Who is your Master Plan for?

37 min readYour master plan is for you!

A Mid-Century Master Plan is more than a set of pretty drawings—it’s both a process and a document. Today, we’re talking about how to use that document to navigate your remodel, from getting bids from contractors to working with the city.

Ultimately, a master plan is for you, the person who will live with the finished home, and you should curate it to be exactly what you need. But, ideally, you will share pieces of your plan with various pros along the way to ensure understanding, meet permitting requirements and illustrate your vision for your remodel.

Who sees your Master Plan Document?

You may be the only person who ever sees your master plan in its entirety and that is okay!

As long as it helps you get to the finished remodel you hoped for your master plan has served its purpose.

This is especially likely if you are a heavy DIY-er or plan to manage a series of subcontractors yourself.

What is contained in a Master Plan

A master plan includes lots of information.

It’s not just a floor plan. (Although you DO need a floor plan.)

It’s also a collection of material examples and style information.

In the Mid-Century Master Plan packages we design for our clients, we always create perspective sketches for clients and you may creates some for yourself or even just snap some photos of the space and add notes. These are a way to understand the three dimensionality of the space.

If plan to hire a general contractor, that person (or a number of people within the firm) may want or need to scan pretty much your whole master plan through the course of your remodel.

In this scenario, you are getting on the same page by going through the big picture first.

From that big picture, your contractor can make recommendations on phasing the work. As you agree on the scope and a schedule, you can share more detail for the areas you’ll be addressing. You want to make sure that your project manager or contractor really gets it. And that they are seeing what you’ve got in your mind – that you have a shared vision.

Once you are ready to begin, you will probably need to share some of the pieces with of your master plan with you local permitting office. These pros will ask for certain specific information. They usually need a floor plan, maybe a sketch and information about materials. They may even have a checklist or form letting you know exactly what you’ll need to share.

But als the project goes on, you are the one that is going to refer back to the master plan package again and again. You’ll share and curate the information for other people based on what they need to know and when.

Your master plan will also come in handy when you’re selecting materials, fixtures and finishes. It will serve as a reference for you as you search and for vendors as you work with them to purchase the right elements for your project.

And at the end of the day the product … and the process, will mean you have a

Quick design tip for…framing

The standard length measurement in mid-century homes is eight feet and we usually have eight foot ceilings in these houses. The 8-foot ceiling is directly related to the 4×8 foot standard sheet dimension for materials like drywall and plywood. While you’re unlikely to find other standard grid elements in a builder-grade mid-century home, you will almost always find that there are 8 feet between your floor and your ceiling.

Now, there are exceptions! In fact, I’m just finishing up design for a house where the ceilings are all 8’3”. So, you should definitely confirm the ceiling heights in your home. 

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

A mid-century master plan is both a process and a document. Over the course of your remodel, that document will help you do everything from show a friend what you’ve got in mind, to secure Accurate Bids from several contractors, to share in a showroom, to get three perfect options instead of staying up at night scrolling every single option on the internet.

But ultimately, the master plan, process and document is for you. You are the person who will live with it. Know every part of it and curate it to be exactly what you need. Today on the podcast, let’s talk about how and when you share different parts of your remodel plans and how ultimately your master plan will keep you on track, moving efficiently towards the mid-century, renovation of your dreams.

Hey there. Welcome back to mid modern model. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2203 last week, when I was talking about measurement quirks that relate to mid-century houses. I talked about two by fours and how they are not, in fact, two inches by four.

And today I want to actually talk about a different standard measurement, which comes into play on the length of a two by four, which means that I am literally, physically unable to not tell you my favorite joke about two by fours, which goes a little like this.

A fellow walks into a lumberyard and says to the guy in the store, I need some four by twos. You mean two by fours? Just a minute? He says, I’ll find out. And he goes back to the parking lot where his buddies are waiting in the car. They roll down the window. He confers. And he comes back into the parking lot and says, Yes, I mean two by fours. Lumber yard. Guy says, How long do you want him? Just a minute. The fellow says, I’ll find out. And he goes back across the parking lot to confer with people in the car. He comes back into the lumber yard and says, a long time we’re building a house. There you go.

But how long he actually wants them to be is probably eight feet. This depends a little bit on whether we’re balloon framing and whether it’s the two, two story house or one story. But really, the standard length measurement in mid-century homes is eight feet. We have eight foot ceilings in these houses. I’m always really curious when I find something that’s different. In fact, it’s such a standard, it’s almost assumed, although it is a measurement that I take when I’m doing a field measure, it’s a measurement you should take just to confirm that you have an eight foot ceiling in your house, because it occasionally is different.

I’m just finishing up a design project right now for a house where all of the ceilings are eight foot three I cannot begin to imagine why. That seems unhinged to me. Were they all cut specifically to an eight foot three dimension? What was the request of the original homeowner? Did the builder do that himself for no particular reason, like, what? What on earth? What would possess someone to chop their ceiling height, to set their stud height at such an unusual amount?

Perhaps a mistake? Who knows? But eight foot ceilings are absolutely a standard in the industry, and we don’t. We don’t build our houses on a strict module. In this country, I think it’s much more common to use more grid, orientation and design. In Europe, for example, they do a lot on the one meter grid. We don’t do as much with building, our floor plans, our layouts, our wall elevations on a grid, there’s a lot of odd measurements that just sort of exist in a house, but the four foot by eight foot sheet dimension is pretty rock solid.

