Tag: midcentury modern

Decluttering doesn’t have to be a nightmare.

19 min readThis decluttering episode is not about perfectionism. It is about best fit storage solutions. About planning realistic storage with a little bit of squish. Real-world answers that fit you and your approach to the stuff in your life.

That said, a solid declutter is a great “step zero” for a remodel plan—especially one focused on storage solutions.

I’ve talked about clutter and decluttering before on the podcast. If you feel inspired after listening, check out these past episodes… 

  • Episode 206 – Exploring various ways of thinking about decluttering.
  • Episode 308 – Looking at how your existing house layout affects clutter accumulation and storage problems.
  • Episode 1608-Step-by-step advice for completing a project from Kendra Adachi, The Lazy Genius.

I love Kendra Adachi’s work and have recommended her a number of times. Her messages of matching your activities to your energy level, to letting go of things that don’t serve you and of being kind to yourself resonate with me. I recently found Tracy McCubbin’s book, Making Space, Clutter Free: The Last Book on Decluttering You’ll Ever Need and her work resonated in a similar way. 

Clutter is not random. The storage stuff in our homes carries meaning and emotion behind it, and trying to get rid of things can be a challenge if you aren’t acknowledging why they are important to you. When looking at the psychological barriers to letting go Tracy names the “clutter blocks” we all experience…

  • Your stuff is keeping you in the past. Objects become physical manifestations of memories, making it hard to let go of children’s artwork, outdated clothing from past versions of your life, or tools for hobbies you no longer pursue.
  • Shopping to feel happy. Purchasing items as an activity brings temporary joy, but things pile up unused.
  • Stuff as a visual to-do list. Unfinished projects, paperwork, and unreturned items become to-do lists in pile form.
  • Fantasy items for a fantasy life. Keeping gear, clothing, or equipment for a life you aren’t actually leading.
  • Feeling like you aren’t“worth” your good stuff. Storing designer clothes, unlit candles, or good china away out of fear of damaging them, rather than using and enjoying them today.
  • Being trapped with other people’s stuff. Holding onto family heirlooms or estate items out of an “Antiques Roadshow mentality” over their unknown monetary or sentimental value.
  • The sunk cost fallacy. Punishing yourself by keeping clothes that don’t fit or tools you don’t enjoy simply because you paid good money for them.

Now, we might not experience every one of these blocks. But most of us experience more than one. And we don’t need to resolve them all before we being to improve our storage options. Everyone’s goal isn’t a minimalist, magazine tidy home. Most of us just want orderly spaces that work for us and our families, so we aren’t tripping over shoes every time we walk through the door.   

Parkinson’s Law tells us that work expands to fit the available time for its completion—and the same is true of clutter; we tend to fill up our living areas with all the stuff they will hold. Because we do tend to fill out spaces, you’ll probably have to purge at least a bit before you organize. You can’t successfully organize pure clutter. So, I think Tracy’s method might be helpful as an initial step. 

While you don’t need to get rid of everything you own, we don’t want to do is design a house or big enough to hold everything you would keep if you never asked yourself if the things you’re keeping really mattered. It’s not a good use of your time, money, and energy to just create space for things instead of space for living. And to be perfectly frank, if budget is an object, if you are worried about whether you can afford all the things you want to have in your remodel, one of the most expensive things you can do in a remodel is add new square footage. Expanding the footprint of your house in any way to push out an addition, to grow the volume of the house, is more expensive than anything you would do to change things up inside the house. Not necessarily one-to-one. 

But clutter isn’t just about you or your stuff…the design of your house influences how clutter accumulates and how objects pile up. If there isn’t a right, accessible place in the house to put things away, your stuff will always just explode out of an ill-suited spot back into clutter. Even if you’ve done a really thorough purge.

I’m going to encourage you to think of decluttering not as a virtuous activity, but as one step in the process of designing a remodel that fits your life and budget. Maybe add this to your Discover step. And as you’re looking at all of the things that are accumulated in your house that need better storage solutions, remember to ask yourself why those things are adding up? What meaning do they have? What emotion is lurking behind and underneath them? And does knowing that help you put them in a better place or get rid of them entirely? 

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Before I say a single word about decluttering before a remodel, I want to make one thing clear. This is not an episode about perfectionism. This is not an episode about determination and purging every unnecessary object from your life. This is about best fit solutions. This is about planning realistic storage with a little bit of squish. Real-world answers that fit you and your whole family and your approach to the stuff in your life. 

That said, a solid declutter is a great step zero for a remodel plan, especially one focused on storage solutions. So today we’re going to talk about the objects in our lives and why we’re hanging on to them. Yeah, you and me both. And if knowing why we are hanging on to them makes it a little easier to let some go. 

Hey there. Welcome back to Mid-Mod Rebodel. 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 2602. Now, um, as I said last week, this whole season is going to be connected to the idea of great mid-century storage solutions for your home. 

And I wrote a free PDF guide that goes with the season at large and will walk you through the process of taking a master plan approach to storage in your life. What is important for you, for your family and your personal preferences, what’s going on with the house that you have, what your taste has to say about this, and then how to seek out solutions and boil them into your actual plan of action. It’s also linked to a handy Pinterest board that I’ve been creating in real time to go along with this season and I’ll continue to add to. And I think it’s just a great place to get started. 

So grab that from the show notes page at midmodest.com slash 2602, or you can go directly to grab it from midmodest.com slash storage. Okay. Um here’s the thing. When you are planning solutions to storage, you’ve got to seek out clutter. And we want to solve our storage problems at the source. 

So anywhere you have a tendency to accumulate clutter in your house may indicate a lack of sufficient storage or a lack of the correct storage. And it’s important to know which problem of those two, lack of sufficient or lack of correct, you are trying to solve before you solve it. Taking a quick thought experiment stroll or a physical stroll around your house can highlight where your storage needs are most prominent by identifying where there are piles of things, or an object out of place, or where a drawer is ajar because you needed to fold everything up perfectly before it all fit in there. 

Now, you can organize and tidy these extra objects, but if there’s not just a place in the house to put something away, but an easy and accessible, a right place in the house to put everything away, the storage will also always just explode back into clutter. So as I said at the top of the episode, I am going to advise you to look for a sweet spot in paring down your collections to size your proper storage. Um, I’ve already done an entire episode. 

