the bathroom a place where multiple people are trying to cycle through in the purpose of a morning? Is it a refreshing space or a practical logistical space? I am interested in the why of my clients’ bathrooms. 

And I think actually, in that sense, this is the perfect season to kick off with an episode addressing the broader philosophical nature of the room. Bathrooms are perhaps one of the easiest places to make those quick how decisions. They are, I could just as easily say, one of the easiest places to make bad decisions. 

Bathrooms and kitchens are one of the most commonly remodeled parts of a mid-century house, probably of any house, and unsurprisingly, the most commonly botched parts. They are vulnerable to a combination of quick flipping ideas, replacing something old and slightly worn with something new and cheap that looks good by virtue of being fresh and then will quickly fade and fail, and also by being victims of fast fashion in the fashion sense, that is falling into whatever is the current trendy mode for doing your kitchen or bathroom. 

This combination of the two things leads people to replace and landfill beautifully crafted mid-century pieces, even machine-made ones from the mid-century that were solid materials and intended to be maintainable and repairable with cheaper substitutes that hit a moment in time precisely, or maybe even imperfectly, as an inexpensive knockoff, and then immediately begin the process of falling out of fashion and falling into disrespair, starting a stopwatch of inevitability, of disposability at the moment of their installation. 

So that this is this it’s it’s so painful and frustrating to me. And I could just as easily talk about this in terms of kitchens. When I meet a new client, the first touch point we have is a contact form that I ask people to fill in, and they will give me their address and often share some photos of the relevant areas of their house. Even if they don’t, I can often check out the house on Zillow. I also spend some time on online house listings in my own neighborhood and in other places, or when I walk by a house and like the outside of it and want to know what’s happening on the inside of it. 

Even in a house that is generally a pretty great time capsule, has its original siding still intact, has some obviously visible, charming living room spaces that I can see through the open picture window area. Um, when I when I look at the listing photos, when I see what’s happening on the inside, the most common areas to have been remodeled are always going to be the kitchen and bathroom. Those spaces are hard wearing, they take a lot of abuse and use in terms of life. They get beat up on, they have plumbing accidents in them, but also they just they are victims of fast fashion. They are victims of how-based thinking. 

So I could talk about this in terms of kitchens, bathrooms fall into the same category, and they are perhaps even more at risk of the kind of thinking that says, it’s just a small room. We’ve got two bathrooms, so we can use one while the other one gets done. We’ll just hire a bathroom remodeling company to come in and, in theory, upgrade the space, do the space. And that typically means a replace-in-place remodel with little thought to the best arrangement of space or the current leads of the family. 

And I see it all the time. The result is not great. The thinking that anything new is better than everything old hits over and over and over again. When I visit a vintage home as part of touring an estate sale, when I meet a new client and see what’s going on in their house, or even when I just scroll on Zillow, I see this. When you focus only on the questions of how you could remodel a bathroom, you will inevitably fall into a trap of removing and replacing as much as possible of the original space. If you begin from a question of why you are remodeling a bathroom, you may arrive at the same point ultimately. 

You may decide that the layout of the space is awkward or inadequate to your needs, however. You may decide that there are elements of the original bathroom that are worth preserving that you want to, for example, um, something we suggested to a recent client. They had two complete time capsule bathrooms with relatively generous layouts, one with a pretty charming yellow tile setup, one with a pink and blue accent tile setup that wasn’t quite as beloved. Um, but they were looking at what needs to change in the house. 

The kitchen layout was dated and very hostile to their sort of family structure, but did they need to change the bathrooms? Not necessarily. They didn’t feel a pressing need to do that, and I didn’t feel a pressing need to recommend that to them. It did seem that the built-ins were a little worn out and they weren’t equipped with the kind of easily open and closable doors and drawers that are particularly handy for multiple kids going in and out of a space all day long. 

So we proposed that they could simply replace the vanity in place in such a manner that would keep all of the original tile. They could potentially keep their existing plumbing fixtures and just set them into a new countertop. The mirror could be replaced, and I didn’t love the way the light fixtures were oriented, but we could set all of that up. 

And because we weren’t going to move the major locations of pieces and we weren’t going to replace the tub or the toilet, we didn’t need to touch the tile. That could all stay. Thinking about the why of that space led us made a very conservative choice financially and a very preservative choice for the vintage charm in the house. And even if they change other parts of the house as they go along through this remodel, hanging on to that anchor point of preserving the original tile in that bathroom will help everything else feel a little bit more connected back to what’s going on in the lifeline, the lifetime of the house. Saves money, saves style. And it would be just as easy, I think, uh hiring a contractor without having gone through a design process, they would probably have walked through the house and checklisted, oh, there’s failing cabinets in this bathroom. Maybe this bathroom is due for an update. Let’s do the bathroom. And then rather than a charming but slightly worn 19 mid-50s bathroom in five years from now, they would have an already getting dated mid-2020s bathroom to deal with. The clock starts as soon as you do the work. 

Now, on the other hand, sometimes the why questions pertaining to a bathroom lead us to know that we’re probably gonna make some fairly aggressive changes to the layout. The division of sp of sort of bathroom core spaces between two different bathrooms are not allocated properly for the way that the house is going to be used today. I actually have two projects on the boards right now, um, one we’re just wrapping up and one we’re gonna be kicking off soon, that need more of that approach. That we’re gonna be testing, is there something we can do to help these bathrooms function better with their current division of shared bathroom versus owner’s bathroom? 

Or ultimately, is the way that the house is about to be used by its next occupants just gonna be so different? And the original division of spaces between two tightly packed bathrooms just awkward enough that it’s not worth preserving. We’re gonna test both things, but the question always comes up, and we will tell I’ll, you know, I’ll also be addressing sort of the kind of questions that come up when I chat with people often about bathrooms in a 30-minute design consult. Is it worth it to change up this bathroom? What will be gained? What will be lost? And in the balance of those two questions, is it worth it to do something as drastic as changing up layout, or should we try to work within the existing footprint, which gives us the opportunity to try to preserve, for example, existing tile? 