Standard dry wall sheet rock comes in four by eight sheets. Plywood comes in four by eight sheets. Now sometimes four by 10, four by 12. You know there are options, but nine times out of 10, if you’re picking up a piece of sheet material, it’s going to be four foot by eight foot. I wanted to do a little bit of research and tell you definitively why that is the case. Is part of the measurement fact of this episode, and I actually what I’m going to tell you is that I don’t think I am going to be able to give you a definitive why on this, I found a couple of websites that suggested maybe it had to do with the minimum dimensions of box cars for shipping in the early 20th century.

A little more digging very little more indicated that that is not true. I don’t think it has to do with the standard size of a truck bed, although perhaps it does more than anything. I think it’s just a nice round number that people got used to specifying. But the way that it applies to a mid-century house is that you are almost always going to find that there are eight feet between your floor and your ceiling.

So it’s an interesting thing to notice if there are repeatable grids, measurements, dimensions going on in your house. You’re very likely to find that you have that eight foot height happening in your house. In my experience, you’re unlikely to identify any other standard Grid Elements. Mid-century houses, the way that people were thinking about building them in that era was generally about eking out every square in. Not about fitting a gracious, simple, repeatable grid.

One exception might be Frank Lloyd Wright’s approach to certain Usonian houses. He did love to use a standard module in his homes, in fact, to the point of sometimes etching it into the concrete of his heated floors, they often have a four foot by four foot grid scored into them, and you can see that the House follows that module, which he was clearly working from plan on.

But in a mid-century builder grade house, you’re much less likely to find that, if your house is slightly more gracious, perhaps architect designed, you are more likely to find a four foot or an eight foot grid in a post and beam house. So this can be an interesting thing. If you are fortunate enough to live in something designed Eichler Cliff may something of that nature, you may find more grid based elements coming to play.

If you live in a standard stick framed two by four based Ranch, you’re much less likely to find grids all around you, although that four foot by eight foot sheet material is going to lurk. And speaking of two by fours, I should cite that joke, which I have had floating around in my head, sort of banging into the walls occasionally since I was a kid when I first heard it in Annie Dillard’s and American childhood. It’s a really lovely memoir of her childhood growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 60s.

If you’re ever looking for that, honestly, I have not in my life to this point ever identified it as a mid-century book, but it is kind of a history of experiencing the mid-century firsthand as a child. It’s also beautiful prose, most of it is not silly, corny jokes. Anyway, one more item of business before we get into our topic of extolling the benefits of master plans, which was just to say that I’ve been warning you for a couple of weeks that there will come a point at the end of summer, as we shift into fall, when we suddenly get flooded with new clients coming in.

We are still looking for our next up master plan. We still have, actually a tiny hole in our schedule, but in the last week, seven days, we’ve had six people reach out to schedule a call to start the process of a master plan, or at least to find out more about it. Remember clicking the Apply to work with us button on our website is not a firm commitment to anything. It’s the beginning of a conversation about whether a master plan is right for you, for your house, and whether now is the right time to get started.

Please don’t take the fact that we’re getting a bunch of calls right now as a reason to not reach out to us at the moment and start your master plan process. In fact, I mean the opposite. Now is the right time before the school year picks up, before even more people start to feel the pressure or the inspiration of fall kicking in, now is the time to get the conversation started, to get the ball rolling, to get your name onto our design queue so that we can tackle your design project and help you plan a perfect master plan for your house this Fall.

Without further ado, let’s get into the topic of exactly how you might use a master plan approach in your house, whether you’re creating one entirely by yourself, whether you are following the process I teach inside of our ready to remodel program, or whether you are hiring mid mom Midwest to create a master plan for you to continue to develop. However your master plan process develops. Having a master plan document in hand is going to infinitely simplify your renovation, make it more specific to you, more detailed, more well thought out, more long lasting. It’s going to be to your benefit.

If you want to grab any of the transcript, any references I’m making here, if you want to reach out and start working with us immediately. You can always find the show notes for this episode at mid mod midwest.com/ 2203

So I spent all of July giving you my very favorite, my most essential, curated episodes on the process of a master plan and how each individual step, dream, discover, distill draft and develop, set you up for success and give you the ability to plan a remodel that is more tailored, more timeless and more timely, moving faster, making more concise and decisive decisions than if you didn’t take the time to follow those steps.

And now, just after just two episodes, another topic, I’m back to talking about master plans again, because I had another point to make. I’m never not talking about master plans, actually, but I’m gonna go back to a recent Office Hours question, and actually, spoiler alert, this season, you’re gonna get a handful of podcast episodes that are based on some of the really excellent ready to remodel student questions that I’ve been getting on recent Office Hours calls this summer.

It feels like every question we’re getting is either very fun and specific, that we can just answer it and move that client forward on their personal decision tree. Or it’s a wonderful universal question that gets to the philosophy, the sort of core meaning of what it is to make good choices for your home. So this was a very specific question. A homeowner was worried about their individual process and wanted a question answered. And I immediately jumped from the specific to the general, because, hey, that’s what I always do. So she asked if I’m completing my master plan in pieces.