I’m gonna do a little rundown on the episodes I’ve done in the past about decluttering. And they are all helpful. And getting rid of some things is a good idea. But I’m not pushing you towards some sort of Spartan minimalism here. I’m not telling you that you should hark back to the traumatic 90s diet culture of my youth or whatever crazy diet culture we’re in today and think about like using your willpower and a light summer flu to suddenly drop two pant sizes and get rid of all your other pants, and then you’ll be a perfect person for the rest of your life. That is not a long-lasting solution to pants, and it’s not a long-lasting solution to stuff. 

So instead, we want to fit storage solutions with a little bit of squish for your everyday life. And we want to think about storage throughout the rest of the season in such a way that you don’t have to take step 12 extra steps and cross a room to put something where it goes. Um, you shouldn’t have to neatly organize every drawer before all the things that belong in it fit into it. And the storage solutions that are important for you also need to work for every member of your household and be easy to follow by all the members of your household. 

So, um with all that said, let’s talk about how to properly think about extra stuff or just all the stuff that you have. I’ve talked about this since the very beginning. In the second season, episode 206. I talked about various ways of thinking about decluttering. And going back to that episode, I was reminded that there is this uh law of efficiency in work planning. Parkinson’s law says that work will expand to a fit the available time for its completion. And this is absolutely true of clutter and stuff and collections in our spaces. 

We tend to fill up our homes, our living areas, with all the stuff that they will hold. So when we’re thinking about organizing, when we’re thinking about planning for storage, we’ve got to purge before we organize. You can’t organize pure clutter. And if we’re going to uh probably the most famous name in getting rid of extra stuff from the last several decades will point to Marie Kondo, um touching every object in your life, judging whether or not it brings you, well, it sparks you joy, if I remember correctly. Um a Marie Kondo purge of your things can be lovely. I did it myself in the, oh, I think in the 2010s. And lo and behold, I have I have accumulated more objects since then. It’s not a permanent solution, but her objects, her methods can really help. 

I have also talked about how the design of your house being an influence on how clutter accumulates and how objects pile up. So if you’re curious about that, on what the existing layout of your house might be doing to affect the way that you’ve got storage problems, um episode 308 from the third season might be a really good jumping off point. 

And this kind of gets to that discovery process I was talking about last week, where you follow yourself around the house mentally, watching for where you’re setting things down. As I put it in that episode, this is particularly useful if you’ve been having a rough week so far or a bit of a rough go of it. You may, however, this this experiment may already be in progress. Where are there piles in your house? Take stock and now work on them. In that episode, I also talk a little bit about apartment therapy, which was a blog from the heyday of the blogging era with some great advice on it that resulted in a book written by its uh the blogger, Maxwell Ryan. He uh, among other things, had a lot of great small-paced storage solutions because he was a New Yorker and he was talking about primarily New York-based apartments and how to make them more beautiful, more warm, more colorful, but also better filled with storage. 

And he was most interested in solving the solution at the entry point to the apartment. He recommended something called a landing strip, which was a place to filter out clutter at the door, a place for shoes, for coats, for bags, for keys, a defined area where all of those things could be set down at the one entry point of the house. Now, your mid-century house may not have one entry point, and it may be harder than just having a hook for keys and a hook for one coat on the door, uh on the wall by the door, when you’ve got kids and multiple adults and a bunch of people all using the space together. But it’s still a useful place to jump off. 

And then about 10 seasons ago, uh episode 1608, I got into advice for decluttering from one of my favorite podcasters, uh, Kendra Adachi, whose podcast, The Lazy Genius, had a great episode on step-by-step advice for how to complete a project, any project, but specifically excellent advice for decluttering. So you might want to check out that framework for taking on a declutter project. 

But looking forward, I wanted to share in this season on storage a maybe more holistic approach to understanding the objects that we hang on to. I came across this book several years ago, and I’ve been wanting to talk about the podcast ever since, uh, called Making Space, Clutter Free, Making Space Clutter Free by Tracy McCubbin. This was published in 2019, and it deals with the underlying psychological issues of our stuff. Tracy is a house organizer professionally, and so she shares a bunch of examples of people she’s worked with and what was sort of holding them up from getting rid of their stuff. But I’m gonna give you some of the specifics in a moment, but I really think this idea of why we hang on to stuff is important. 

And just trying to get rid of things can be so challenging if you aren’t acknowledging why they’re important to you. Marie Condo also tried to get to this with her whole hold on to it, does it spark joy? If not, let it go, thank it for its service and send it out of your life. That’s great, but this is like, I don’t know, going to therapy for your things. If you don’t ask why, do you really know what you’re doing? Do you really care to do it all the way? In my job as a residential architect, I haven’t seen quite so much of the intimate insides of people’s storage as the author Tracy McCubbin has, but I really do validate some of the psychological sources of stuff that she highlights in her, as she describes them, clutter blocks. 

Um, I’m gonna go into more or less detail on some of these, which seem more or less relevant to me based on the things I see coming up again, again, and for my mid-century house clients, but I think each of these may ring a bell for you. The first clutter block is that your stuff is keeping you in the past. When the objects around you aren’t just things, but they are physical manifestations of your memories, it can feel really hard to let those things go without feeling like you’re losing the past too. 

And so this kind of hanging onto stuff covers a lot of children’s artwork or old outgrown things that you can’t get rid of. Old outdated clothing from past versions of your life, an old job or a different body type, or weather activities you don’t encounter anymore, um, dishes, or maybe even a whole room, formal dining setup for a type of hosting you don’t do anymore. Tools, craft supplies, etc., for a hobby you don’t have as much time for these days. 

Um, that last one, hey, fellow ADHD friends, are you holding on to the detritus from your past dozen hyperfixations in your house? How many of those are you coming back around for? Because maybe only some of them really need to stick. After she’s identified what a psychological block is and what kind of stuff this generally manifests as, she has what she describes as a bridge, which is how you sort of get beyond it, let it go. And the bridge for this one is to just recognize this for what it is and you take its power. Then you can keep one or two items that hold a good memory for you and let the rest of them go. This might fall into the category of like take a photograph of your stuff and then give it away. I don’t know. That always feels a little cheesy to me. 

