Tag: storage solutions

What’s your mid-century storage style?

17 min readBefore you try to start solving any storage problem, I’m going to recommend that you set your storage style. Because of course I am!

Planning new storage solutions might be part of your remodel. But planning some storage improvements does not have to mean taking on a whole remodel. Storage is a great place to make smaller targeted updates as part of your mid-century remodel master plan. DIY-ing a small storage niche or a buying a new piece of storage furniture can easily be a weekend project. 

Your storage style is probably aligned with your mid-century style. Which you may already know if you’ve taken my style quiz. (If you haven’t, click that link and take it now!)

Knowing your storage style will help you decide between open or closed storage, choose vintage or modern pieces or details, and figure out which wood grain and tone will work in your home.

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Being prepared to make these choices upfront allows you to rinse and repeat your way to a house filled with coordinated custom built-ins or helps you hunt down a nicely matching set of vintage furniture to solve your problems instead.

Whether you lean vintage or modern, storage gives you an opportunity to create a cohesive feel through your home. Adding built-ins in a few key places around your house, can yield both better functionality and a “tied-together” feeling of design intention throughout your home.

In an original mid-century home that is at least a notch or two above builder grade, wood elements are often primary features. Hardwood floors, slat walls, paneling and built-ins are often included beyond the kitchen and bathroom. You may have a cute built-in room divider/shelf or built-in dining room storage. Most mid-century modest home have the wood floors and trim, maybe even some paneling, but are often missing those additional features.  

If you lean toward the vintage side, trying to preserve or recreate mid-century original storage solutions is eminently possible. And recreations don’t need to be fancy or expensive. Original mid-century built-ins were often very simple – stained single pieces of wood on metal brackets or simple box frames with partial overlay doors.

Because these pieces were often site-built by local builders or DIY-ed by homeowners using guides from publications like Better Homes & Gardens or Mario Dal Fabbro’s classic book, How to Make Built-In Furniture, they carry an approachable, hands-on charm. And even a novice level DIY-er can build them using those same guides.  

Not a builder? You can hunt down authentic mid-century furniture on social sites, thrift stores or architectural salvage warehouses. 

But what if your style leans a little more modern or mid mod fusion? Storage is a great place to add updated elements to a mid-century house. Whether you are planning to work with a high-end custom cabinet shop or choose a flat-pack system (like IKEA with custom doors from Semihandmade or Plykea), you’ll have a different set of choices. You’ll need to decide on frame style, door style and materials. And I actually covered those choices in Episode 2111. Whether you are choosing kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, mudroom, or basement storage the options are the same…and so are the answers. 

Resources 

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

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Planning new storage solutions for your house doesn’t have to mean a whole remodel. You don’t need to do them all at once either. A little storage niche can be an eminently weekend DIY type project. But before you solve a storage problem, you need to set your storage style. Open or closed, vintage or modern, wood grain or painted. 

Make these choices up front, and then you can rinse and repeat your way to a beautiful house filled with coordinated custom built-ins, or just hunt down a nicely matching, but not actually originally matching, set of vintage furniture to solve your problems instead. 

Today we’re going to talk about the pros and cons of a more vintage preservation style of built-ins or a more modern update style of built-ins that either way should play nicely with any material finishes that already exist in your house. 

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. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2603. 

Before we get into today’s topic, I want to remind you that now is absolutely the right time to get in touch if you are hoping to take on remodel work in 2027. If you want to get it done, or frankly, even really a medium-sized project started next year, we want to start your design process, ASAP. 

And Mid Mod Midwest is already booking out into design starts in 2027. But our process will begin with a conversation. You and I talking about what’s important to you, what’s going on with your house, what worries or roadblocks you’re experiencing, and what matters most to you in your upcoming plans. 

That kind of conversation, we should get it on the books in December. So pop on over to midmod-midwest.com slash work with us to get yourself a time on our calendar so you and I can have that first talk. Okay, uh, what else do I need to remind you of before we dive in on our topic? You’ll probably find it handy to go look at visual examples of the things I’m talking about today, and you can find some of them on our show notes page. 

But also I’ve got a whole guide to mid-century storage solutions, which links out to past episodes, to decluttering advice, to um resources, and to our Pinterest board that I’m continuing to kind of fill in with more specific storage solutions for each of the episodes as I record them. Grab that from the show notes page at midmodest.com/2603. 

Okay. So no matter what, whether you are leaning vintage or leaning modern for the style of your entire house, which should be related to the style of your storage, you want one thing more than anything else, which is consistency. And if you’re going to spring for storage built-in solutions in a few key places around your house, you get not just better places to put away your things and easier access to the objects of your daily life, but a cohesive, tied together feeling of design intention throughout the house. 