The project is drawn as a whole package, but I’m tackling it in sections. So should the whole Master Plan package be reviewed with the county and the contractor? Will a permit be pulled for my whole plan or the sections? So this, when I read this, I instantly knew that I could give her an easy answer that would set her mind at rest.

And the short version is that the big picture of the master plan is for you, but you’ll actually want to curate how much of it you share with others at various stages. And that means both, no, you will not show all the plans you have for your whole house for the future, to the county. When you’re pulling a permit, you will show them the exact components of the plan that you’re going to tackle next, so that they can get you a permit just for the work that you’re about to complete.

And for contractors, the answer is going to depend on how comprehensive is your relationship with that contractor. If you are connecting with someone you hope will be your go to handyman or your comprehensive general contractor over a number of phases, you probably do want to loop them in on your big picture plans.

But you’ll focus most on what’s going to happen right away, because your whole master plan is for you, and the pieces of it that you communicate outwards are always going to be curated to the needs and interest and attention span of the person you’re talking to, which is not to say that on a human to human connection level, the people that you work with at the building permit desk or the contractors or even the sales folk that you talk to in a tile shop or a lighting store aren’t interested potentially in everything you’re doing, but on the day, they are trying to do their job, and you’re going to give them just the exact piece of information that is necessary for that job.

So that’s the short, short answer, and I would say maybe getting in a little bit deeper on each of those two parts, permit office versus contractors. When you’re talking to the building department, you are only ever going to get permits for the next completable body of work that you want to have on the books.

Why? Because that way you can complete your permit quickly. You don’t want to leave them open, and in some cases, there are penalties for leaving them open for too long, and also, because permits are about the right now planning you want to take them out for work you know you’ll do and that you’ll know you’ll do right now.

And because your municipal permit office, however large or small it is, I can almost guarantee without knowing anything else about them, is super strained and understaffed and doesn’t have the time to focus on or approve more than the clearly stated minimum of what you’re trying to do right now. A light exception to that might be there can be a really helpful type of interaction with the building permit office, particularly if you are a bit more of a DIY homeowner, if you are a deep DIY planner, sometimes there’s benefit when you’re almost ready to get to the permit stage, to just take what you have down to the desk.

I might call ahead and ask if there’s a not busy time of day, and walk them through, I wouldn’t say, everything you’ve ever planned to do, your entire Master Plan goals, but a slightly bigger picture of what you’ve got in mind than you might be pulling a permit for right now and get their perspective on how much is appropriate to bite off.

They can’t tell you how much you’re going to get done in a month or a year, but they can have a sense of the connected pieces that when that inspector comes out to see how the work is going, they’re going to want to see the various connected pieces. What is that silly song? The knee bone is connected to the leg bone. I don’t even think that’s how it goes. But you want enough pieces connected so that you can actually get comprehensive approval for what you’re trying to do.

What you certainly don’t want to do is Micro Focus, what you’re asking for permission to do so small that the inspector comes to your house once the work is well underway and is surprised by what’s next to the piece you ask them to look at. That’s always a bad thing to have happen. So you’re not trying to keep the building permit office in the dark by showing them less than your entire master plan, but you are trying to use their attention politely, advisedly, not take up too much their time with things that are not on your this year to do list.

Now for contractors like I say, this is going to depend on a couple of things. In some cases, it’s a good idea to start from the big picture with a general contractor, so that they understand what you have in mind. To say that this is phase one. And there will be Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise phase two next year and phase three, five years from now. But this is what you hope to take on right now.

Now, this I’m going to get into later in the episode. But part of the reason to say that is because a contractor, maybe even more specifically and helpfully than a building permit official, might tell you, you know, I would really recommend doing these two parts together. I think we can get the same crew out to site and do them at the same time. I think it will pay off in the long run to bundle these projects. I think we’re going to open up this wall once for this project and once again for the next project. Let’s do them at the same time.

They may also have insight into the proper order to do things if you don’t have other insight yourself, if you don’t have experience, if you don’t have a designer working with you, telling you that you probably want to lock in your choices on the main floor before you fully finish and polish up your basement ceiling, a contractor can give you that advice. They can say, Look, if your plan is to do a full sort of living room style finish in the basement and then move the kitchen and bathroom to opposite locations right above them.

You are going to need to get into the ceiling of that basement to check on some of that plumbing work, and you’re going to undo all the nice work you did last year in your next year project. So it’s a better idea to leave that ceiling unfinished, or even not to worry about finishing the basement until all of your upstairs plumbing and electrical work is done and all drops and lines and structure have been verified.

So that’s a case when it’s better to give the big picture to the contractor first. But then as you get into what’s about to take on, you’re going to narrow your focus to the next steps of the project. This is also a place where it’s really a good idea to be mindful of the information style and preferences of your contractor. And some of them are going to be self-aware enough to tell you exactly what they would like to know, ask you, maybe with a checklist or even a form when you get in touch with them, how much of a project you’re taking on and what kind of information they’d like to have about it.