But basically, if you find that you’re hanging on to things as an aid memoir, that’s not an efficient use of the your one wild and precious life or the storage in your house. Um, is that the second color block she calls up is that your stuff tells you who you are, that you’re shopping to feel happy. You’re you’re letting purchasing as an activity um give you joy, and then things pile up and they never even get used. This, to me, it’s funny. She wrote this book in 2019, and I was like, oh, this is what we did in the pandemic. We ordered stuff from the internet and waited for it to come, and it was like how time passed. 

That’s what I did in the pandemic. I tried to keep it to sort of I’m expecting one item of clothing or craft supply, or, oh, and it’s new fabric for the masks I’m sewing, and it’s coming in the mail, and I’m tracking it. It’s a new book. I’m following it across the country to me. Uh yeah, in those really weird days of the shutdown, I definitely did that. 

And I think we all can be guilty of a little bit of shopping to keep ourselves happy, but the bridge in this case is just look for other sources of dopamine. It’s also absolutely possible that sometimes you keep stuff because it’s the things you’re avoiding: uh paperwork, mail, unfinished projects, unreturned items, these kind of become a to-do list in pile form. Uh, and sadly, she has no magic bullet for this. She’s just like, look, you’ve got to go deal with your visible to-do lists. If you personally are a person who keeps your to-do list in pile form in plain sight, or perhaps even more obnoxiously, if you live with someone who needs to keep their to-do lists as piles, um, this sounds like my parents’ source of constant disagreement. 

My mom wants like a less cluttery house, and my dad needs to leave something on the steps so that he’ll remember to take it out with him next time, except then sometimes he doesn’t. Um raise your hand if this feels like someone you live with and love, or someone you are and you know it’s annoying your loved ones. This might be just the sort of thing that a storage solution needs to be created where yes, you can have a visible to-do list, you can have a pile of papers to be answered or objects to be moved to another space, but it can’t be in the main traffic areas. It can’t be blocking someone else’s access to their daily life. 

It’s gotta be we’ve gotta make a we’ve got to make a storage solution for that. Um, the fourth cutter block is fantasy stuff for your fantasy life, collections of clothing for trips you haven’t taken, crafts you don’t know how to do yet, equipment for cooking you don’t actually take on, exercise gear you don’t use. Basically, if you’ve got a bunch of the stuff in your life for a life you don’t lead, then the bridge to that is to focus on action instead of acquisition. Meaning maybe you start using the things you’ve been storing up, or maybe you let them go and focus on the hobbies you actually have right now. 

One interesting clutter block that can create a need for more room in your house than you really need is feeling like you’re not worth your good stuff, um, which might mean keeping, even displaying the good versions of things you never use. Designer clothes you store in a closet but don’t want to damage by wearing. A collection of unlit candles, unused bath salts, pleasant treats for the future that you just never get through. The good china on a shelf that never sees a dinner. 

The bridge for this is use it. Now you don’t need two sets of everything in your life. Now, sure, you don’t want to do yard work in your favorite new clothes, but you can let yourself use the good stuff today and appreciate it in the moment. I will say I’m about to get to the sixth one, which is also gonna feel related to this, but sometimes there is a sentimental reason to keep um some of the good stuff more on display than in use, but also I think whenever you’re keep finding yourself keeping multiple collections of something, you’ve got the daily use stuff and the stuff you almost never use. 

Ask yourself, do those really need to be two separate objects? Um the sixth uh clutter block is being trapped with other people’s stuff. This often looks like family heirlooms. Um, and it can be really hard for people to get rid of these because they’re like, what in my what if it was valuable? What if it was secretly really special? I’ve been told this was really precious once. Um Trace McGevin calls this the antiques roadshow mentality. 

People really worry that family items have an unknown monetary value, and they’re sure they have a sentimental value, so they can’t be gotten rid of. But again, like letting yourself use the good stuff, you should have stuff you like. Now, for us mid-century lovers, it might well be that the stuff you like is considered an antique. It might even have come from your grandparents or an estate sale, but only keep it if you like it. If you have multiple sets of china from previous generations, boxes of unsorted memorabilia, unlabeled photographs, and things from past family members, unused rooms filled with vintage furniture that’s in someone else’s style. 

This is a hard one. And particularly, I’m I’m in a sandwich generation. I’m not sandwiching myself, uh, which for which I’m grateful, but you know, I I have things in my home that belonged to my grandparents that my parents took on when they cleared out their house and didn’t have a place for. At some point, I will have many things in my life that belong or belonged to my parents, and I won’t want to get rid of that all right away. But keeping every possession of a past loved one doesn’t help you remember their life. It’s keeping you frozen in yours. 

So choose one or two things that really remind you of them, or one or two dozen things that really remind you of them, and let the rest go. And the seventh clutter block is the stuff you keep paying for in your mind. You paid good money for that and now you don’t want to let it go. This is the sunk cost fallacy of clutter. Yes, it sucks that you paid more for it than you got fun out of it, but don’t punish yourself by keeping it around. Let it go. 

This also catches a different psychological angle on the same things. Clothes you don’t fit anymore, exercise equipment you don’t use, tools and craft supplies you don’t enjoy. So, what do you do when you’ve touched all of these or any of these seven clutter blocks and realized, oh, this really this is me. This is why I have a basement full of stuff I don’t touch, never use, but it’s taking up all of my available out-of-the-way storage space. Well, it’s time for a perch. You sing the song from Frozen and you let it go. 

You can resell things if that feels like a fun project, but don’t let making that into a task stop you from getting rid of things. So if it’s easier to just give it away, if that’s faster and lets you live your life, do that. Here’s the biggest takeaway from this book, Making Space Clutter Free for me. Clutter is not random. Clutter, storage stuff has meaning. It has emotion behind it. You bought or were given that thing. You set a thing down on that surface and left it there. Why? Are you tapped on emotionally? Are you trying to remind yourself of something or out of space to put that away because the space to put it away is filled up with lurking emotional boulders? What’s up with that storage problem? 

So, sure, you can get out the big black trash bag energy and work yourself into an adrenaline spike and just get rid of a bunch of things. But will that really solve the problem at the source? No. So here’s what I want to leave you with. Let’s try to take the shame out of our stuff. My own example is that I am a natural minimalist in terms of clothing and a lot of food and lifestyle needs. I love routine. I do the same thing over and over again. I like to eat the same dinner every night. I certainly like to eat the same breakfast every morning. I wear the same clothes again and again and again through each season. The capsule wardrobe idea speaks to me. In fact, I effectively do it without really thinking about it. 