In an original mid-century house that was, you know, built above the builder grade, or frankly, even in a builder grade house, you’ll find a commonality, not just in the kitchen and bathroom. You’re gonna find wood grain specifically all over the place. Hardwood floors, wood post and beam structure in some cases, slat walls, wooden panels, and certainly uh wood built-ins in many more places than just kitchen and bathroom. 

You’ll find them in the living room, you’ll find them in the basement, you’ll find them in bedrooms, the trim on the house doors and the doors themselves will probably match or coordinate with the built-ins that you’ll find throughout. As we remodel, as we add layers and layers of detail to a house, that consistency can break down a little bit. 

And one of the big failings of if you sort of are scanning through Zillow and looking at a house, sometimes you’ll see a wipe slate clean flip where everything is painted white and everything has been replaced with sort of cheap Home Depot whatnot. But more often than that, even you’ll just see a bunch of different remodeling projects from a bunch of different eras that don’t really seem to be speaking to each other anymore. 

Now, no matter where you’re starting from, whether you’ve got a time capsule house that you now would like to modernize, but you don’t want your new kitchen, for example, to feel completely foreign to the rest of the house, it could be a really nice easing of that transition to keep some time capsule elements of the house. You don’t need to go through and change every piece of hardware or every swing door in the house. 

But if you put a few of your new built-ins in not just the kitchen, but also in a prominent bathroom, in the living room, at the entryway, you can start to create um a bilingual house, if you will, in terms of style languages that it’s speaking. You’ve got the vintage pieces and you want the new pieces to feel friendly to the old ones, but you can create consistency among all of the new pieces. 

Or conversely, if you’re dealing with a house that has been totally whited out, you’re adding back mid-century vintage or mid-century update adjacent details throughout the house. Again, you want that to appear in more than one spot. So even if what you’re primarily considering is a new kitchen, a new bathroom, you still want to have these things pop out in other places. 

This kind of throws back to the conversation I had with Nathan Hartman, the founder of Kerf Kitchens. If you are not familiar with Kerf Kitchens, there are beautiful end-grain, visible plywood specifically kitchens, but also built-ins for a bunch of different parts of houses. And that was, what would that have been? Episode uh 2308 back in February. If you missed it, it’s a great listen. 

Um, but if you heard it and you are just remembering, one of the things he talked about is that when they do a kitchen for a house, they often bring in just a couple of other places. You know, if you can see the living room from a relatively open planned kitchen, they might also do the entertainment center. Uh, they might do something at the entry of the house. So you don’t sort of come into the house experiencing one design language and then boom, you walk into the kitchen and something else completely different is happening. 

You feel the anticipation, you’re already seeing the pieces of the new kerf design layered into the house in multiple places. All right. So the topic for today’s episode is the vintage versus the modern and how these pieces kind of go together. Uh, and I’ve talked about this before, but I think in the specifically context of focusing on a season of storage solutions, a season of built-ins, if you will, that distinction is going to be really important. 

If you lean towards the vintage, if you’re trying to preserve and expand upon your mid-century original storage solutions, the most important thing, or if you’re trying to rebuild them from scratch, if you’re trying to recreate them in a sort of a preservationist manner, the most important thing to remember is that it does not need to be fancy or expensive. Often these are very simple. It’s a stained single piece of wood shelf on a metal bracket mounted on one of those vertical tack strips put onto the wall. Or it is a very simple box frame with partial overlay door. 

The trade-off, though, in a relatively simple vintage style, is that it is more highly crafted, might require more of your effort because it’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to be able to get from every cabinet shop. It’s certainly not the thing sort of thing you’re going to be able to get from your big box store. But that at the same time means it, even though it’s a thing that you kind of need to DIY, it is a thing you can DIY. 

And frankly, to do it yourself, to build it yourself, was part of the philosophy of these original homes. They usually came with a kitchen and with a bathroom built in, but often with an unfinished basement, or the idea that you would add on a rec room in addition off the back of the house. And that might be done by a builder locally, or it might be finished out by the owner of the home. But if you look at the publications from the day, the uh the Better Homes and Gardens, or the Popular Mechanics, there are all of these how-to manual advice pieces talking you through the process of creating your own built-ins. 

And there is absolutely nothing stopping us from taking that on for ourselves today. When I’m trying to identify the era of a built-in, there are a couple of signs that talk to me about it being an early mid-century, a mid-mid-century, or an 80s remodel, 90s remodel kind of a kitchen. I was just on site doing a field measure and site visit for a new master plan client earlier this week, and we were trying to determine without any permit data the build date of various built-ins throughout the house. 