Some people are not as self-aware, but they you know, if you are starting to explain with wavy hands and many, many pages of documentation, everything you’ve ever thought of, every thought that you had along the way, along your master plan process, to your contractor, and you’re watching their eyes glaze over, or them subtly check their phone for The time, then they might not be a person who’s taking on board as much information as you have to share, so you focus and limit yourself. For other people, the best way for them to process is to know everything.

Take me, for example. I really like to know as much about a project before I get into the design of it as I can. This is my neuro spiciness. This is my beliefs and philosophies around being a designer. I want to know how you’re planning to live in the house. I want to know what your favorite colors are. I want to see examples of houses where you’ve lived before if you’ve got kitchen layout troubles in your current house.

I’d like to know about the college dorm room communal kitchen that really worked great for four independent adults to hang out in, and now you wish you could host just like that. I want this backstory to me. This is useful or for yourself, this house, this remodel, is probably your obsession. If you’re listening to this podcast and dreaming up your future perfect home, you have an almost unlimited interest in how in every detail of the project.

Again, your master plan is for you, and so the comprehensiveness of the master plan is for you, but for a general contractor, depending on what’s going on in their life that day, depending on how they view a project, they might not want to know how you got to your answers. They might want to just see the answer. You might not need to show your work, or they might want to see only certain parts of it. They might want to just see the floor plan.

I would recommend again, we have the various deliverables of a master plan. It’s not just a floor plan. It has material examples. It has some, perhaps some views when I create a master plan for my clients. It has perspective sketches. It also has style guide components. Some of those things are good to flash along with the floor plan. But while the process of the master plan is for you, a lot of the outcomes are the most part you’re going to share with other people, and you’re going to show more or less of the outcome. You’re going to focus how much you share of your deliverables, your final answers, depending on how much people are taking in.

At the end of the day, you are the guardian of the master plan, and so it’s important to make sure that everyone has access to your shared vision, and then for you to monitor along the way, and to listen to what you’re getting back from people, and to see any sort of response information they’re giving to you, and make sure that they are capturing what they’re picking up, what you’re putting down, basically.

So I wanted to, yeah, I saw this question in my intake form as I was preparing for that month’s Office Hours call, and I just knew, I knew instantly it was going to be a podcast, because it I had so. Many things to say about it. I want to actually step back from who your master plan is for beyond the concept of your master plan is for you, ultimately, and talk about a quick overview of what the master plan can be, what it is, what it must contain, and what it can contain.

So if you’re looking for a comprehensive explanation of the many uses, usefulnesses of a master plan, I did a little spin through them back in 2021 applied specifically to the kitchen, and that was one of the past episodes featured in last month’s let’s review series. If you want to listen to it, it’s episode 506, but I think it was also from the first of the four let’s review feature episodes.

Now I talked about a bunch of different ways that a master plan can be helpful to you, that it can be good your master plan can be for you to stay on track, for You to expand and refine your ideas, for you to get feedback from other people, for you to tell other people what’s happening. So in a little more detail, in your own process, in your own planning, the purpose of a master plan, even if it had no deliverables, even if there was no final outcome, although, of course, that’s a big part of its value, just following the steps keeps you on track, helps you stay motivated, gives you a clear system to follow, so you’re not just thinking, Oh, my God, I want to remodel my house.

Am I picking fabrics, or am I examining structure, or am I looking at my bank account? Or, you know, we will go in the right order, and that will make a big, overwhelming project feel plausible, possible. I don’t want to say it’ll make it feel easy, but it will make it feel easier. And by getting all of the raw materials of your design lined up, you can solve the right problems, the problems you actually care about the most, the right way, and you can expand and refine your ideas continuously for however long your process lasts, and this is something I’ve talked about many times in the past.

If you have a weekend before you’re starting on your remodel, you can follow the Master Plan process in microcosm and get a little bit of benefit out of it. If you’ve got a week, if you’ve got a month, if you’ve got two months, before you really wanted to be getting in touch, finalizing a contract, before you even wanted to be reaching out and finding out about feasibility, however much time you have using it to follow the five steps, the five ds of the master plan process will benefit you.

But once it starts to exist, once you start to and you know, as I said in the last of the last review episodes, you’re going to continuously develop it. But once you start to have some ideas baking, you can now use the physical outcomes, the Floor Plan sketches, the views you’ve created, either with a 3d modeling program, or with chicken scratch drawings, or with a model you made out of popsicle sticks, or by layering taking a photo of the house and layering different elements over it using PowerPoint. All perfectly valid options, by the way, you can share that with other people to get their input and opinions.

Ultimately, again, your master plan is for you. No one is a better judge of what’s important to you. No one is a better judge of what is ultimately going to matter to the most, what you like the most than you are. But it can really help to have someone to bounce your ideas off of so you can share your plans as they develop with friends and family, out of a sense of like, here’s what’s going on with me, isn’t it cool? Or if they have expertise, if they’re more experienced DIY-ers, if they’ve been homeowners for longer, if they are mid-century friends, particularly, getting their opinion, factoring it into your mix, you can also get opinion and buy in and validation from experts.

So this might look like checking in with a building inspector, getting a particular subcontractor or a range of them through the house, to look at systems, to look at your HVAC systems, to look at your windows, to work with product suppliers as you go along, if that’s your style, to sort of lock in what’s possible before you’re making final purchases and installing them, so that you can continuously refine and develop the build ability, the practicality of your master plan. One of the experts you might get opinions from is me.