But my storage Achilles heel is never being able to let go of something that could potentially be used in a future house or craft project. And I come by this honestly, because there is stuff in my garage right now that I’ve never touched, and I don’t even know what it was for. Um, but it was just in case tools or supplies saved by my grandfather, cleared out of his house when he died more than 15 years ago, um, put into a storage unit for my parents, by my parents, um, which was then got cleared out and decommissioned when they moved and dumped on me. 

We had a yard sale out of my garage and a bunch of stuff that didn’t sell, is still in there. My dad has 44 acres of his own property to keep stuff on, and Lord help me, he’s got stuff in my garage, and when he’s not around anymore, all of things in his barn and garage and basement will become my responsibility as well. 

Long story short, I am not standing up on my high horse to tell you that I have all the answers to solving a clutter or a storage problem. Um, I’m not telling you this to give you a sense that you should or will get rid of your stuff, but I do want to open a possibility. Because what we don’t want to do is design a house or storage big enough to hold everything you would keep if you never asked yourself if the things you were keeping really mattered. That’s not a good use of your time, money, and energy to create space. 

And to be perfectly frank, if budget is an object, if you are worried about whether you can afford all the things you want to have in your remodel, one of the most expensive things you can do in a remodel is adding in new square footage, expanding the footprint of your house in any way to push out an addition, um to grow the volume of the house, basically. That’s more expensive than anything you would do to change things up inside the house. Not necessarily one-to-one. 

There’s probably some cheap, quick and dirty addition you could do that’s less expensive than a full, beautiful, perfect jewel box remodel of an interior space. But as a rule of thumb, it’s better to keep your house at the size that it is now and then do what we can with it. And if that means shifting activities, downgrading them so we don’t have to make your daily life worse, but we can move some storage out of daily life spaces into less important spaces. We can move, um, we can improve on some of your basement spaces, for example, if you’ve got it, if we can condense some storage space from all of the basement to some of the basement. One way or another, we can keep your whole remodel a little bit more surgical and precise if we’re not trying to fit it around every object you’ve ever accumulated in your whole life. 

But I also will end where I began by saying that I’m not recommending that you purge every unused daily object from your life. I’m not advocating for perfect minimalism. I don’t even think it’s necessary. We want to acknowledge and support your natural predilections. We want to study the way you and the way everyone else in your household accumulates things on a repeating cycle, and we want to create space that contains and supports all of that effectively. 

So, hopefully you may have found some category of things pop to your mind as I talked about these various clutter blocks and what causes people to feel hung up on hanging on to a particular type of thing that will let you let something go. Um, if you want to know more about it, the I only was quoting from sort of the first third of this book on making space clutter-free. And I think I would go ahead and recommend it. 

As you’re looking at all of the things that are accumulated in your house that need better storage solutions, remember to ask yourself why those things are adding up? What meaning do they have? What emotion is lurking behind and underneath them? And does knowing that help you put them in a better place or get rid of them entirely? 

I will link to all those previous decluttering episodes of the Mid Modern Model podcast that I mentioned on the show notes page, as well as putting all the information about this book if you’d like to go get it, describes itself as the last book on decluttering you’ll ever need. And I say bet, but I still think it’s a good one. And um, and yeah, I also think you might have a good time reading through my free resource on storage solutions for mid-century houses. All of that is going to be at the show notes page, midmod-midwest.com/2602. 

And I will be back next week to talk to you about vintage versus modern storage styles, um, both aesthetically and sort of procedurally, and how you can make the most of storage solutions in your home, whether it is a perfect time capsule that you’re trying to tune up, or whether it is already sort of flipped and you’re reinfusing it with a modernist uh mid century aesthetic. Uh, more on storage solutions here for the rest of the season. Catch you next week, mid mod remodeler.

Master Plan Your Mid-Century Storage.

19 min readYour mid-century home could probably use more storage. Today I am going to ask you to slow down and learn why my Master Plan Method might be the best way to solve your storage woes.

Storage is a near universal mid-century home problem, and it comes up for every design client and every ready-to-remodel homeowner in every space around all of their homes. 

The good news? There are solutions. The better news? There are solutions that can add both storage and charm into your mid-century home. 

First, there is an option that doesn’t involve adding anything. You can weed stuff out, have less and choose to live within your home’s meager mid-century closets. 

You can also go low-ish cost and low disruption by focusing on finding the perfect piece of mid-century storage furniture or the perfect suite of modular storage for every space. A little storage is better than nothing. And this might a great “for now” solution as you (or we) create your master plan. 

And you can combine these lower impact options with more robust solutions based on your goals and budget and the life you want to live in your home. Not every storage solution needs to be solved with beautiful, expensive built-ins. Sometimes the solution is vintage furniture to attractively conceal your items, or wireframe shelves with neatly organized plastic storage tubs in a basement.

And I’m not going to rule out any of these options. 

BUT I am going to argue that using my Master Plan Method to design the right storage for your home and your life is potentially transformative.

Solving the Right Problems by Asking the Right Questions

It is completely reasonable to go from “I feel a frustration” straight to looking for solutions. This is what drives people directly to Pinterest first thing or causes them to rush out and buy storage furniture to cram things into without matching available resources to their actual needs.

In reality, we end up with solutions that really work when we start by asking the right questions. Which is why I begin every design process with a lot of information gathering. I ask about how my clients live in their homes and how it could function better, including questions about: 

  • Daily Routines: When and how do you access your belongings? What do comings and goings look like in your house? 
  • Habits & Hobbies: Are you a Costco family, or do you pick up something on the way home for dinner? Do you have storage-demanding hobbies like woodworking, quilting, or puzzles?
  • Visibility vs. Concealment: Do you like to see your belongings arranged around you because it gives you a sense of pride or peace? Or does seeing a bunch of objects create noise and chaos in your brain, making it better to have everything tucked tidily away behind a cabinet door?

Applying the Master Plan Method to Storage

For anyone rusty on the process, my Master Plan Method uses 5-D thinking to plan the right remodel for your home and life. The 5 D’s are:

  1. Dream: An internal process making mental lists of your hobbies, cooking style, and lifestyle habits.
  2. Discover: Taking stock of your house to understand where the trouble spots are and where there might be missed storage opportunities. Then documenting it with photos of your rooms and specific details. 
  3. Distill: Determining your mid-century style. This sometimes means time-capsule vintage or your style might be a modern update that adds a cohesive material layer to your home.
  4. Draft: Turning clever ideas, images, and advice into a number of plans that bring your house into alignment with your life. I always recommend developing three options for any space.
  5. Develop: Whittling your drafts and style choices down into an action plan that fits your life, budget, and energy level.