The kitchen, we decided was almost certainly an 80s remodel. I kitchens are a little bit harder to date given style language, so it could have, could have even tipped into the 90s or it could have been 70s, but when we went into the bathroom, I was pretty sure the kitchen and bathroom were done at the same time. The bathroom was 80s as all. Get out, right down to the sort of beige uh tile, grouted tile countertop. Yikes. 

Um, but one thing, even though the cabinet doors were a partial overlay with an exposed hinge, which could even be a 60s style, the drawers had uh metal track roller pullouts. And that kind of hardware was not as common in the mid-century era. We went into the basement, and the basement entertainment center struck me as much more likely to be either original to the house or part of a first pass finished the basement project undertaken by the original owners before the end of the 1960s. 

And I could see when I opened up again, the drawers are kind of your telltale. A modern cabinet drawer is probably wrapped MDF or a sort of a or either wrapped in white o

r wrapped in a light sort of pine-ish finish. Um, but it’s multi-density, medium density fiberboard underneath. Um for a more 80s vintage, you’re probably gonna see uh a plywood or a solid wood door uh drawer sort of side panel, but it will be on a metal slider. 

Um for the 60s one, it was a relatively simple box frame drawer, but there was there was squeaking. I could hear metal on metal squeaking. So there was some kind of, it wasn’t a roller device, but it was like there was some kind of metal underneath it. And then for a 1950s door, uh drawer in a 1952 house, it’s just a wooden box jammed in a wooden hole. But like that’s that’s the drawer hardware. This is one of the reasons it becomes a little hard to pull them in and out. They don’t soft close, Lord knows. Um, and it’s one of the reasons people end up replacing mid-century built-ins because the drawers are kind of sticky. 

But anyway, um one of my favorite references for the kind of partial DIY nature, even though it may have been built by the homeowner or it may have been built by go by site built by a local builder, it was probably not built in a cabinet shop. If you’re looking with a 1950s built-in install for storage in your kitchen, in your bathroom, in your entertainment unit, anywhere, um, is this lovely book, How to Make Built-in Furniture by Mario Dal Fabbro. My personal copy, ironically, although the book was originally pug published in 1952, 1955, I beg your pardon. Um, my copy was published in Great Britain in 1962, a repr a reprint. Um, and was in the Kincardineshire County Library. Angus and Kincardineshire. I’m probably not pronouncing that right. 

Um, anyway, and then it made its way to me through modern book reselling properties. But you can find resale copies of this book. You can also find a scanned version of it online, I believe, in the USmodernist.org archive. I’ll look that up and see if I can find you a link to it. But in the foreword, Mario Dal Fabbro himself writes, Built-in furniture is becoming more and more the mark of a modern interior. The old method of dividing the living area by wall partitions is gradually giving way to the practice of leaving the area open and permitting the occupant to adapt the space to his own needs in accordance with his own taste. 

Thanks to built-ins, a room can have its own individual design, free of the monotonous uniformity of mass production furniture. Um it’s funny that they think that buying furniture is not putting personality into your house, but building built-ins is. Anyway, aside from these aesthetic considerations, built-ins can achieve real space economies by either utilizing wall recesses, attics, or the space beneath a sloping ceiling, or by making full use of a wall area from the floor to the ceiling and side to side. 

And then this book goes on to contain pretty helpful introduction to measuring, to purchasing wood, to finishing, to hardware, to anchoring and installing pieces, and then designs for bookshelves, for a bunch of different configurations, for desks, for radio cabinets, for wall-hung storage units, for radiator enclosures, for serving hatch from the kitchen to the living room, for a telephone shelf, built-in benches you can sit on, breakfast bars, um, a bunch of different ways to cleverly add storage to your attic, to your basement, to your garage, and eventually like an entire kitchen, um, island breakfast bar, storage wall, and bath cabinets. 

So you could you could do the built-in furniture for an entire house from the pages of this book, and it’s it’s beautiful, clear, lovely illustrations. I’ll put a couple of photos of it on the the show notes page. The thing that you will see over and over and over again in these vintage styles is um simple pieces of wood. It’s plywood and it is um lumberyard boards, it is exposing edges, there’s very little sort of decorative trim, um, it’s very simple construction, there’s not a lot of complicated hardware necessary, it’s just screws and cleats and hinges, uh, and it’s it’s very basic. 