Um, in the case of a bathroom that has already fallen victim to an aggressive flipper-style remodel, the answer is nearly always that it is worth it to come back and at the very least substitute again some better quality finishes, fixtures, et cetera, for the choices made by someone who was only trying to pay cheaply for materials and sell the house to someone who could only see the value in something shiny or new, or even sadder, perhaps a homeowner who made choices for their own space based on the cheapness of the materials and assumed that it would feel like an improvement in quality simply because it was new. 

This is also a place where returning to a why-based philosophy will help us push back on the entire remodeling industry, which, like many other industries functioning under the general umbrella of capitalism, push us to do things quickly, cheaply, and sacrifice on quality. Instead, let’s think about put the slow food movement, the slow fashion movement. Um, I’m not too interested in a technical one-to-one comparison here, but just taking it as a as a metaphor, what does it mean to plan a slow remodel? 

Not one that takes a lot longer than you hoped, but one that isn’t about chasing quick fixes or patch jobs or making compromises to get something done now that doesn’t even ultimately serve the purpose that you set out to accomplish. If we’re gonna go to the trouble of making a change to our home, we want to feel like the change we’ve made is worth it. It’s worth our time, it’s worth our money, it’s worth our energy. And if doing it a little bit more slowly, if thinking about it for longer before we do it can make that happen, then yay, we get to push back on the system of constant marketing that is being pushed in our face by social media, by uh the home remodeling industrial complex, etc. Capitalism, basically. 

Now, the other piece of that capitalist equation that makes it hard for us as owners of mid-century homes who want to make good choices for them is that our lives aren’t necessarily as settled as we might like them to be. Some people have or choose lives where they know they will stay in one place and make other choices in their life around it. Others find ourselves moving for education, for employment, for family, for opportunity from one place to another across the country or out of the country. 

So it’s always easiest to make choices for your home in a long-term sense when the planning window for your life in the house is your life. When I work with a new master plan client who tells me that they’ve bought a house in a neighborhood that they want their kids to grow up in, that they’re planning for age and place details, that this house is near three or four of their family members, they think of this house as their forever home. It is very easy for me and for them to talk about the choices that they are going to make as investments, not in the financial value of the house, but in the life that they’re gonna live there. 

That means making choices that fit their personal preferences, uh, choices that should last, chosen with decades in mind, installations done with maximum care, finishes that are meant to endure. In other cases, folks that I work with know that they might not be able to commit to staying in the house for that long. We might be talking about improvements to make for a three-year or a five-year or a ten-year planning window. 

They want to make improvements to change it, to fix it up, to repair it anyway, but the planning math does change a little. In some cases, someone who plans to stay may find a reason that they must leave, and someone who assumes they’ll move on may end up staying in a house longer than they intended. When I bought my ranch and started changing it, I actually thought it was not going to be a long-term place for me. I was treating it a little bit more as an architectural project lab, and I definitely wanted to make smart choices for it, to infuse it with 

good design, both of a sense of personal and professional pride, if nothing else, and to enjoy the time I spent in it. 

But I admit, I do see the house differently now, both ten years into living in it, and knowing that my window of living here might be very long. So this is an important thing to know about your own circumstances and your relationship to your house. You don’t have to ponder it too deeply to know the answer, you can simply answer it. Do you think you are currently living in your forever home? Or do you have some pretty clear reasons to believe that your time in this house is temporary? 

Not for nothing, but also I’ve been in my house ten years and I’ve gotten 10 years older in the interim. The way that I think about longevity in my mid-40s isn’t the same way I thought about it in my mid-30s. But here’s the thing: no matter how long or short my lifespan is in this house, how long you plan to live in yours, the house is still going to be there. And the choices you make for it have the potential to last or not. This reminds me of a great conversation I had a couple of years ago with my friend Susan Holla of Make It Mid-Century. I’ll link to one or two of my conversations with her in previous podcasts in the show notes page. 

But we had a lovely conversation about how much we love mid-century homes and why it’s important to make good choices for them. And that honestly, there should be an element of altruism in an ideal remodel of a mid century home. There’s what we do for ourselves so we can enjoy our lives more, so we can feel comfortable and safe and convenient in our houses. But there’s also taking care of a mid century house and an act of stewardship. This house has been around for 70 plus years and could very easily last. 70 plus years again, or well beyond that. So, how can we make choices for our homes that will last? Not only through our own tenure, but beyond them. 

Now, this is not to say that you might not find yourself remaking some of the choices you made on your home in earlier years. My bathroom is a key example of a room I plan to touch again. I didn’t do much to it when I was first moved in. Um it and it it what didn’t have much to recommend it. It was mostly a replacement of 90s Home Depot light fixtures and uh vanity and etc. I removed the old man toilet with the power flush that’s had like a jet taking off and replaced it with a modern low-flow Toto flooring I liked better. 

But as I reflect on those changes now, they weren’t the most long-term thinking I could have done, and they were not really in keeping with the original style DNA of the house at all. Such is the nature of first home improvement projects. Here’s the thing. We’ve come back around to bathrooms specifically now. It is theoretically pretty easy for me to come back and do my bathroom again. Bathrooms are the smallest and most discreet object space in any house to be remodeled. 

And companies specialize purely in bathrooms. It’s possible to come in, take out all the fixtures, scrape off all the finishes, put them all back in fresh any day of the week. You can DIY it, um, or you can hire someone by pointing at a few pictures in their lookbook and making the most obvious of choices and update the bathroom to today’s standards and trends without thinking about it too much at all. But this is why I’m happy to talk about the concept of why versus how in a remodel at the kickoff of the bathroom season, because it’s a microcosm for the greater approach we take to remodeling our home. 