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

Your mid-century home could probably use more storage. Nearly everyone’s can. This is a near universal mid-century home problem, and it comes up for every design client and every ready-to-remodel homeowner in every space around all of their homes. The good news is that solutions to this problem are many and varied. 

You can weed out stuff and have less, sure, or you can focus on finding the perfect piece of mid-century storage furniture or the perfect suite of storage built-ins for every space. A little storage is better than nothing, and a full-fledged master plan for storage is potentially transformative. So today kicks off our brand new season on mid-century storage solutions and built-ins for every room. 

Today we’re going to begin with, of course, how to master plan the storage solutions for your house. 

Hey there. Welcome back to Midmodern 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 Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. 

You’re listening to episode 2601. Here’s a quick overview of what’s coming up today and over the weeks to come. Basically, from now through the rest of the year, we are going to be talking about storage in your mid-century house. 

Today I’m focusing on the process, how to ask yourself the right questions so that the answers you come up with are going to solve your problems. Tomorrow, oh, next week, rather, I’m going to be talking to you about decluttering. 

And I do not mean to make this a should-based episode, a shame-based episode. In some ways, I’m going to give you a permission structure to keep things that are important to you, but I’m also going to be highlighting a book I came across recently on the psychology behind the things we keep in our house and how perhaps touching on the underlying why of the collections or the detritus or the stuff that it’s just hard to get rid of can help us get rid of it more easily or understand it in a new way. 

So, some thoughts on how to clear out extra stuff from your life, because as has said been been said on the podcast before, you can’t actually organize clutter when it’s literally just clutter. Um, purging first and then organizing is a great way to go about it. And you want to figure out that you’re making storage solutions for the right amount of your stuff, then I’m gonna talk about mid-century vintage versus more modern updated, mid-century inflected versions of storage styles, both aesthetically and in the approach that we take to where we’re putting things away and how we’re housing them. 

So this will be a little bit of a if you want to be a more of a time capsule person, how to think about this. If you’re looking for more of an update approach, how to think about it. And then I’m going to dive into a variety of spaces around your house and talk about some of the specifics, pros and cons, uh background needs, types, benefits of storage solutions for kitchens, for entryways, both front and private, for uh bathrooms, for bedrooms, for basements, for living areas, and more. So I will be talking about storage in so many different ways. 

Throughout the season, I’ll probably point to a bunch of handy resources. Certainly for like kitchen storage ideas, I’ll point you towards some resources, uh both free and paid, that I have for kitchen design solutions. But in general, an overall uh free resource that’s gonna be helpful for this season is the guide to mid-century storage solutions that I’m putting together to match this episode, specifically walking you through this master plan process focused on storage that we’re going to cover today. 

So you can grab that from the show notes page, which is gonna be midmod-midwest.com/2601, or you can go straight to midmod-midwest.com slash storage, and you will get that guide. It’s also going to link to a Pinterest board I’ve put together with a bunch of great image posts collected from across the internet showing both vintage and modern update versions of successful storage solutions for all of these different parts of the house. 

So if what really helps you is visual references that are photographs, go check out those, that collection of organized boards, um, which will be linked to in that storage free resource. So, uh, one more thing before I dive in, which is to say if you are planning to work with Mid Mod Midwest to solve some of your storage problems, or to and to address the rest of your home improvement needs to set a master plan for everything you want to do to your house over the next decade, or to kick off a remodel that’s going to happen in the next year. 

Next year, certainly not in this calendar year, now is a really great time to get your ducks in a row for a 2026 remodel because that’s how booked our we are on our design calendar right now. Our next signed project is gonna start in January, I believe, um, from our perspective. 

Now that’s to say, when we when we meet with a new, when I meet with a new person, we have a conversation about whether we’re a good fit for you, you’re a good fit for us, whether your house fits our criteria and our design services and style will best suit you, and we agree to move forward. 

Your process will begin almost immediately because we start by assigning some design homework. Questions like, how do you live in your space? Some of them will feel related to storage needs. Where do your things accumulate? How, where the what parts of your house do you spend the greatest parts of your time? How do you feel about those places? 

That part and the documentation of the house, floor plan, information, photographs, et cetera, plus the boiling down of what mid-century style to you means, all begin as soon as we’ve got our proposal signed. But our design process won’t be beginning before January for any projects that we have not already got on our design calendar. So if you want to get work done in 2026, design also takes time. We’d love to have your design drawings set for spring 2027, but the time to get started is now. As they say, the right time to plant a tree was 50 years ago, and the next best time to plant a tree is today. So um, if you’re thinking about working with us, then reach out and say hello. 

Also, we are still on the hunt for the perfect new addition to our team. If you have been dreaming of working on designs for improving mid-century homes, if you love to draw mid-century buildings and think about how they could be done better, if you are just curious about what it might be like to work with for Mid Mod Midwest, reach out on our careers page. I would love to hear from you about your curiosity, your experience, your background, your love for mid-century. We are trying to grow our mighty but small team, and we’d love to hear from you about your experience. Or if you know someone who might be a good fit for working with our design and illustrating team, pass them this information. 

Okay, let’s dive right on in and start talking about the way to solve a storage problem. It is so easy to go from I feel a frustration to I’m looking for solutions. This is what drives people directly to Pinterest, first thing, to look at how other people’s entryway or kitchen or bathroom looks. This is why people rush out and buy storage furniture to sort of cram things into without having quite matched the available resources to their needs. 

But in reality, we’ve got to start with the right questions. And I begin every design process with a lot of information gathering. I want to talk to my clients about the way that they shop. Are they habitual pick up something on the way home and then make it into dinner people? Or are they a Costco family? Do they have crafts or other storage-demanding hobbies, woodworking, quilting, Lego, puzzles? What helps you, a potential client, live best with your stuff? Do you like to see it arranged around you because seeing it gives you a sense of pride or peace or reminds you of your favorite thing you’ve accomplished? Or does seeing a bunch of objects around you create noise in your brain? Is it chaotic? Is it always better to have everything tucked tidily away behind a cabinet door? 

