How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life (and budget)

If you listen to the Mid Mod Remodel Podcast regularly, you hear lots about the tips and tools I recommend to help you plan and lead your perfect MCM remodel. And once or twice a year I boil down the most helpful of those tips and tools into a free masterclass that I offer live. 
 
In the past that session was only available to the folks who signed up and attended the live event, but now you can listen on the go! 

In Today's Episode You'll Learn:

• The three biggest mistakes other homeowners are making on their remodels (that ALWAYS result in a remodel that costs more, takes longer and … doesn’t do end up how they want)
• My five step process for planning a remodel YOU CAN LEAD WITH CONFIDENCE: one that will turn the house you have into a home you’ll love
• How to cut the chaos of remodeling in HALF with one simple maneuver (seriously, everyone should do this!)

Learn more about my master plan process and Ready to Remodel right here!

Like and subscribe at Apple | Spotify | YouTube. Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here! Or get my course,  Ready to Remodel.

Transcript

0:00:00 I noticed that the Loom replay tends to put me at 1.25 speed, Yes. And I don't think that's a good way to listen to me telling everyone everything that I want them to know in an hour.
0:00:12 I think that is an overwhelming way to hear my voice. But, you know, people can always adjust their own settings.
0:00:16 just bumblebee speed, that's all. we've got some people saying hello, we've got Jenny from Texas with a 1960 house, we've got Lynn, oh, hi, you, we talked already, you've got two layers of carpet in the walkout level on a concrete slab.
0:00:31 That's quite something. We will talk about that more in the Q&A afterwards, perhaps. got Michelle, who is in a 1920s cabin with a 1955 add-on, and we've talked before about, sort of, how that can be another way to bring mid-century.
0:00:43 If you have a house that has mid-century pieces, even if it was not originally created in the mid-century, you're welcome here, too.
0:01:05 So, here we are at how to plan an MCM remodel to fit your life and budget. Before I go any further, If you're watching this class in the future, hello, how is Futuredella holding up?
0:00:59 Okay, I hope. Also, reach out to me on Instagram. This is the best way to get a hold of me personally and not go through any filters or layers.
0:01:06 So, it's always the way, if you've got a question, if you've got a comment, if you've got something you want to share, let's be friends on Instagram.
0:01:11 this class. Is going to be for you, if you live in a mid-century home, and you want to make timeless, tailored choices for it, rather than doing the latest trend that's going to instantly become tired and out of date in the next two, five, ten years.
0:01:26 All the changes that we see in houses that have been remodeled in the past that just don't stick. So that you can spend the time that you have and the budget that you have for your house on the things that are actually going to make your life better, and so that you can get started as soon as possible
0:01:39 on this process. So again, to get a sense of who is here right now, just say hello in the chat if you are in any way a new homeowner, new first-time homeowner, or if you are new to your mid-century home.
0:01:50 I'd love to know if you're here today so that I can tailor some things about this, because people who are new, if you've just found a mid-century home, you're probably feeling pretty wiped out by the process of getting here.
0:01:59 Getting there, paperwork, bank loans, the Zillow search, and you're probably pretty traumatized by all of the bad remodeling damage that's been done to the houses that you toured by previous homeowners of the past, and so you are probably looking for ways to get up to speed as quickly as possible so 
0:02:16 you can avoid all those mistakes that you saw in every Zillow search, every single white kitchen. You want to not make those mistakes on your own house if it has original quality, and if you had to choose a house that has some past damage, you're looking for the way to get past that as quickly as possible
0:02:31 . I also want to know if you are in the middle of your remodeling journey. You've already done some things, maybe some significant things.
0:02:38 There's a lot of power in the first projects you can take on with a mid-century remodel. So you come into a house, you have an immediate punch list of things you wanted to change about it.
0:02:48 You might have an inspection report that says there's lead paint somewhere, or something needs replacing. So you can dive in and do those first projects with confidence.
0:02:55 But once you get past the obvious things, two things can happen. You can look back and realize you made a few choices that aren't as mid-century as you would have wanted now, and also, you don't really know where to go next.