It is neither cheap nor easy to take on a remodel, no matter how quick and dirty you do the job. It’s going to cost money. It’s going to require breaking inertia, letting strangers into your house to make noise and dust. It will take a certain amount of time no matter how fast it goes. But far too often we prioritize spending a little less time, money, energy to make those quick choices for our house. And then we get to spend the next 10 years thinking, oh man, I wish I hadn’t done it that way. 

And I’m really going to have to come back around and do this bathroom again. We make quick choices when we should be thinking long term. So as I crack into the bathroom season and talk through the approach that I take as an architect to layout logistics and material finishes in a mid-century space, let’s frame all of it, not as a quick fix, but looking for a solution that can last as long as the house has already lasted. 

For those of us in mid-century homes, that means trying to imagine choices that we could make right now that would be good for another 70 plus years. Now, never say never, but I don’t think most of those choices are going to be found on allmodern.com. So stay tuned for another pithy, relatively focused season where we’re going to talk about bathrooms in the context of regrettable choices made in the past and how to fix them. Tight-space logistical issues, some of the original mid-century design moves that have just not landed as well with today and perhaps need adjusting, and some that are charming and should be preserved at all costs. Some fun history, some remodeling philosophy, because you know I can’t stop myself, some linked sketches and pictures. 

I’ve got a great conversation coming at you next week with my friend Aletha of True Home Restorations in Michigan. We’re going to talk about the personal choices that she and I made for our own homes and how she recently took on a remodel of her bathrooms. Again, not scraping them back down to scratch, but adjusting several of her original choices made shortly after she moved into her house while preserving some of the others. The result is really nice, and I hope you find some helpful advice there for anyone who’s listening to this that has made choices in their own home they don’t love anymore. 

So to come back around to the question of why questions versus how questions, there are so many things we can do to improve a space that actually make a difference that may or may not even show up in a lookbook of pretty bathroom updates, prioritizing wise investments in long-term maintenance, like a whisper quiet but super effective bath fan to make sure humidity doesn’t take your bathroom out earlier than it needs to be. 

I want us to focus on why and on the broader planning horizon of planning a remodel for your house that will last as long again as the house has already stood as a consistent theme for this season, even though the season’s theme is also the littlest, cutest, most sort of tile-finished spot in your house. Um, let’s talk about what it will mean to plan a slow remodel of a bathroom. And that’s it for today. You can find references in the show notes page. 

So links to past conversations I’ve had with Aletha of True Home Restorations, of Susan, of Make It Mid Century, and check out the excellent podcast of Tara McMullen, What Works, and some of the things she referenced in her June, ooh, what was it? Her June 3rd episode that got me thinking about all of this. There’s really not that much overlap. I kind of took the idea and ran with it into a different direction. So if you found today’s conversation interesting, you will find her separate podcast fascinating. And I will be back next week with more on making great choices for mid century bathrooms. See you then, mid mod remodeler.

The RIGHT choices for a timeless mid-century kitchen

15 min readI tell my clients that there isn’t one “right” answer. I tell my students that there isn’t one “right answer. But honestly? I have opinions. 

Do you ever find yourself wishing that someone would just tell you the right choice for every finish in your remodel? Between the tile, the fixtures, and the endless cabinet options, the sheer volume of decisions is EXHAUSTING.

Now you probably know me as the person who ALWAYS has options for you to consider.  I like to offer alternatives, pros and cons, and let people tell ME what possibilites are landing best for them.

Options for the optimal layout.  Options for tile color.  Options for replacing or keeping your original windows.  There’s a silver lining for every cloud and an advantage for every starting situation as I approach a remodel.  

I tell my clients and students that there isn’t one “right” answer all.the.time. 

Straight talk, tho? 

I do have opinions.  Lots of them.

My friends and family know me as someone who will judge a poorly designed building harshly AND at length.  

Let’s focus on the positive here, though.  

Just for today, I’m putting aside the “it depends” caveats and giving you my unvarnished hot takes on THE CORRECT choices for a mid-century kitchen update.

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Continue reading “The RIGHT choices for a timeless mid-century kitchen”

Small Kitchen Secrets

23 min readWhat’s a mid mod remodeler with a small kitchen to do? If you’re living in a home built in the early part of the era—or even a more “generous” late-60s ranch—you’ve likely realized that mid-century kitchens were designed for a different way of living.

Does the kitchen in your mid-century house feel a little snug? Maybe it’s a bit tight when two adults try to hold a conversation, or you find yourself constantly hunting for more than six inches of clear work surface.

If you’re living in a home built in the early part of the era—or even a more “generous” late-60s ranch—you’ve likely realized that mid-century kitchens were designed for a different way of living. 

But you don’t always have to knock down walls or build a massive addition to find relief.  And sometimes you just can’t! You may have stairs or another structural feature hemming in your kitchen. 

So what’s a mid mod remodeler with a small kitchen to do? 

I actually LOVE this question. And I’ve answered it literally hundreds of times..in a bunch of different ways! I create three kitchen options for almost every master plan and often explore double that number of possible configurations through the design process. 

Each of these solutions is tailored to both the client and the house. But there are a few clear tricks of the “designing for a mid-century house” trade that I employ over and over again. Today I’m going to share those with you. 

Think in zones, not just triangles

I talked about the kitchen work triangle (the path between your fridge, sink, and stove) earlier this season. While it might work well in a small one cook kitchen, it’s not great for busy social spaces. I recommend switching your mindset to think about work zones instead. I find I keep three zones in mind:

  • The Prep Zone: Keep your knives, cutting boards, and trash near your primary work surface.
  • The Clean-up Zone: Group the dishwasher, sink, and dish storage together.
  • The Social Zone: Even in a tiny kitchen, designate one “out of the way” spot where a guest can lean or sit with a drink without being underfoot.

By organizing your tools around activities rather than just appliances, you reduce the amount of shuffling you have to do in a tight space. 