Throughout this season, I’m going to talk about the ways that mid-century homes sometimes have incredibly clever, desirable storage solutions that we should reach back in time and connect to, and sometimes then in the ways that they are totally lacking and we can completely improve upon them. 

So while we settle in for this next series of episodes, I’m going to constantly return to this first episode of the season, which is to ask about what problem we’re solving before we try to solve it. What’s going on in your household as it stands, what’s going on in your life, the way you’re living it, what would you like it to look like? And from there, we can throw a spaghetti at the wall and try to solve specific problems. 

Before I dive in on the process you should think about, questions to ask yourself as you go through a storage solving process, I want to caveat that storage does not necessarily or does not only mean built-ins, but I’m going to spend a lot of time talking about built-ins this season. In fact, in my head, I was kind of thinking this as the mid-century built-in season. But that’s not necessarily true. 

Um, this, as I was pondering how to begin this, I thought of all the way back to my high school experience, I was on the robotics team, and a crusty old guy in the shop who volunteered to support us had a saying, which he often repeated, which is, with a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. I’ve said that on the podcast before. From him, it was a reminder to us to think outside of our most easily reached for solution. 

He had a bunch of those helpful phrases, some of which were quite contradictory, like he’d pull, perfect is good enough when he wanted us to keep going on something, or good enough for the girls we go out with if he wanted us to wrap it up and get the hell out of his shop at the end of the day. 

And you know, yes, there were also girly calendars on the wall in that shop, and I think I was the first girl he’d ever had on the robotics team in his experience coaching. He was not quite prepared for it. But going back to the hammer and the nail, this is true. And I will just tell you that my approach as an architect is very hammer-oriented. I will always try to solve every problem with architecture. I’m gonna look for a way to look with a structure, to tuck a beautiful, clever built-in into negative space, to recommend that every storage solution throughout the entire house be handled by the one consistent cabinet shop so it can have this beautiful, smooth, coordinating grain and stain and design language, the material language of the house all ties together effortlessly. 

But that’s not absolutely necessary. Not every storage solution needs to be solved with beautiful, expensive built-ins. Sometimes the solution is furniture to attractively conceal your items. Um you can source vintage and add an era of instant authenticity to your otherwise flipped and white painted house. Sometimes the solution is just a bunch of wireframe shelves lining the walls of your basement with neatly organized plastic storage tubs along them. 

Um, so feel free to take this advice when I talk about built-ins as one thing you could do, and know that you have many alternatives. So we’re going to solve the right problems by asking the right questions first. Friends, you’re not shocked, but I’m going to talk to you about how we should use a master plan method approach here. 

Yes, you need a master plan for your entire house before a remodel. And we can also use master plan thinking specifically to look only at your storage issues. For anyone who has forgotten, for if you’re rusty or if this is somehow the first episode of Midmon Remodel you’ve ever listened to, the master plan method is the 5D method for planning a remodel in the right order so you ask the right questions first and answer them thoroughly afterwards. 

The three pre-designed steps to gather insight into the situation are Dream, which asks what’s important to your life, discover, which digs into what’s going on in the house itself, distill, which focuses your style, what your mid-century aesthetic is for yourself. Once you’ve done that, you can move forward into creative problem solving in draft, the step where you try to explore as many possibilities as possible before you settle into what you will actually do with develop and focus mindfully on the solutions that solve all the problems you have at a scale that fits your life and your budget and your energy level. 

As always, if you’re thinking about the big picture of a master plan process, go over and check out my free class, Planning a Mid-Century Remodel to Fit Your Life and Budget, which is an hour-long uh recording of a live event that I do occasionally to walk someone through this entire process. So the master plan approach to your whole house is key to a successful remodel, but this thinking works at every scale. 

I use it when I’m standing in the aisle of a home goods store debating between two products and feeling a little worn out about choices. I speed run a micro master plan process to help focus my decisions. What helps my life in this case? What does the space, the house, need? What are the style through line elements that connect with other parts of the house? What could I choose based on what’s available in front of me or everywhere in the internet in the world? And then what’s the best choice out of all of that? I can sometimes do it as quickly as it just took me to say those five steps. 

And what this often turns up for me is that I can narrow the process right down and pick something in front of me, or hold up my hands and back away slowly from an impulse purchase that I, in fact, did not need at all. So let’s take this and think about how storage solutions can fit into the framework of the master plan. When we start with dream, this is always going to be an internal process. You’re making mental lists of your hobbies, your cooking style, the way you like to stock up on spares at Costco, versus knowing that you are a person who wants to go to the store on the way home from work and pick out tonight’s meal. 

It doesn’t need to be grander or more complicated than this. Reflecting on what makes you different from everybody else is important to figure out how you fit or don’t fit into the storage solutions of your existing house. If this helps, you can also think about how well or awkwardly you fit your things into various rental spaces of your youth or into other previous houses you’ve lived in, or the one you’re living in right now. 

Now, some of these questions are less important to you to ask yourself, although it doesn’t hurt to just stop and think about, you know, what what are my habits that create storage needs? But they’re very important questions to answer and to be able to clearly share with any designer you may enlist in the aid of your remodel. Because while it is obvious to you, knowing whether you’re a shoes-on or a shoes-off household is not obvious to everyone else unless you tell them and it makes a big difference to storage. 

Does all of that need to happen at the entry transition zone, or are shoes primarily stored in each person’s room where they get taken off during the evening? So doing a little ruminating on how your lifestyle relates to things is very important. And also, as I said earlier, one of the questions that I always like to talk to my clients about as I’m preparing to do a master plan for them is how much they want to see, how much do you want to see all of your belongings around you visibly versus how much do you want them all to be closed away behind drawers? Behind doors or drawers. 

Now, the next step in the 5D process is to discover. And in the case of storage solutions, dream and discover really can go hand in hand because what you’re looking for is trouble spots, and you’re gonna see them very visibly around your house as you go around your house and take stock of what storage you have, especially if any of it might be sitting empty or is poorly used, and separately, the places where things are piling up because there is not sufficient storage. 

I’m going to tease a solution here that will come up many times through the season. Um, a simple framed closet. You know, like the kind of space, it’s a tiny room with a door. Uh you open the door, and inside is a two foot deep and two or three or four foot wide space with a single hanging rod and a shelf above it. This kind of closet is the builder basic most common default storage unit in a mid-century house, and it is notoriously underused storage volume. 