0:03:06 The next project ahead of you is bigger and more nebulous than anything you've tackled so far, and that can really set stop you.
0:03:12 So, if you're here in that situation, you're probably looking for a plan to take your plans to the next level.
0:03:17 So you can start in again, knowing you're going in the right direction. And then, probably there's somebody here who has been in their house for a long time.
0:03:26 For a few years? For decades? I work with people in this situation all the time, and maybe it's something that's changed in your life.
0:03:33 You've gone from having kids at home to the empty nest. You've wrote a lot of retired. You're looking for something now to help tune the house to the life you want to live.
0:03:40 And maybe you're dealing with frustrations you've had all the way along. Or maybe you've just gotten newly interested in the mid-century nature of your house that you didn't appreciate before.
0:03:49 It might be that you yourself have done some of the things to the house that you now want to change, and even if that's true, it's okay.
0:03:55 At this point, the biggest challenge for people in your situation is to, you know, see outside of your own past experience.
0:04:02 so you are all in the right place, and we are going to get right down to what's important here. No matter what shape your house is in, whether it's a time capsule house, or it's just been sort of, creatively flipped by someone who had too much time in HGTV at their disposal last year, we can make right
0:04:18 choices for the house going forward, and the steps to plan them are the same. We're going to talk about them today.
0:04:22 And whether or not you're going to DIY everything you take on in your house, or you're going to hire a general contractor, explain what you want clearly, and then make it their problem, we're still going to follow some of the same planning steps, and I'm going to walk you through how to think about all
0:04:35 of that today. if you were hoping to get nothing but free value today and never be told about any next steps you can take, you'll be disappointed by the end of this, because I am going to talk at the end of the class a little bit about my Ready to Remodel program and how I created it to be the next level
0:04:48 of help that I'm can offer beyond a class like today's. but you can just tune out before the end if that's you.
0:04:53 I will say, if you're curious about that, at the end, for people who sign up and join us inside of Ready to Remodel this weekend, I'm going to be offering a free one-to-one house audit with me, so you'll get a chance to schedule a 30-minute Zoom call, you can take me on a tour.
0:05:06 Some people like to use this call for an immediate entree into Ready to Remodel so that I can point you towards the resources that'll be most valuable inside the program.
0:05:14 Other people save it up for a rainy day when they need some help, but anyway, that's coming at the end of this class.
0:05:19 we're going to talk primarily today about how to avoid the mistakes you've seen so many of your friends and loved ones and people that use Stock on Zillow make in their houses by planning more specifically towards what you need, more specifically your mid-century house, and more specifically towards 
0:05:36 the style that you like for it, which is not universal. And also, I want you to walk away with a mindset change, or just a reassurance.
0:05:45 If you were already hoping that you could do this, I want you to believe that you can do this, and I'm going to equip you with some of the necessary tools and tricks and strategies and mindset to do it.
0:05:53 And then finally, I'm going to show you the thing that everybody ought to do. In order to get a coherent, cohistant, coherent, consistent style from their remodel.
0:06:03 One that looks like it was all done purposefully, even if you're going to break it up and do it over multiple phases.
0:06:08 So, this is the thing I want you to know more than anything else. You are so right to love your mid-century home.
0:06:15 And even though it can feel like everyone on the internet is showing you how to remove what is mid-century about a mid century house, that's not actually true.
0:06:23 There are pockets of people out there who agree with us, and I would argue that for anyone with any home of any style, they're right to lean into that original era.
0:06:32 But for mid-century homes in particular, they are such great houses. And I just want to, I just want to shout out a thank you to Michelle again for making my day, because it really is my mission.
0:06:42 This is more than a job to me. It's become my vocation and my agency. My vocation to save, let's say as many, but I want to say every mid-century house in America from bad, poorly thought out, quick, cheap, fast remodels that end up being regretted.
0:06:57 I think these houses are worth so much more than that. And the thing is, this is about more than just preserving what's cute about them.