Now, if you’re starting from scratch, if you’re building new built-in storage for your mid-century house, kind of whether you’re going vintage or mid-century in style, there’s a lot more commonality between a low, a low-cost DIY version and a high super custom solution than there is of the middle ground. Um, because mid-century original cabinets were often site-built by the contractor who built the rest of the house, not built, as I said, in a shop with boxes installed in the house as separate units, the way cabinets are now. 

And what that means is that while a high-end or just a philosophically creative custom cabinet shop can match you detail for detail on some of the things you’ll find in your mid-century original house or in someone else’s, if you’re going for a more price-conscious middle-of-the-line supplier that starts from pre-made box units, like you would find at a big box store, or flat pack like you’d find at IKEA. That system is going to depend more on predetermined regular units and have less room for creative flexibility for clever storage niches into that last available inch of space, as Mario Dal Fabbro was talking about, of like getting into the cavities of the house. 

They’re going to be a little bit more stack along the edges of the space. Now, this is not the end of the world. There is plenty of good design to be found in flat pack IKEA kitchens. Um, IKEA themselves has a nice line of walnut doors, or you can go with a semi-custom door and drawer replacement, like the kind supplied by uh semi-handmade or plaikia. It does mean that if you’re not willing or able with your own skill and available time to follow the advice in a mid-century built-in design guide, or to get a truly custom mid-century uh anchored built-in setup done by a high-end custom cabinet shop, you are going to be doing something a little bit more regular looking, a little bit more a little bit more related to the style of the person that’s selling it to you, and a little bit less related to the style of your house. 

One way or another, you will recognize that you’re being shown something, or you get to choose between options that are going to go towards the cabinet box type, which basically means does it or doesn’t it not have a face frame? You can have a European style or a traditional style. The European is just the edges of something. A traditional is the four outside edges of something, and then a front piece with a hole in it that then has a door or a drawer over it. And this will definitely affect how sort of tied in, how built-in the built-ins feel. Or I suppose you can have no framing whatsoever. You can just have shelves mounted on a wall, and that is also, if done right, a classic mid-century style. Um, either can be correct for mid-century style, the European or the traditional. Similarly, you’ve got options for door type. 

If you’re going full vintage, you’re gonna choose a partial overlay door with like a browdered curved edge, not a curve in the, it won’t, this will still be a rectangle, but the edge profile of the door will be lightly curved. Uh for a much more modern, much more contemporary look, you’ll go with a full overlay door. That’s just a simple, each door and drawer front is a full square-edged uh prism. And then you’re gonna be thinking about what is it made of? Are you looking at wood grain? What is the veneer type? Again, for all of this, I’m gonna point you towards an episode I’ve done in the past on mid-century kitchen cabinets, but this applies to all of your built-ins everywhere. And that is episode uh, let’s see, 2111 from June of 2025. 

Now, what are your storage options if you are not solving your storage problems with built-ins? I said in the very first episode of this season that you don’t have to have built-ins to solve storage problems, and you don’t. Um, this is where I have so much more affection for the simple builder grade storage solutions or the cheap furniture solutions of the mid-century era than I do for the less expensive and easier to access storage solutions of today. 

Back in the mid-century, it was pretty easy to go to the lumber yard and get some of those triangular shelf brackets with little vertical mounting strips and some astonishingly dense grained, high-quality random board lumber and fill one of those blank empty closets with very effective storage or line your basement with very effective storage. There is still nothing stopping us from doing that today. The boards are a little more fast growth, a little less densely grained, but those triangular mounting clips and brackets are still around. 

But today, much more often when we need storage, I think it’s the default to assume we’ll just run down to Target and grab one of those flat pack knock-together little cheap storage six square, eight square opening MDF stacking storage unit things. Um, maybe a collection of brightly colored fabric boxes to put your objects into. And there’s nothing wrong with that conceptually, but what it actually means is you’re bringing a whole bunch of wood glue and formaldehyde or similarly disgusting off-gassing chemicals into your home. 

And those little flat pack units made out of MDF are heavy as hell, hard to repurpose, and rapidly go from looking relatively fresh and tidy to pretty beat up, dirt, dirty, and cheap. They’re not repairable, they’re not reusable, and for anyone who’s ever depended on them in an apartment life through several moves, know that they do not survive more than two moves before they get wobbly and never stop wobbling. In my opinion, therefore, a far more successful approach to furniture solutions for your mid-century storage would be to go hunting on Facebook Marketplace for an authentic piece of mid-century furniture, which, yeah, might have a little plywood in it, but no MDF. That’s medium density fiberboard if you’re not familiar. And it will survive many moves and be pretty with its veneer covering while it stores your stuff in drawers. 