When my students ask questions about their specific projects, they often show up to an architect Office Hours call with a sort of a mini master plan, document focused on the specific area they’re asking a question about. And that document they bring to the meeting or share in advance might have any of the following in it, floor plans or 3d models. Those floor plans might be hand drawn. Often, people will give me like a. So if we’re talking about a space that’s going to have built ins in it, they’ll give me like the IKEA kitchen Viewer program is a 3d model, or they’ll have had someone put together a sketch up model, or they’ll have made one themselves.

So any kind of way to understand the three dimensionality of the space photos of the existing space photos, or images of things you wish it was like, and then often mockups. So this might, again, people regularly use PowerPoint for this, and that is perfectly fine. In fact, I think it’s great if whatever the program that you use in your daily life, in your business life, or used most commonly when you were in school, you can drop everything you’re doing into a Word document. You can put it all into a PowerPoint. You can put it all into any number of online sort of visualization, Mind Mapping software that exist for myself. I tend to default to the Adobe Creative Suite.

So I often put things together in InDesign, but you could also do that online with a sort of new digital equivalent in Canva, any of these programs, it doesn’t matter which one, allow you to sort of layer together a bunch of different pieces types of information about what you’ve got in mind so that you can share them with others and then get more information. So people will say, Oh, by the way, the last thing is plans, photos of the space, photos of your ideas, mockups and then versions this versus this, or three different ideas.

As I’ve said many times on the podcast before, I’m a big fan when I’m showing ideas finished master plan designs in the solutions package document to my clients, I like to give them three options, because it really lets us rule things in and out. Kind of do a heat map of our ideas and preferences and how we like it. And while I can come up with all the things that I think are the best outcomes for my clients, based on all the high level of information I’ve gleaned from them, ultimately, when I’m talking to you about your house and showing you the options the master plan is for you, and the preferences that you have are going to come from you, maybe from you and your spouse.

Sure, there will be compromise there, but from you, not from me. I’m showing you what you could do, and you’re deciding what you want. Then we get back to you know, once it’s almost done, you will share some of the documents of a master plan with the building department, the basic information that you need, and this is a great point too, where you can share it along the way. I said at the top building officials, inspectors, the permit office, folks are busy. They are understaffed and over committed, so don’t trade on their goodwill too much. But they’re also, I have found generally, to be really good folks.

If you live in a city like Seattle or Chicago, you’re unlikely to get a lot of one on one face time with anyone at the building office. But here in Madison, it’s I’ve found as a homeowner myself and I’ve had my clients and friends be able to just go down to the building department office and say, here’s what I’m planning to do. What pieces of information do you need from me in order to get a building permit? What’s the level of detail you need in a plan? Oh, also a building section. What is a building section? Oh, okay, so you want to see what’s in the walls and what’s in the roof, and do I know, am I promising to insulate it properly? Okay, I can do that. And then, is that it Okay? Great.

So having that kind of clear check in of what is necessary can be both very confidence building and also can really help you not over deliver, not put too much into it, not get into really detailed plans of like, I say, the entire house when you’re just working on we’re changing the way that you go from the garage to the kitchen, for example, and allow you to give them exactly as much information and know more of what they’re looking for.

And then, of course, how much of your master plan do you share with the builder? This is the best way to get before you’ve chosen a builder, showing them your master plan, some of your master plan documentation. Again, don’t overwhelm is a great way to get a sense of the communication style of the person you’re meeting with.

And if you’re going to get multiple bids from multiple contractors, which, by the way, unless you have a long standing, deeply personal and already proven successful relationship with someone who is a contractor, you’re going to want to get multiple bids from multiple contractors. It is the only responsible way to carry on new work in your home if you don’t already have an existing relationship with someone.

And by the way, I don’t mean you’re friends with someone who’s a contractor, but you’ve never worked with them before. That is not the kind of existing relationship that exempts you from getting exempts you from getting bids. I mean, they’ve already done some projects in your house, and it’s been incredibly successful, and you loved it. That person now, okay, now you’re set. You don’t have to go get other bids every time you want to do another project but get bids. But if you get bids by having three.

Different teams of contractors come to your house, and you walk them through, and you wave at the things you want. You say, we’re going to open up this wall a little here, and all new cabinets and some new windows, and here’s a picture of flooring that we like. You’re going to get a picture in their mind that is wildly different based on the assumptions and past experiences and the word choice that you have in each case. Where, as if you take them to your house and sure, you walk them through the space and say, you know, like, here’s what we’re thinking of doing, and then you say, here is the floor plan we’re changing to.

And here are some sample pictures of the type of cabinets we’re thinking of. Can you get us these? This is what we’re looking for prices on. And here is a picture of the built in that we’re thinking of. And here’s a diagram of how the built ins are going to go around the space. Now, each of those contractors has a much clearer vision in their head, and you’re getting much more accurate pricing and be able to compare apples to apples in the bid process. And then, of course, at the end of the day, you are the manager of the project.

Well, we’ll talk about this. How hands on you want to be going forward a little bit later in this episode, but at the end of the day, the master plan is for you in the sense that it’s going to help you continue to be the guardian of your goals. It’s going to help you come back to your why. It’s going to help you, refer to what you’d already decided. When questions come up, I think I’ve mentioned on a couple of podcast episodes through the summer and into the spring past, that there’s a project under construction right now that I did the master plan for.