Scale down appliances

When you have a small kitchen, every square inch has to work twice as hard. In the US, we often think “bigger is better” for appliances. But a massive 36-inch professional range or a giant French-door refrigerator can swallow a small kitchen whole. Two quick space wins: 

  • Consider counter-depth: Switching to a counter-depth refrigerator can reclaim nearly six inches of floor space, which makes a massive difference in a narrow galley kitchen. Or consider just a smaller daily refrigerator…with or without the Midwest classic “garage fridge” for overflow. 
  • Right-sized your dishwasher: If you’re a household of one or two, consider an 18-inch dishwasher. It cleans just as well but gives you an extra 6 inches of precious cabinet storage.

Go low…and high

If you have lower cabinets with doors, you’re likely losing the back 50% of that space to “the abyss.”

  • Drawers over doors: Replace lower cabinets with deep drawers. Drawers allow you to see everything from above and utilize the full depth of the cabinet. Even for heavy pots and pans, a high-quality drawer slide is a game-changer for efficiency.
  • Use every inch: Claim three to four feet for work surface, then go full height. Filling vertical space with storage can be a big win in a small space.  

Focus on alignment

If you’ve got just four feet between one run of cabinets and the other, you want to think about what’s happening opposite. You need to consider whats going on on both side elevations. Make sure that you have misaligned common standing room spaces. 

Someone should be able to stand at the sink and NOT be immediately back to back or buty to butt with someone who is standing at the cooktop if it’s on the opposite wall. Shifting over by even two feet, but ideally a full three foot appliance or fixture width, really allows more people to multitask in the kitchen. And even allows one cook to rotate, take one step and get to where they need to go without disturbing a second cook. 

Create visual breathing room

Consider trading some upper cabinets for open shelving or even just a window. Losing a little storage up top might feel scary, but if you’ve optimized your lower drawers correctly, the trade-off in “visual lightness” will make the room feel twice as large.

And don’t forget! This weekend you have the chance to see even more small kitchen solutions at my Live Mid-Century Kitchen Design Clinic. I’ll be doing deep dives into layouts just like these and answering all your kitchen questions. Grab your ticket at midmod-midwest.com/clinic and let’s get your kitchen project moving!

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

00:00

Does the kitchen in your mid-century house feel a little snug, a little tight, not enough storage, not enough work surfaces, and where exactly are two adults supposed to stand to hold a conversation without being totally in each other’s way? Today I’m talking about small space solutions for mid-century kitchens, because this is a very common problem. Mid-century houses, particularly those built in the early part of the era, have kitchens that are dramatically small by modern standards.

00:27

And even more generous footprints of mid-century houses built later in the late 50s and 60s, are often tight in the kitchen area. You can solve a small kitchen by making it bigger, pushing out into another part of the house, or adding on entirely. But if that feels out of scale for your life or for your budget, you need some small kitchen secrets. So that’s what we’ve got today.

00:48

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. And I’m your host, della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2404.

01:00

Before I carry on with giving you my best advice for your small mid-century kitchen, let me tell you where you can get even more advice for your mid-century kitchen, which is to show up for this weekend’s live mid-century kitchen design clinic. I really want you to be there. This isn’t a history lecture or a sales webinar. It is a live design workshop where we’re going to go through real time planning exercises for your kitchen.

01:25

Whether you’re dreaming of a big remodel right now, big in a small kitchen, perhaps, or just looking for some ways you can tweak the space you have with weekend DIY projects, you will get something you can act on out of this clinic. Plus you’ll be in a Zoom Room with a group of fellow mid-century kitchen lovers all at the same time getting that validation that comes with knowing you’re not alone in loving the things you like about your mid-century house. Loving the things you love about your mid-century house.

01:52

By the way, if you can’t show up live, if you’re not free this coming Saturday the 16th, at 11am Central time, but you are thinking about kitchen updates, absolutely sign up anyway. We will be recording the workshop, and you can enjoy it almost as much if you watch it on your own time as a replay that you can in person. The one thing you would miss out on if you were to get the replay after the fact not being live is your chance to ask me questions about your specific kitchen. So if that’s you, if you can’t show up live, but you’ve got kitchen questions on your mind, sign up and then email or DM me to know that you did, and share your questions in advance so that I can address them at the end of the live clinic.

02:30

One more incentive, in case you needed it if you’ve been on the fence about the ready to remodel DIY homeowner program, which is a perfect fit for anyone who’s thinking about a mid-century kitchen update. I always give the folks who attend these design clinics limited time access to join ready to remodel at a discount, so I’ll talk about that more at the live event. But if you’ve been struggling to get your plans in motion or even to focus what it is you really want to need to change about your home, about your kitchen, I designed ready to remodel as a homeowner planning support program with you in mind, and I would love to help you make your remodel happen.

03:06

Ready to Remodel takes you through every step of the master plan process with bite sized lessons, design resources, planning workbooks and live monthly support at my office hours call and these design clinics that pop up intermittently around every year, like the mid-century clinic are first and foremost for my current ready to remodel students. And then I invite the general public to join them as well, so tag along and get a sense of what that program is as well.

03:29

Or just sign up, show up live on Saturday and jumpstart your kitchen plans. Ask me your small space or big space mid-century kitchen questions at the end. Okay, well, let’s talk about the problem of small spaces in mid-century kitchens. I want to frame it first, because I am no stranger to working on small mid-century kitchens. I have designed, at this point, hundreds of remodel update options. Well, hundreds and hundreds, if we’re thinking about the fact that I like to design three different layouts for every master plan that comes across my desk, and I spend a lot of time developing strategies and techniques to fit good living into relatively small square footage. Because mid-century, houses are small.

04:13

I’m going to be talking in particular today with one recent project in mind that I think was the smallest, the snuggest I’ve ever worked on. But the solutions that work for them work for bigger kitchens and can also work for your life. As I think about that house, it is a galley kitchen tucked in between exterior walls and a major structural element, in this case, a stairwell. I’ve also…that that happens so commonly. It’s a very usual mid-century structural move to connect a house to its basement if it has a basement with a stair that either runs down the central spine of the house or separates the kitchen from the adjacent bedroom.