Um speaking of, though, those uh triangle bracket and shelf versions, uh, one piece of advice I have if you are paying attention to your neighborhood, if you ever see a neighbor cleaning out their old basement storage shelves or something else and dumping a bunch of old wood on the curb for trash, pick it up, take it home. That is good, solid, strong wood. You will not find in the same quality at the same species at a lumber yard today. Best quality you can find without demolishing a Victorian house, basically.

I know I just did an episode on decluttering, and you know what? In it, I confess that I am a hoarder of potential project supplies, but I am strongly gonna recommend that if you ever see anybody trying to put into a landfill simple pine storage shelves from the 1950s or 60s, uh that stuff is practically bomb blast proof and you should salvage it. Okay. 

So whether you choose to try to match or at least coordinate as much as possible with uh any vintage original built-ins in your house, or whether you choose to distinctly make a difference, to do something clearly modern, like for example, apply Kia kitchen and apply Kia entry storage unit and apply Kia um bathroom, and then the rest of your house has its original mid-century doors and a few built-in walls, shelves, and things. That can be a lovely contrast. 

There is not a right or a wrong way to do this. There are pros and cons to both approaches, and I think it’s just gonna end up depending mostly on your style guide. If you have not yet done the work to set up your style guide for your whole house remodel, then I recommend A that you take a mid-century master plan whole house approach to this process, or at least B, you run yourself through the style guide system. 

I’ve got a very affordably priced class that walks you through that process within sort of a two-hour time window that you can find on my courses page. I’ll link to that in the show notes. It’s the more than a mood board course because you need more than just a mood board to really plan an excellent remodel. And I know that you can. Um, but yeah, setting up the style guide, knowing what kind of wood grain or paint, painted wood can be possible, but I would recommend wood grain for your new storage solution built-ins, or that you’re going to be hunting down. 

If you’re sourcing vintage furniture on Facebook Marketplace, you’re looking for a lighter warm stain rather than a darker one. And when that pops up, you will drop in the car and drive for at least an hour to go pick those up. You’re looking for um pieces that have a certain type of hardware, a certain kind of metal. These consistent details. 

Or if you’re working with a local cabinet shop to create built-in solutions, they’re all going to be face frame, or they’re all going to be uh European frame. You’re going to have some clear commonalities that come up again and again and again. And then you just rinse-repeat your details as you create more and more better storage areas throughout your house. 

One way or another, every other area that I’m about to talk about in the following episodes should end up. It won’t look the same because what you need for access for visibility, for places to sit down versus places to put things away, in an entry hall versus a bedroom closet are not the same, despite the fact that in a builder grade house, the hall closet and the bedroom closet will look exactly the same. 

If you’re gonna go to the trouble to doing a custom built-in, they should be different, but they should be made out of the same materials in the same way. That’s not surprisingly the most important element of all of this. So I’m gonna point you towards the reference Pinterest board, towards the links I’m gonna drop in the show notes page today. 

You can find all of that at midmodest.com slash 2603. And I’ll be back next week with specific storage solution advice for…we’ll probably start with the front door for your entry area. So catch you next week, mid mod remodeler. See you then.

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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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.

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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.

Mudrooms, Mudrooms and More Mudrooms

46 min readWe love our mid-century houses for many reasons – their enduring design, clean lines and great indoor/outdoor connections. But MANY mid-century homes, both modest and high end, share one glaring omission. They lack a proper mudroom. 

Good mudrooms are unfortunately rare in mid-century houses.

The process of leaving home and coming back has apparently gotten more complex since the mid-century era because … we have mudroom needs that time capsule houses just can’t meet.

Most of my clients come to me with homes that lack a transition zone that takes you from the sidewalk or garage into the house.

You probably do too. Even if you have a mudroom, it may benefit from an overhaul. So today, let’s take a tour of several past projects that need mudroom improvement.

By the way, this post has a companion post. Make sure you check out: How to plan a great Breezeway to Mudroom Conversion

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Bedroom Storage Secrets

19 min readLooking for clever bedroom storage solutions designed to fit into to your (modest) mid-century bedroom? These bedroom storage secrets will help you create a mid mod inspired space that meets your modern storage needs.

Bedroom storage in mid-century homes leaves a lot to be desired!

So how can you and your mid century bedroom have at all? Is it even possible to make a space with ample bedroom storage, peaceful sleeping area, de facto, laundry folding station, and maybe a little work from home spot too?

Continue reading “Bedroom Storage Secrets”