It’s really hard to properly fill that space up and still have access to all of the things inside of it. So, one of the steps in the discovery process is going to be to open every closet door in your house and see how much empty volume is in there. How fully loaded is the upper shelf? Is the hanging rod space totally used? What about the space underneath the hanging clothing? What’s on the floor? Is it easy to reach in and see everything you want and grab it, or is it kind of a mess with jumbled objects blocking each other from view? 

Similarly, you can go downstairs if you’ve got a basement, peek into the attic if that is a place where it’s safe to store things in your climate, or out to the garage if you’ve got one of those and take stock of empty storage volume. How big are your unfinished spaces? And do you use them for anything? If your kids are playing floor hockey in your back basement, then there’s not any possibility to fill it up with storage, as there is if the only thing that ever happens back there is you walk through it to get to the laundry machines. 

Um if my bringing up the idea of storage in a back basement room immediately triggers you, no, Della, I don’t have room for the stuff that is my everyday, always touched stuff, then I would ask you, what’s being stored in the closet and storage furniture inside your main spaces? Is all of that stuff daily necessary stuff, weekly necessary stuff, or even seasonally necessary stuff. Perhaps some of that could be shifted to more out of the way locations to free up space in your close to daily life areas. 

So you’re took you’re taking stock of what is the empty, if any, capacity of your house. And this is your answer will vary depending on how jam-packed you are, how long you’ve been in the house, um, how much you are an accumulator of things, how carefully you can pack things away. But you always want also want to see like where are where are the non-stored items piling? Um the best time to look for this is when things have been going a little screwy lately, not right after you’ve just cleaned up everything for company. 

Although if you clean up everything for company and then wait a week, you’ll definitely have an opportunity to see, okay, where are the where’s the fresh clutter? Um, but you’re gonna look through the house for where is there a pile that doesn’t belong? Where is there uh a sort of things piled on top of a storage unit as well as sitting inside of it? Where is there a pinch point where you’re shuffling around, uh scrabbling through a drawer to find the one of an item that you have too many of stuck into one small space? 

Some of these things, if you’re anything like me, will slowly become a little invisible to you over time. And so you’re gonna kind of have to do fresh eyes. This is definitely a place where you can walk around and look at your house, but if you’re like, I don’t know, everything is messy and I hate all this clutter, and you’ve gotten into the bad habit, well, or perhaps the self-preservation habit, of just kind of not looking at your hotspots, at your clutter piles, it can be also helpful to take photos of the room. 

It’s wild to me whenever I’m taking a picture of a space in my house. I’ll look at it, be like, yeah, that’s pretty clean, the dust is all gone, it looks good. I take my camera out, take my phone out, take a snap, and I’m like, okay. So there is an out-of-place piece of junk on that coffee table, and there’s a cord visible, and the curtains are crooked, and I immediately in the photo see like five things that are wrong with this picture that I didn’t notice in real life. 

So if you’re having trouble thoroughly documenting where these spots sort of pop up, then taking photos of your house might be good documentary evidence against yourself, what you want to improve upon. Uh, a nice before picture, if you will, and also will help you identify where are your most troubling clutter spots. There are some of these, though, that need no reflection whatsoever to be like, I can’t stand coming into my entry one more time and tripping over the giant, unorganized pile of shoes in there. It has to be changed. 

So, again, as I often say about the dream stage, this does not have to be rocket science. This is just knowing what you know and making a note of it. All right, dream, discover, distill. This is slightly jumping the gun, but let’s think about it as a treat to yourself. What is the ideal aesthetic of your storage? Should it be time capsule vintage? And if so, from what sort of style or era or micro note inside the mid-century years are you looking for? Or should it be more of an update? Um, more visible, more open shelving versus more closed? Are you looking for uh an opportunity to blend a light wood Scandinavian style into your older, darker amber mid-century home? 

If you’re doing a full pass storage overhaul of your entire house, this is an opportunity to bring in a new consistent material in such a way that feels very tied together and purposeful and can add a beautiful layer to the material palette of the house. If, on the other hand, your house has already been subject to somebody else’s bad comprehensive remodel in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, or a flip in the last few decades that has scoured out most of its original built ins and woodwork and character, this isn’t. 

Opportunity for you to feed two birds with one scone and really plan thoughtful storage solutions that both declutter your life and also bring back in a mid-century flavor to multiple rooms in your daily life. Only once you’ve gone through those three steps can you get into the hunting down clever ideas. 

This is where we get into draft. This is where you turn to Pinterest and look for other people’s clever ideas. This is where you check out what influencers are recommending on TikTok, on Instagram, etc., on YouTube. This is where you might find like a 90s published Better Homes and Gardens guide to storage ideas around your house. And the style of them will be completely, I don’t even know what blonde wood or white painted everything. But you’ll find some glarely clever answers to the questions that you’ve already been asking. 

If you’re looking for a suite of my own solutions to some of these problems, one place to get started finding good storage ideas for every space in your house is to just wait and keep on listening to the rest of this season. But you can also go back and check out a bunch of previous mid-mod remodel podcast episodes, case study blog posts, videos on the Mid-Mod Midwest YouTube channel where I sometimes show examples. 

Or if you’re focused on one specific part of your house rather than a comprehensive sort of solution, you might want to check out one of my several past live mid-century design clinics. I’ve done design clinics on kitchens, on owner suites, which is bathrooms and bedrooms, on additions, which covers a lot of living room space, on exterior spaces, which include sometimes garages and carports. 

So there are storage suggestions built into each one of those clinics. Those recordings are available on the courses page of my website. And yeah. The ideas that you’re looking for here do not necessarily have to come from or be planned for mid-century houses. This is where you can get a good idea from your neighbor. You can go down to several local cabinet shops and look at their showroom for clever storage solutions. You can surf the pages of Plykea or Kerf Kitchens and see what clever little storage solutions they suggest. This is where you start to accumulate a laundry list of wish list sort of items. I wish I had a pullout drawer for this, and I wish I had a tall sort of can storage pantry pullout in my kitchen. And I wish that the trash cans in the kitchen were in drawers rather than as a unit sitting outside of them. One drawer for trash and recycling would be amazing. 