04:55

And that limits dramatically what we can do to expand the kitchen footprint without. Going to a big move, like an addition or move the stairs. When I’m thinking about a snug kitchen space, I do sometimes show my client an option where we do make a major blow it out structural change. Where we add on to the footprint of the house or do something like relocate the stair, remove a masonry fireplace because they’re not going to use it, it’s not serving them, or maybe it’s just not more valuable to them than good flow and good space in the kitchen.

05:28

But when the space is really snug, we just have to make the most of what’s going on. There are a couple of different things to consider in terms of priorities for a snug mid-century kitchen you want to think about first storage in an ideal capacity. By the way, if you want to think about layout solutions and design updates for mid-century kitchens, make sure you’ve grabbed my free guide to mid-century kitchen design solutions. You can get it from mid mod midwest.com/kitchen and in it, I talk about the good lighting features, the good workspace features, the good storage features, the good social space features and the good material features of a mid-century kitchen.

06:10

I’ve got storage right up in there. It is a major quality of mid-century space, but it is the thing I’m probably most likely to squish in a really, really small kitchen. What I want to prioritize in a truly small kitchen is counter space that does not have anything over it. I want to have at least some run of counter, ideally three, maybe four feet long, that has nothing hanging over it, no upper cabinets, maybe it actually has a view out into another part of the house through interior window, opening a pass through, maybe it looks out at a window, either a window that exists in the house already, or we’re cutting in a new window. I want to have that space, even if it means a sacrifice of existing storage.

06:56

Sometimes it means that we’re just sacrificing what had been a base cabinet with upper wall hung cabinets above it, making that counter surface less usable. And we’re bundling up. We’re creating we’re sacrificing two or four feet of counter space somewhere else for a full floor to ceiling pantry storage unit. That can be really effective. This can also be a time where, if there are pantry storage or major appliance storage needs in the kitchen that we don’t have space for inside the footprint of the kitchen. We’re going to look for a nearby a helper room that can have space borrowed from it.

07:34

This might mean we are taking over a little bit of front hall closet or storage space extending out from the kitchen. If we can remove a wall that separated the kitchen from one space, we can extend a line of counter out and get more drawer space, or have it turn into a bench with storage underneath it that lets us have kitchen storage space that’s not in the kitchen, but isn’t like hiking up and down the basement stairs from the kitchen.

08:03

For a truly small kitchen, you’re going to be a little conservative about what kinds of things you store in it. You might choose to, for example, have a really small refrigerator that either you treat yourself like a European and do more regular shopping for, or you’ve got a small daily use refrigerator that you’ve got. And then a classic Midwestern tradition is to downgrade your old fridge into the basement or possibly the garage and keep it around so you could have a backup fridge where you keep bulk goods, more frozen things. You could also think about having a step outside the kitchen space, deep chest freezer that has a lot more things capable to be stored in it.

08:41

These are, again, solutions that were used during the mid-century era. The idea of a garage refrigerator or a deep freeze, chest freezer somewhere outside of the kitchen footprint would not have been surprising ideas to our mid-century forbears. So trying to jam the world’s largest refrigerator into a kitchen with original mid-century cabinets not sized for that is something that just about everybody tries to do when they move into a house.

09:05

But it’s possible to think about the fact that maybe you don’t need such a big refrigerator. You could get away with a smaller one in that space and have a separate refrigeration unit somewhere else in the house. Now it may be that you struggle to even find any modern appliance that works, but particularly I’ve had, for example, large families with a lot of kids say, well, we just need the largest possible refrigerator capacity. And in certain cases, now always design of a scheme or two that have a big fridge option.

09:34

But we can sometimes think about, what if we used a smaller fridge in the space to prioritize more counter or more pantry storage or access to a wall, viewing through into the house, or viewing out of that side of the house, it would work better. These are the sort of tradeoffs of working with limited square footage in a small kitchen.

09:57

Not to digress too far from the topic. But I’ve been a really big fan of the HBO show, heated rivalry, and particularly with the magic of high production value they’ve accomplished with a really small budget, using, I don’t know the magic of being Canadian, but also, clearly the artistry and skill of the producer and director, Jacob Tierney. And I am such a nerd about deep diving into everything. I like I’ve watched several interviews with him, and I watched him talk about the value of working on small budget productions in his past, and a lesson he learned from his film director father on one of their first collaborations. That was a very small budget film they did together, where his dad framed to him, the fact that when you don’t have money for everything, part of your directorial choice is to choose where you will spend the money that you have. And that is the art at the end of the day of a producer and director.

10:51

This is a thing we have to consider in mid-century houses as well. It might be actually also the dollar value of our remodeling choices, but we can think about the value of square footage as also being at a premium in a small space. When we’re thinking about how best to use small space solutions prioritizing a certain amount somewhere in the kitchen of at least a four foot run of under interrupted counter work surface, in an ideal world that looks at a distance. 

11:21

Gathering more of our storage into full height pantry storage, rather than treating upper cabinets as our solution. And unless you are in love with and have access to original in great shape mid-century cabinets when space is really snug, this is a place where we kind of want access to the interior storage solutions of cabinets that have base cabinets with drawers, rather than the classic mid-century cabinet door that you sort of have to get down squat on your haunches, look down and pull things out from fixed shelves to get into.

11:55

If you were truly handy, however, you could take the original mid-century cabinet boxes, remove their interior shelves and retrofit them with pull out drawers at the very least, if not pull out drawers behind cabinet doors, if not actually, I don’t know, rerouting new attachments for your existing doors. There are some things you could take on there if you really wanted to get vintage with it.

12:16

But if we’re dealing with a house that’s been remodeled in the past in a small footprint. I’m definitely going to advocate for the best quality, modern storage drawer base units, because you’re going to be able to jam a lot more things in and get access to things tucked in the back better with that.