And this is just a client who’s working really fast and has enjoyed having me be quite hands on with the project. So as it’s gone along, she’s often reached out to me by email. We’ve had a couple of on-site meetings, which isn’t my normal process, but I was happy to do it in this case. And this is a service that we offer.

We can stay in touch in any level that seems appropriate that we’re available for after our master plan package is complete, to answer questions by email, answer questions by zoom, meeting, and in this one particular case, it was to be on site with this client. But I’ve really enjoyed getting her questions as we come along, and they have been everything from choosing the type of grain and stain for the built ins to confirming some dimensions and refining the design of built ins in our sketches, into elevations, and solving some problems of what’s going on with a little bit of code review. Can we, can we have a second basement kitchen, or does it need to be a kitchenette? How are we going to develop that? And a bunch of other fun little the quirks that come up through a remodel process.

But I got a question from her in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that I didn’t see right away, because I don’t live in my inbox. I often face, you know, head down over a design project or putting together a podcast episode or whatnot. I have my notifications turned off, and by the time I popped into my inbox to see that I had a message from her, I saw that there was also a follow up message, and the first one was, oh, I can’t actually recall the specific thing she was asking about, but she was asking about a material choice. What should I think it might have been about door handles? What should the door handle style be? And then before I had even had a chance to see that, she’d emailed me, and before I could remind our message her back with an answer.

She said, Oh, never mind. We found the answer in the style guide that was prepared originally, which is, which is great, which is the point of what it is. And I would have been happy to give her more specific information, more examples, more feedback based on how her thoughts were developing that style guide that we’d put together for her had, you know, may have become a little bit of an outdated document. That’s always something that can happen if you don’t keep these things alive.

But also, it did exactly what it was going supposed to do. We put it together as thoughtfully and comprehensively as we could at the time, and it’s still valid, and it solved the problem for her, and got her an answer faster than I could even respond to an email in a single day. So when I say the master plan is for you, I mean, it is of you. It is by you. It is for you, and it will continue to sort of solve your problems as you go along.

That is it is designed. It is engineered to do just that. And I this comes down to I mentioned earlier, as you are the guardian of your master plan. You will be the person who checks that it’s happening the way it’s supposed to probably. Now I’m a big believer that a master plan is right for you, no matter how hands on or hands off you intend to be with your remodel, and that I could make a case for a master plan being particularly important, absolutely essential for someone who’s going to DIY their design and then DIY the work.

And then, on the other hand, I could make a case for why it’s even more important perhaps, to have done the Master Plan process and given yourself the best. Benefit of a master plan document, if you hope to really hand off the responsibility of keeping track of the project, managing it day to day, to somebody else.

And I mean, this is a little bit of blue sky thinking. I think there’s an opportunity in every situation. I feel the same way about. If your house has been preserved, it by a single owner in a complete Time Capsule condition, that’s a huge win. What a gift, particularly if you like a vintage style, you can just choose to maintain everything that isn’t broken or works.

You know, everything that doesn’t double negative, everything that doesn’t not work for your life, everything that works for your life, you can keep it versus, on the other hand, if your house has been the victim of a brutal flipping, the silver lining of that is now you’re not precious about it.

You’ve got the freedom to make changes where you need to, and you can build back in the specific moment of mid-century style that you like. There’s pros and cons to both. And so there are pros and cons to both situations of using a master plan. But actually, I would argue that the master plan is correct and incredibly beneficial in every case. Now for the hands on DIY, er, the process of the master plan is for you in that it’s going to keep you on track.

It’s going to keep you focused. It will really for my overthinkers out there, the linear nature of moving forward through the Master Plan process is going to simplify everything. It’s going to cut down on stress. It sets you up with a recipe that you can then follow one project after another, and sort of comprehensively and in microcosm. Then once you get into the actual doing of it, your master plan is for you in that it will help you remember the things you yourself decided a while ago. You can go back to your style guide again and again, and you will be able to keep repeating rinse and repeating the design decisions from one project to the next, the material choices may refine may get a little bit more specific.

You want to make sure that your project manager, that your contractor really gets it, and that they are seeing what you’ve got in your mind, you’re imagining the same thing. So ultimately, the question of who is a master plan really for is always answered you, whether we’re talking about the process, the process of a master plan is for you because it’s going to keep you calmer, keep you moving forward, keep you inspired, keep you sort of focused on your why.

You might learn along the way. You might get better at executing on them, but it will all have been sort of laid out in the DNA of the project that you wrote in your master plan process now, for people who are hoping to hire a general contractor and entrust the outcome to that person or that team, then the real benefit of the master plan process is going to come out of having done the thinking, having asked your why, and having clearly illustrated what it is that you Like, that you hope to get so that you can get a really good handoff of vision from you to the person that’s going to execute.

And then the outcome of a master plan is also for you, although some of the deliverables are to be shared in other ways. I think this is also true when you think about the deliverables, when we’re thinking a little bit about once you’ve finished your master plan finished, I say in quotes if you’ve just listened through to the let’s review series on master plans from last month.