0:07:04 This is, this is an environmental mission. This is a, a resource use mission, because mediocre remodels and whole houses end up in landfills.
0:07:14 And it's true that in America, 30% of our landfill content by volume is construction demolition debris. So to make that not happen, we need to plan houses that are worth keeping.
0:07:25 And mid-century houses are so worth keeping. The mid-century moment was the answer that our society came up to answering the last great American housing crisis.
0:07:35 Right after the war, a whole bunch of people were looking for new places to live, they were coming off of farms, they were coming back from the war, they wanted to set up new houses and we had a population boom to deal with.
0:07:44 They came up with this brilliant solution to build small, really right-sized houses, starter homes that people could afford. When you look back at the ads, these houses, I mean, I know inflation exists, but these houses were going up for sale for $10,000, for $11,000, for $15,000.
0:08:01 This was the kind of house that somebody could buy on a working person's salary. And they weren't just cheap, they were also small, because they were meant to be a starter home that was flexible enough to add on to.
0:08:16 There were about 15 million homes, this is citing one of my favorite mid-century historians, he I'll next video. Bye. He estimates that in that era, about 15 million mid-century homes were built, that still represents about 15% of our single-family housing stock today.
0:08:27 And they're not as affordable as they once were, because we're up against another housing crisis, need drives demand, but this is my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, the yellow represents areas that were built during that sort of two-ish decades of the mid-century era.
0:08:43 by the census, so 1940 to 1960, roughly, and you can see, this is about half of Madison. That might not be true in your town, it might have been more developed by the time it was, but there are mid-century houses everywhere, and they are popular for a reason, because they were built to be modifiable.
0:09:00 Let's see if I can move my face. Every mid-century house, pretty much, a few outliers, a few dramatic architect-designed homes start out a little more interesting, but almost all every mid-century house starts out like this little rectangle.
0:09:11 And then, they grow. They get a little front porch addition, a little back porch addition, they get a bedroom popped out the side, they get a den added, they get an L, a C, a Z, all of these shapes.
0:09:23 By the way, does one of these look like the profile of your house? I'd love to see, sort of, what the past additions have been worked with here.
0:09:30 Particularly in the earliest days of the building boom of the mid-century era, these houses were all simple, little, minimal rectangles.
0:09:36 Two bedrooms, maybe three, one bathroom. And the plan wasn't that they should stay like that forever. It was that people should buy the house they could afford, and then grow it to fit their family.
0:09:46 So, the good news for us is, if your mid-century house right now needs a bit of modification, it was always meant to be modified.
0:09:54 The simple construction technique but also the skill that was put into them mean they are sturdy, they are built with old growth wood we don't have access to anymore, they are built with craft labor that is rarer than we would like it to be these days, and yet they are still meant to be added onto and
0:10:09 modified and changed in a way that houses built before are a little more complex and harder to change, and houses built later tend to be built by, sort of, 80s CAD designs, and they are all also a little harder to change up after the fact.
0:10:23 Okay, so we've got a couple of people sharing out their spaces here. What I want you to know about this, though, is we are in a great position to make changes.
0:10:32 The dream home of 1955 can be the dream home of 2025. Everybody loves a ranch. Zillow and Trulia still list them as the most popular home style, and I want you to know that you've got a good house right now, and you can plan and lead an update that will keep the mid-century style intact so that it will
0:10:51 stay timeless, but also suit it to fit your life, because it was always meant to be changed up and modified to better fit the lives of the people that lived there.
0:10:59 So, maybe a quick introduction right now. Hi, I'm Della. I'm an architect, and I own a mid-century house. This is my 1952 ranch.
0:11:06 I'm the third owner, and I bought this in, What is time? 2016. I've been here eight years. So this house- nine years.
0:11:16 I've been here nine years. Holy crap. Okay, anyway, this was my first home, and I bought it, and I completely got into a- an overconfident bubble immediately.
0:11:25 I've been a licensed architect for years. I've been working in high-end residential remodels that whole time. I've always wanted to work in homes.
0:11:32 I've always designed residential remodels and homes for other people, and I figured, great, this is going to be a playground.