12:32

If we’re locked into a galley style kitchen, or even just a kitchen that’s small, that doesn’t have a lot of space between one face of cabinets and another, a snug mid-century galley kitchen might have just four feet of sort of aisle space down the center five would be much more friendly.

12:51

But if you’ve got just four feet between one run of cabinets and the others, you want to think about what’s happening opposite. You can’t look at this kitchen only in terms of one side elevation, just the flat view, without thinking about the other. So trying to make sure that you have misaligned common standing room spaces, so that someone can stand at the sink and they won’t be immediately back to back or but to butt with someone who is standing at the cooktop if it’s on the opposite wall.

13:14

Shifting that over by even two feet, but ideally a full three foot sort of appliance or fixture width really allows more people to multitask in the kitchen, and even allows one cook to rotate, take one step and get to where they need to go better, particularly the place you want to try to make more clearance than just four feet is in front of a refrigerator, and this depends a little bit on the style of refrigerator.

13:41

We’re already talking about smaller, perhaps vintage units. If you have a French door refrigerator with two narrower doors that open out, there’s less of the through passage that is taken up by the door opening than particularly a three foot or a more than three foot wide refrigerator that has just one single side hinge door. When you open that up, you can completely cut off the entire lane of traffic in a galley kitchen. So choosing the design of your refrigerator probably French doors is better than single door, and choosing a smaller width, because those doors will then swing open and take less space.

14:16

And prioritizing trying to set the fridge in a place where it’s not opposite another close by wall of base cabinets or misaligning it from other key features like a range or a sink. This is a place where the kitchen work triangle actually comes into play as a counterfactual. No, that’s not really true, but it’s a place where thinking about those three major fixture appliances, the sink, the range and the refrigerator are important. What you want most of all is for them to be in a sort of an oblong triangle, so that none of them are back to back with the others.

14:51

As we’re regarding the kitchen in plan, the location in floor space of where various things are, if at all possible. It’s better to have straight runs of cabinets that die into a wall, rather than cabinets that turn and form an L for two reasons. One, that l corner is very hard to work into. Anyone who needs to get access to any part of that space within sort of two or even three feet of the corner is blocking everybody else’s access to it. They are more limiting for any appliance that needs to flip forward, for an under counter, oven door, for a dishwasher door, it can cut off more space if it’s tucked into an L and also, it’s harder to get access to that back of the corner space.

15:38

Now lazy Susan’s exist, and if you’ve got an exterior of house corner with a corner of base cabinets meeting in it, you’re just going to have to get clever with those lazy susan or pull out rotating drawer aftermarket fixes. But again, I don’t mind interior corners in in a broader cabinet layout if you’ve got a U shaped kitchen, that’s sometimes just the way that it works, but I don’t encourage them in a small kitchen. I would actually rather sacrifice an extra two feet of cabinet turning the corner than have an L shape where I don’t need it. They also often end up constricting doorways as you come in and out of a small kitchen space.

16:23

One…thought I was done talking about kitchens in plan, but no, I have one more thing. If you have a kitchen that serves not just as a cooking space but also is a collection of doors portals to other parts of the house, which, again, is super common in a mid-century house. My own mid-century kitchen, which is not tiny, has a door to what had once been the outside and now goes to the mudroom, a door that goes through a door with no doorway, a door opening that goes through the dining room. It has the door access to the basement stairs, and it has a door that leads to the third the nursery bedroom in my house.

17:02

I have, much to my own surprise, decided to keep all of those door portals. I really thought I was going to close off the access to the nursery bedroom because it seemed silly and I really wanted that extra square footage. I thought I could remove my refrigerator from its current location over to that spot. This is getting me out of the point anyway, when I moved into this house for at least two years, every part of me knew that I was going to be closing off that door. I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

17:27

But then I made a mistake. I started using the nursery bedroom as my home office, and now that’s my snack door, and I can never get rid of it. It’s super important to me.

17:39

So this, I suppose, brings me back to one of my most prime fundamental directives, which is, what matters to your life is more important than what is the most practical layout solution and a master plan approach to making the most of a small space. Means you can disregard the advice I’m about to give you if it doesn’t work for your life, but if you have more than one, more than two, more than three doors opening into a very small kitchen.

18:06

Think about if any of them can be closed off or turned into a pass through with counter in front of them, or in any other way, combined or relocated. Could you shift access to outside into it from an adjacent room? Could you reorient moving the stairs again gets us down to small space solutions and into big structural changes? But what could you consider stand and brainstorm around each one of those doors? Are they all necessary? The sort of British World War Two advertising poster question, is this journey really necessary?

18:42

And think about whether that might be a win of three extra linear feet of counter space in your very small kitchen that I think is going to take us to the end of the floor plan solutions. And then as we flip and start to look at the space in 3d we come back to one of the earlier points I talked about, which is, how much are you using the entire verticality of your wall?

19:05

I’m not a big fan of the mid-century classic, a base cabinet with upper cabinets shallow over it, so you’ve got your sort of appliance storage below, and your dish storage above, and the work surface sort of exists, but it’s also overshadowed by that upper cabinet, and you can’t lean in and really work there. Upper cabinets are fine in some places, but I always want to take them down in a few places and combine them into full floor to ceiling pantries. But that brings me back to the full floor to ceiling. Are you using it properly another fashion of mid-century kitchens that, honestly, I find a little baffling, was to soffit down the top foot, or 15 inches of the wall space in a kitchen and just block that off.

19:53

Sometimes there is air handling happening there. Sometimes it’s concealing duct work. Sometimes it’s in an electrical chase. But a lot of times it’s merely decorative. And if you are really graveled for storage, what you want in your kitchen is a step stool, no matter your stature, that allow you to get up into upper storage that goes all the way to the ceiling in a pitch. It’s better than moving those things to the basement and giving up the top foot, or 15 inches of your cabinet height to closed in soffit.