We talked about dreaming, we talked about discovering, distilling, we talked about drafting options and then the continuous nature of developing. But there is a point at which you’re calling it pretty good. You’ve got a pretty good vision, and you’re going to start moving on it. You’re going to begin demolition. You’re going to begin construction on the whole project, or on part of it, the master plan really benefits you in that it’s going to help you see as far down the road in the project as possible so you can avoid changing your mind.

Because, as I’ve said many times before, nothing is more expensive in a remodel than changing your mind after construction is underway, even a small tweak, change can have big costs. You may be dinged for change orders by any sort of organized contractor. It, frankly, should be, because it will cause chaos and stress and extra work for them, and there’ll be a loss of time, a loss of material, there will be a cost that you’ll pay, probably a number of different interrelated costs.

But there will also come times in a remodel where you need to make a change, where you need to pivot, and at that point, having the sort of underlying meaning of your master plan can help you switch from maybe one product supplier to another smoothly, to get the same result, maybe even a better outcome, or to sort of refine your order, or go in a different way, or cut a piece of the scope out for now in a way that’s not going to hurt the overall value of the project, by the way, if you want more on either of those two concepts, the fact that a master plan will help you avoid changing your mind. I talked about that originally in Episode 607, and how a Master plan can help you make a change when you need to, or rather to pivot and keep moving forward in a project, as you can then I talked about that in episode 1302 at the end of the day.

The reason I got so excited about this question when I saw it come in in my contact form for the office hours was it lets me ponder and philosophize around the question of who a master plan is ultimately for, and I often talk about it from a deliverable point of view. I often when I’m trying to persuade people of the benefit of a master plan from $1 perspective, I often talk about it as a way to get clear communications outwards, to have documents that you can show that you could get a permit with, or you could be close to a permit, and then you can figure out what else is necessary.

My current master plan package is schematic, and therefore it doesn’t quite have enough information, usually for a building permit office. But what we find most common, most commonly is that the general contractors that our clients tend to be working with usually have a draftsperson in house that they like to work with that gets exactly what’s necessary to the local building permit office. But also that a master plan is really beneficial for that contractor information for that contractor interaction rather and that having the documentation put together is going to help you communicate clearly to a contractor what you want.

Now that is so true. I don’t mean to undercut that message at all. It is incredibly beneficial to have really clear documentation to share, to have more than just a floor plan, but to have example photos, to have a material palette, to be able to point to a specific type of cabinet, so that when you’re talking about what you want done, they are imagining the same thing, and you’re going to get you won’t you won’t be surprised when something that’s wrong gets delivered on site.

You won’t be displeased when the final result isn’t what you had imagined, because everyone was imagining the same thing, but at the end of the day, there’s going to be more information documented in your master plan outcome than anybody but you will ever care about and there, or at least at all at one point, like you might actually end up showing every single piece of your master plan documentation to someone, to everyone over time, but when you’re having specific interactions with people, particularly the more micro focused that person is in their job.

So if it’s a subcontractor, you’re going to give them way less of the pages, for example, or the scrolling screen or whatever. You’re never going to just, sort of just send a Dropbox file with organized folders and a whole bunch of bits of information, or multiple Pinterest boards to an electrician. Say they might, on a personal level, again, on a human to human basis, they might care. But in order to bid the project and get it done accurately, they do not need that information, nor do they want it, and making them sort through it will either prevent them from taking on your project entirely or be a waste of time that they’ll either grumble about and maybe present you for or bill you for, none of which are outcomes that you want.

So curating and sort of reducing the amount of information from your master plan as you pass it along, is a really important process, and it’s a really important thing to know that sort of different pieces are going to be pulled out at different points so that you can share them with the folks who need to know. In some cases, you’ll actually end up having to generate maybe a little bit more information than you had document. Information than you had documented, but hopefully not more information than you had ever considered for the process.

I recently provided a little lift assist to some past clients that I have loved working with who are getting their construction underway now they’re working with a local contractor who seems like a great guy, and in their area, it’s important they have some sort of neighborhood or village or municipal overlay that’s going to be permitting, specifically the exterior appearance of the changes they’re making.

So this is a board that meets a couple of times a month that is going to need to see a bunch of details, not necessarily about what they’re doing on the inside, although they are submitting floor are submitting floor plans, but about every material choice they’re making for the outside, and needing fairly comprehensive views of the outside, it was listed as they needed exterior elevations of each side.

And we ended up checking again, always check with someone who was on that committee, and found out that, yeah, actually our perspective views that captured two sides of the house at once were enough, and we didn’t need to redraw everything from scratch. Always ask before you have your designer do extra work, because, I mean, I would have enjoyed drawing more elevations of the house that would have been pretty, but it would have been a waste of their money and probably my time that could be spent on doing other people’s design time work so.

But we also, you know, they were really putting together a very thorough list of all the materials, the specific brands and products of lamps and light fixtures, wood stains, everything, so that this oversight committee could approve that they weren’t going to mess it up.

I have 100% certainty they’re going to get approval, because A, the house is already lovely in their case. And B, they’re making really lovely, appropriate improvements to it, but this is a perfect example of very specific information has been requested. Now, they may go to this board meeting and talk a little bit about all the things they’re excited about in the house and things they love, but I think they will read the room.