0:11:38 I'm just going to figure out whatever I want and do it. I thought I could jump right in. I also had the benefit of labor, my own energy, my first homebuyer energy, and my dad, who'd recently retired.
0:11:46 This t-shirt is a gift I gave him for Christmas that year, joking that it was going to be our one-off custom home business, just this one house.
0:11:53 Anyway, we did really take advantage of his labor. Here are the two of us working on a bunch of projects.
0:11:59 In that first year or two, we screened in the breezeway, turned it into a mudroom and a garage storage area.
0:12:05 We put in an egress window in the basement so I could have a legal bedroom down there. It's now my exercise room, but that's not, neither here nor there.
0:12:10 we jackhammered up part of the floor and then put in new plumbing and, radon remediation is what this is. This is going on right now, and then poured new concrete around it, and then also, I messed up.
0:12:22 Here is a picture of me making a mistake that I regretted for six years before I got around to fixing it.
0:12:26 I have painted my house millennial gray, which I would not do today. I would paint it olive green. we needed to paint it head-lead paint that was peeling and flaking into the yard.
0:12:33 It was an ecological disaster, so that needed to change, and I chose trendy, trendy gray, and I painted my trim white.
0:12:40 Carefully, and by hand, I made a mistake that I now advise everyone that I speak to not to make, because while white trim on a colored house is okay if you're looking for a sort of a mid-century traditional vibe, a cottage-y vibe, or if you have a cottage, I wanted a modern look on my house, and I painted
0:12:55 my trim contrast white anyway, when I should have painted it gray. And then I ran out of steam and energy, and I didn't go back to fix that mistake, paint that trim, that contrast, garage door gray to match the house, for another six years.
0:13:06 So, it's so much better to not make mistakes in the first place, and that's what I would like to be the situation for you.
0:13:16 I experienced the same kind of, I don't know what to do next, I don't know which project is most important, I don't know how to prioritize what's necessary for maintenance versus what I think is a cool look, and I did not know enough about mid-century in those early days, so I ended up feeling the overwhelm
0:13:28 that I have now received from every single mid-century homeowner that I've worked with since then. The answer of how to do this right, of how to process this in a clear way, of how to go step-by-step-by-step and plan a remodel that does not overwhelm, actually came only when I started helping other people
0:13:45 . And I actually want to just jump through this timeline and tell you this, the story of the first person that I helped.
0:13:52 What I have learned from literally every single person that I have worked with on the process of planning a remodel is that if you just jump in, the possibilities are too many.
0:14:01 The entire internet exists. There is a host of information that's not right for us, that's easier to find than the information that is right.
0:14:08 And if you start tackling a remodel by looking at everything you could do and then just trying to pick the right project to start with, it will instantly break your brain.
0:14:16 But it doesn't have to work like that. The very first mid-century home I worked on a design for was not my own because I didn't make a design, I just started doing projects.
0:14:25 But I helped a friend of a friend, without realizing that this was about to become my whole life and my whole personality, to plan a remodel because it was my sister's college buddy.
0:14:33 I heard from my sister that she and her husband had just bought a house, their first home. They were on a tight timeline, they wanted to move into it before the baby came, and when their condo lease was up, and they were being absolutely bullied by their contractor.
0:14:47 And so I kind of just threw myself in front of the moving car of this interaction and said, can I please help you?
0:14:52 Please, just, just let me, let me help you with this. Here's the thing. Their goal was to transform a run-down, beat-up ranch with a bad layout into their forever home.
0:15:01 And they were being told this ranch would be better off as a cottage and not And they should go ahead and put a second story on it, because that was the only way to solve their problem.
0:15:07 I knew that was going to be more than they could afford, it was going to take longer than they could, and it wasn't the right answer, because they bought this house for the backyard space that was a park running between their houses and the houses behind it, and the side yard, which was an electrician's
0:15:21 , an electrical? A city electrical easement, that meant they had all this beautiful green space over here. And what they had was two bedrooms that you couldn't get out to the backyard, back of the house from, and no way to share the social spaces with that area.