20:24

In some cases, again, if we’re trying to preserve a very classic vintage mid-century look, and we are not super snug on storage space, I will keep the upper soffit, but in most cases, I would rather use that for storage space, whether it feels super easily accessible or not. And again, in some part of the kitchen, you’ll get better effective use out of your space from a three or a four foot run of built in pantry storage that has drawers, that has interior organization that works better than your sort of classic closet pantry that you see in a builder grade mid-century kitchen.

20:58

Let’s sum it all up. What are the sort of secrets of making this most of a small space? You want to just really get inventive with your built ins, unless you are the proud owner of an entirely original mid-century kitchen, which is the golden handcuffs I find myself in. You need to replace 90s or early 2000s built ins with something else in order to really maximize a super small space for other people who are working more limited on budget than square footage. You can re face, re-door, refinish, even the most uncharming out of period 80s and 90s builder grade cabinets.

21:38

But if you are, if your most tight pinch point in your kitchen challenge is square footage even more than budget, you are going to want to make the most of your built ins. So to that end, I’m going to offer you two counter intuitive options for making the most of a small kitchen. You can make a small kitchen feel bigger by using wall mounted cabinets rather than our traditional Marin cabinets sit on the floor, European cabinets, the IKEA kitchen line, for example, is wall mounted. And it can float, hang over a floor space with no kick plate.

22:14

Even just being able to see a little bit of floor disappearing underneath just a three, four or five, six inch gap down there can make a small space feel a little bigger. This is also a solution I definitely recommend in small, snug bathrooms; a wall mounted vanity is key. It’s a space where you can add under cabinet lights to bring a little bit of brightness out of space, out of the sort of working area. And it can really be an effective way to make a kitchen feel bigger.

22:43

On the other hand, the opposite solution to that is not just to have a kick plate under floor mounted cabinets, but to activate that kick plate space for just a little bit more storage. I have seen people put pans bonus overflow spice drawers, keep their trash bags and saran wrap and wax paper rolls all in those sort of concealed in the baseboard storage units when you’re really scraping for every square inch you might want that.

23:10

Similarly, you can recess storage in between the studs of interior wall framing. You can take advantage of small space solutions like counter depth refrigerators, yes, a little bit more expensive, yes, a little less interior storage, but they will make a small kitchen feel bigger. And you should certainly be creative with every vertical inch and foot of your built ins go all the way to the ceiling, maybe, or maybe not, all the way to the floor.

23:35

And think about how the interior storage solutions of your built ins are really cleverly oriented, so that when you open them up, you’re not just seeing two foot deep of opaque can storage, but you maybe have the ability to sort of open out an inner drawer with something mounted on the doors well sprung, and then have a shallow interior space with interior lighting that you can easily see, manipulate and reach into don’t be afraid to move or to remove a problematic doorway. There is a power in reducing congestion.

24:11

Mid-century, kitchens often function as sort of mudroom, entry space, homework space. They multitask, sometimes too much, and while we always want to create more space for social areas inside of a kitchen. We don’t necessarily need the kitchen to be the major traffic zone of entering the house. This may be also tips towards the idea of micro additions, rather than feeling like your kitchen is too small, so you need to put a kitchen sized addition onto the outside of the house and put all of that expensive Plumbing and Heating and built in work out there.

24:44

You might think about just taking a few of the multitasking uses out of the kitchen. If the kitchen is also serving as your mudroom of vestibule addition, even a three season unheated addition off of that kitchen space can take some of the pressure off of kitchen having to do all sorts of things. Anything you can do to straighten out a corner or relieve a pinch point of either storage or circulation in a kitchen, maybe by moving a door, maybe by removing a corner of built in base cabinets, can let the rest of the space flow better.

25:19

My last tip isn’t really about space saving at all, but more about opening up possibilities and options for yourself, and it’s really to consider your options don’t get locked in by the footprint you have or by only one solution to your problem. Force yourself to design a kitchen layout that might work better than the new one you have. And then keep going, keep designing alternatives. One thing I do when I’m really facing a snug kitchen space, I’ll tend to keep the kitchen sink where it is, but I will just shift the other appliances around, sometimes willy nilly, sometimes into places that I don’t think they should work. Move the range, move the refrigerator and just give myself as many different alternatives as possible, then go back and see if I can tweak or improve any of them to make them work better, to flow better, to feel functional.

26:11

If I can’t, they get struck from the list. But sometimes I come up with a better solution just by reversing two appliances or shifting something into a former door opening and just trying to work the problem from there. My philosophy as a designer is that I always want to show my clients three workable solutions to any layout issue. To do that, I test way more than three. I try a lot of wrong answers before I get to the right answer.

26:41

And in the end, when I’m weighing which of the three options, I’m going to show I want to show them the three most distinct from each other options, and I want to organize them and scale from the least we might do the tweakiest, most subtle solution to something big and grandiose. When we’re dealing with a really tight kitchen, I tend to choose based on the owner’s preference, whether we want to do one that keeps the kitchen of the same footprint and two that might shift, expand, move, borrow space from other parts of the house, add on to improve the kitchen, or whether I want to do two that keep it in the existing footprint and one that’s our reach solution.

27:16

I do always want to show that contrast of what would it look like to work within the existing kitchen footprint, no matter how snug and what would it look like to blow out beyond it. You have the advantage and the disadvantage when you’re thinking about layout solutions to your own kitchen of living inside your own mind. I have the I can’t see inside my client’s mind. I don’t know everything they want and wish for. I don’t know what unspoken factors or assumptions are going to cause them to reject a design I show them out of hand.

27:48

But I do have clarity in my remove from their innate biases. Experience what they’ve seen before and liked. Sometimes I can surprise them, actually, often I can surprise them was something they either had quickly considered and rejected or something they didn’t even realize was possible. So I get the advantage of being a separate brain from my clients is real. You don’t have that when you’re working for yourself, but you do have the extra advantage of instinctively knowing whether you like something or not.