They’re both very socially savvy folks, and they will not say more about what they’ve got in mind for the project than is really being asked for unless it’s a chatty conversation that’s had after the meeting is concluded. I would also, frankly, kind of expect people on this board to ask some follow up questions about the larger project, because it’s a cool project, but ultimately, on the Nate, on the night that the meeting takes place, this is going to be about getting it done. It’s going to be about agenda items.

It’s going to be about the exact amount of information that is necessary in order to answer the questions asked and move forward. So I mean, this kind of brings us around full circle. There is always going to be extraneous information in your master plan from the perspective of someone else, but not for you. You are going to put the amount of detail into your master plan that is appropriate because, again, the document and the process of the master plan are for you, and this means that it’s going to have as many example images as please you.

It’s going to have as many specific style sheets for every single individual room in the house, or one that gathers all the possibilities in one place, and you kind of pick from them to like a checklist. You’re going to do it with spreadsheets. If spreadsheets speak to you, you’re going to do it with checklists. If checklists speak to you, you are going to curate the format and the information of your master plan to suit your own brain and your own level of obsessiveness and detail oriented-ness and visual thinking.

But at the end of the day, it is going to have a couple of key components. It’s going to have some kind of floor plan documentation, maybe full modeling, maybe just a simple pencil and paper on graph, grid, floor plan. There’s no better or worse. There’s what works for you. It’s going to have some visual representation of the materials that you’re choosing. It’s going to have something that shows a visual example of what you’re thinking of. It’s going to have some pieces that describe the scope of work that you’re taking on overall and next and hopefully buried in its recesses.

It’s going to have a place where you can easily refer to why you’re doing this project in the first place, and what about it is really important to you. If you are curious about the Master Plan process, I highly encourage you to just pop over to the mid mod Midwest blog and put the search term master plan in there. I have talked about this on the podcast. There are countless blog posts about it.

Or you can learn a lot more about the Master Plan method and how it can really simplify and streamline and also specify your remodel project by watching any of the helpful either of the rather, there are two helpful overview videos I’ve put together in the past on the process and the benefits of a master plan. The first one, planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget is aimed more at people who are planning to plan the remodel themselves.

And the second one, three secrets of a mid-century remodel you will love, is more aimed at understanding how it is that we put together Master Plan packages for our clients. But either of them, I think, are really going to help you get to the source and to the substance of what a master plan can do for you and how a master plan is for you ultimately in the way that it’s going to both keep you anchored to what matters most to you all the way along the process of thinking about it, and then help you stay connected to that meaning and your decisions through your entire construction process, whether it be over in a year or gamed out over the next decade, both of the situations really benefit from one.

So as always, there’s going to be a link to the transcript of this, the references I’ve made the other episodes you might want to check out on the show notes page at mid mod midwest.com/ 2203 I really hope that I’ve got you thinking about some of the benefits of your master plan and ultimately realizing that while it’s going to be incredibly useful to share with people, to communicate, to research, to get your team on board with exactly the vision you’ve got in mind, ultimately, the master plan is for you.

It is your sanity protecting bubble. It is your sort of you. A living document of all your dreams, hopes, plans, intentions and wishes for your house that slowly focus into a checklist, a to do list, a pricing system. All of this sort of falls into the process of putting a master plan together, and at the end of the process, the document is sort of the living record of everything you’ve achieved. This again, is so useful if you are trying to get the most speedy and effective renovation done on your house, and it is in some ways even more useful if you’re planning to break your project into phases so that you can keep track of what you were thinking all the way along.

 It’s one of the reasons that when we create a master plan document for our clients. We actually put this into our mid-century solutions package, deliverable which isn’t quite the final product, but we always include a record of the earliest phases of the dream that we ask the client to share with us their ideal home. Description goes into that document a little bit about the sort of fact based reality, the structure, the existing mechanical systems, whether the house has got a truss or a stick framed attic, information like that goes into the master plan, and the style guide is linked to that solutions package document in the master plan.

Because if you’re going to set this, if you’re going to do a project, set it down for three years and come back and pick it up again. You shouldn’t be starting from scratch, starting from zero. The benefit of the master plan document is that it keeps the process alive for you in an easy to reference, easy to research, easy to get back to way.

Okay, I obviously I could talk about this all day. I believe in it so much. I just think if everyone who was ever planning to pay money to a contractor had the ability to focus and be really clear about what they want using this method, we would be, hey, I think we’d be remodeling a little bit less and B I think we would be Remo. We would be spending our remodel dollars, energy, material, cost in the world so much more effectively, and people would feel more happy and in control every step along the way, which I, as someone who thinks about renovations and remodels all the time, would really like to see for the people that I work with.

I also think contractors would feel confident and happy and be more likely to get repeat customers if they had such clarity and expectation set up in advance, I think everybody wins when there is more Master Plan thinking involved anyway.

Next week, on the podcast, I’m going to be talking about something a little less philosophical and process based and a little bit more technical. I’m going to be talking about how to control temperature and moisture in a mid-century house, the classic moisture control problems that mid-century houses tend to have, and what you might find circumstances that might be common in your house that you might find in any other mid-century house, and what you can do about them. So next week, problem solving from a technical perspective, stay tuned.

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