This begins as a laundry list of ideas. And ultimately, as you shift from the draft stage where you’re testing out possibilities to the develop stage where you’re whittling it down, you’re boiling it down to the actual choices you want to incorporate in your home at the price point in the stage, in the steps that will work for your life. 

And with a cohesive vision that’s going to help you do a solution here that leads to a solution here that helps you lead to a solution here, then you’re getting into creating your action plan. Incorporating all of your storage solutions into the design package that you hand off to a general contractor also lets you then give them a little, not too much, but a little of your pre-designed thinking of your needs, your lifestyle, your house’s problems, and your taste, and asks them to input some more of their own clever storage ideas. 

And it also just helps you make sure that what you’re getting from them is not just the default, but is specific to you and to your family and to your life. So, for a quick overview of the steps of the applying the master plan method to specifically storage solutions, don’t forget to download my free guide, which you can grab at the show notes page or at midmod-midmas.com/slash storage, and it’ll stay with you and be a good companion to you throughout the rest of this season. I am going to be back next week with more on specifically how to think about the stored objects in your home. 

I’m not going to call them all clutter, but if you feel like they are clutter, like anything you own feels clutter-y, we’ll talk about how to address that. But for the moment, I am still, at the time of this episode airing, in the active process of recording the rest of this season. 

So if there are specific areas of your mid century house where you have a particular storage struggle, this is a great time to reach out to me on social media or to drop an email to Della at midmodest.com and tell me about what you’d like to hear on the rest of this podcast season. That’s all for now. Catch you next time, MidMod Remodelers.

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.

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Continue reading “You don’t need to keep a tub for resale value.”

Yes, You Can Use the Holidays to Plan Your Remodel!

27 min readUse the holidays to focus your remodel plans.

I want you to use your holiday prep time to plan your remodel. 

Okay, Before you tell me, Della, that’s crazy. I can’t plan a remodel right now. The holidays are when I’m busiest.

You’re right. Of course you can’t. You know me. I wouldn’t ask you to make your life harder when it’s already full. But … what if I told you that you could also use this time to focus your remodel planning and make real progress without spending time picking out tile or making phone calls?

Instead, make your future life easier by harnessing all of the satisfactions (and frustrations) that are part of the celebratory times in your house.

Continue reading “Yes, You Can Use the Holidays to Plan Your Remodel!”

The Right Siding for Your Mid-Century House

36 min readAre you considering new siding for your mid-century home? Before you call a contractor or pick a sample, let’s talk about what mid-century siding is and how to make good choices for your house.

During the 80s and 90s, when appreciation for MCM was at a low ebb, too many of our sweet ranches were re-wrapped in narrow strip beige vinyl, covering up their original colors and patterns. 

If you’ve been dealing with that kind of generic cover-up, or if your siding is simply damaged or in poor repair, you might be considering a replacement.

Before you call a contractor or pick a sample, let’s talk about what mid-century siding is and how to make good siding choices for your home. 

find the right color for your mid-century siding
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Loving Your Home is the Real Remodel ROI (with Adrian Kinney)

38 min readAdrian Kinney is back to talk all my latest obsessions – housing history, passive solar and planning YOUR perfect home for a grea remodel ROI. Adrian has joined me on the pod before. He’s a realtor, mid-century modern (MCM) guru and heads up Mid Mod Colorado.

I can pretty much talk all day with any number of my mid mod friends. And Adrian Kinney is definitely in that number! He’s a realtor, mid-century modern (MCM) guru and owns Mid Mod Colorado. Here’s one thing we agree on today: loving your home is a huge part of your real remodel ROI.

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Remodeling Cost Mindset Reset

28 min readLet’s reframe the four financial fallacies that hold most people back from kicking off their remodeling plans.

If you’ve been holding off on home updates because of worries about the remodeling cost, I’m here to shift your mindset.

Let’s tackle the most common budget myths that might be holding you back, and talk about how you can plan a remodel you’ll love with the budget you have.

Any remodeling project comes with costs. And it is often expensive. But often what holds would-be remodelers back are the stories we tell ourselves about money. 

Through my conversations with clients and students, I’ve come to believe there are four common financial fallacies that stop people from improving their homes.

Continue reading “Remodeling Cost Mindset Reset”

How to Fit Your House for a Home Office

26 min readWith so many of us working from home, it’s more than time to chat about how mid-century homes can accommodate modern home office needs.

So, how do you design a functional, charming and stylish home office that fits in to a mid-century-sized house? 

Mid-century homes weren’t originally built with home offices in mind, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a workspace that fits seamlessly into your home’s aesthetic. 

Continue reading “How to Fit Your House for a Home Office”

Adding Insulation to Your Mid-Century House

27 min readIs your house too chilly in winter or too toasty in summer? Let’s explore improving your home’s energy efficiency, without compromising its mid-century charm, by adding insulation.

Mid-century homes weren’t built with modern insulation standards in mind. Many of our homes leak heat in cold climates or let in too much warmth in hot ones. 

The good news is that these homes often have excellent air seals thanks to plaster walls and old-growth materials, which provide a solid foundation for energy improvements.

Easy Wins for Cozy Living

If you’re looking to make your home more comfortable without a major remodel, start with the low-hanging fruit:

  • Attic Insulation: One of the simplest ways to improve energy efficiency.
  • Basement Sealing: Insulating rim joists can make a big difference with minimal effort.
  • Air Sealing: Check around windows, doors, and outlets to prevent drafts.

These are straightforward projects that you can tackle yourself or with professional help.

Continue reading “Adding Insulation to Your Mid-Century House”

Get your parents’ dated mid-century house ready to sell

28 min readAs you get ready to sell your parents’ mid-century home, you may feel pressure to “modernize” before listing. But don’t!

What should you do to get ready to sell a house built in the mid-century era – a house built back in the 1950’s or 60’s?

Should you rip out a tired kitchen? Quickly tear off that old, beat up siding and replace it with some easy care vinyl?

No, please don’t. 

One of the saddest things that can happen to a mid-century house is that the current owners jump into a bunch of unnecessary repair work right before they sell it in the misguided idea that that’s what future owners will want. 

Don’t make un-necessary changes

Instead, let me make your life easier. Do less. Because there is someone out there searching for your parents’ time capsule house. 

Here’s a checklist of how to get the house ready to catch that person’s attention…and then move on with your life. 

Continue reading “Get your parents’ dated mid-century house ready to sell”