28:19

I think the best of both worlds for you, as you brainstorm solutions to your own kitchen challenges is to try to put yourself outside of your own preferences and design layouts that you don’t like, just for contrast, just to give yourself something to push back against, you’re never going to solve a true solve a truly snug kitchen space with the first solution that you come up with.

28:42

This is, by the way, a sneak preview of some of what I’m going to be talking about at the kitchen design clinic on Saturday. I will be showing contrasting examples and kind of walking through what my thought process was in getting to them, and also the pros and cons of small, medium and dramatically large solutions for different spaces.

29:01

So if you are listening to this episode, because you have a small kitchen and you wish it was bigger, or you have a small kitchen and you simply wish it worked better, I hope you’ve got some useful advice today, and I really hope we’re going to see you at the mid-century kitchen design clinic on Saturday, May 16, at 11am Central. It’s a two hour workshop that will run long at the end, because I will stay around to answer questions. But if you’ve only got two hours, stay for two hours.

29:26

You can sign yourself up if you have not already gotten your ticket at mid mod dash, midwest.com/clinic, and I will see you there to talk about all things mid-century, kitchen design, find the show notes for today’s episode, plus some YouTube videos showing specific solutions for small, mid-century kitchens that I’ve done as case studies recently that you might find inspiring and helpful, and also just see what I’m talking about rather than hear what I’m talking about at the show notes page that’s going to be at midmod-midwest.com, slash 2404.

30:02

And I will be back next week with a really delightful, long, rambly covering many topics, interview with my friend Atom Stevens, who is a mid-century real estate specialist in Denver. And we’ll be talking about mid-century kitchens, surprise, surprise. And some of the experiences he has when he walks someone into a space they might buy.

30:24

I was curious to find out when he takes someone to a time capsule house, because they asked for a time capsule house. Do that? Do they carry that all the way through to their desire for a time capsule kitchen? And his answer was, it depends. So he’ll tell us more about that next week. I’m really excited to share that with you and in the with you, and in the meantime, I look forward to seeing you Saturday for some deep dives into mid-century kitchen improvements, take care mid mod remodeler.

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.

Continue reading “Hands-On Kitchen Design with Aletha VanderMaas”

Is the kitchen work triangle complete nonsense?

17 min readDo you need a better kitchen work triangle? Maybe…or maybe it’s completely wrong for you and already the cause of your problems.

Odds are, if you’ve ever given serious thought to an upgrade for the kitchen of your mid-century home, you’ve run across the term “kitchen work triangle”. 

And if you have issues with how your kitchen works—not enough storage, not enough prep space, no room to share the work, a crowd underfoot at dinnertime every night—you’ve wondered if this mythical concept of a perfect kitchen work triangle is the solution. 

Maybe…or maybe it’s completely wrong for you and already the cause of your problems.

Continue reading “Is the kitchen work triangle complete nonsense?”

A Palm Springs Landscape in Spring Valley (WI)? With Jim Drzewiecki of Ginkgo Leaf Studio

24 min readIf you adore the yards that get featured on the cover of atomic Ranch, but you don’t live in Palm Springs, are you just out of luck? 

No, you can still have striking plant structures and beautifully composed outdoor spaces. You’ll just do it with different vegetation. Listen to my most recent conversation with Jim Drzewiecki of Ginkgo Leaf Studio for some great strategies. 

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Mid-Century Bathroom (design) Advice

28 min readThis week it’s a bathroom remodel advice roundup to help ease your worries!

Planning the right update for a mid-century bathroom is about space planning and the right product picks, sure. But it’s also about your lifestyle, your morning routine and your five-year plan. 

I’ve had a lot of conversations with Master Plan clients and on consult calls recently that caused me to notice some recurring issues and questions, things that come up again and again for a lot of people, which makes me suspect that if you’ve got bath questions on the brain, you’ve had some of the same struggles.

So let’s talk through some of the most pressing issues you can nail down to create a good mid-century bath update for you and for your house and for your style. 

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A Conversation with Kerf Design

48 min readAre you familiar with Kerf Design kitchens or bathrooms or wall mounted shelving units? To quote Kerf’s website, “Good joints should be admired. Construction should be simple and honest. We tinker, we improve, and we consider every detail. We love plywood.”
Well, I do too.

If you’re in the market for a Kerf kitchen or just in the mood to learn a lot of interesting background on construction with veneer or plywood materials, you’re in luck.

In this great chat with founder Nathan Hartman, we cover how their designs are manufactured, how the plywood is sourced, different wood grain types, and how this kind of minimalist, sleek, modern cabinet blends in perfectly with the traditions of mid-century history. 

I’m also in luck because Nathan perfectly articulated why all of the different members of a design construction team are really valuable.

It works so well for his group to his group to take a project that started with a designer who can handoff to them once the schematic element is well established. Then Kerf’s team take in the project and figure out each detail of kitchen storage and plan for perfect construction before handing off their completed cabinets to a construction team for install. 

This conversation is going to give you some insight into built-ins and kitchen design and cabinets generally.

It’s also wonderful insight into the specific process that Kerf uses to create great kitchens that make their homeowners so happy.

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Apple | Spotify | YouTube

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You don’t need to keep a tub for resale value.

27 min readYou don’t need to keep a tub for resale value. In fact, about half of my clients don’t.

So much of the advice out there about home improvements is focused on the bottom line, treating your home as a commodity. 

And sure, remodeling always has a cost. There are financial factors involved. 

But I firmly believe that return on investment and resale value are the absolute last things you should be thinking about when you plan a change to your home. Hear me out. 

If you’re planning on selling your mid-century home soon, leave it alone. Don’t do anything to it. 

If you’re planning to stay, you are better off focusing on what will make the house your home.

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Apple | Spotify | YouTube

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