0:15:35 They hadn't taken a minute to process what was really important to them, they just called a contractor because they were in a rush and said, hi, we need a remodel, what do you do?
0:15:42 And what I actually recommended that they do, which was very counterintuitive, was to pause in their process, and instead of rushing forward, to just take a minute to ask what they really wanted to accomplish, who they were as people.
0:15:56 And I had a bit of a cheat sheet for this, because I already knew them. I knew they were extroverts, who loved to host, who wanted to be the center of both of their extended families, and everyone they knew.
0:16:04 I also knew what they were looking for in terms of a style, a vision. Nothing too dramatic, nothing too particularly mid-mod, but they wanted it to feel cohesive.
0:16:14 And then we also looked at their structural realities and the maintenance needs of the house. And with that in mind, I was able to throw together some very quick options for them, and they were able to very quickly decide between them, because we'd stopped to prioritize what really mattered first.
0:16:27 And then, they turned back around to the very same contractor, and he went ahead and provided for them one of the fastest home remodels I have ever seen to this day.
0:16:36 And the result was this layout, which has a social space that reaches out to the public. The backyard, a big social deck that walks them down to the backyard space, and a hosting kitchen where a whole bunch of people can stand around and talk about the game that's happening, and shoot, and prepare food
0:16:51 together, and just have a marvelous time, and their bedrooms off to the side in a more private area of the house with their owner's suite right at the front.
0:16:58 Not a choice for everyone, but for these folks, the absolute right choice. We used what I did not yet then know.
0:17:04 No, it was the master plan method to make this happen, and we were able to clarify quickly what they wanted, cut through the sort of, but I always do this, stuff that their talented but sort of boorish contractor was pushing on them, and get a layout that was really going to work for their house, and
0:17:19 not be too much, all done on time. This was a revelation for me, because I had worked in high-end residential remodels before, and everything that I had done for my clients was in the past, was very, I throw a bunch of options at them.
0:17:31 I look at the house, I study it, my boss was teaching me that it didn't really matter what the clients were asking for until they said yes, we should look at the house and design what was correct for it.
0:17:41 That never felt right to me, but it was the method we were using. When I worked with Seth and Jesse, I got to begin from what actually mattered to them, and then design from that, and it instantly worked better and felt faster.
0:17:51 And they were able to get us a yes, so much faster than any of the other, let me show you 12 possibilities and see if any of them land for you, and then we could really decide that I experienced in the past with the same kind of, actually with a much more expensive kind of remodel process.
0:18:06 So here's what I want. Let's walk through the mistakes that you have seen your friends and neighbors make, you may have made yourself, and that I want you to avoid in the future as you go through this process.
0:18:16 The first one is what I did for my own house, jumping into a first bigger project, a little project is okay, but jumping into a first bigger project without a big picture vision, because this is like driving without your headlights, so let's do a check-in.
0:18:31 Do you feel like you don't have time to do a whole ass remodel design right now? Pardon my French. And this is so reasonable.
0:18:39 If this is you, I totally understand. I understand that Steph and Jesse also did not feel like they had time for design.
0:18:43 Many of my clients don't, initially, but after a conversation, we can see how it might be necessary. Maybe you feel like your actual dream project, the project you would design, the thing you flip through and you see in Atomic Ranch, is unachievable anyway, and so that's not fun to think about.
0:18:59 You might as well just focus on this bathroom remodel, this kitchen remodel, this porch addition, and not worry about a whole picture, because, you're not gonna get it.
0:19:07 If you jump in with, yes, Jenny, a whole last remodel. If you jump in with the big, big project without a big picture vision, one of three things is gonna happen.
0:19:16 You're gonna run out of steam, and money, before the project is over, particularly if you're DIYing, you'll get halfway through the project and then realize you've got to pause, you've got to cut down on quality, you've got to leave a project unfinished, because you just don't have the energy, the time
0:19:30 , and the money to carry on. Or, you'll get to the end of your available resources, and then you'll just keep going.
0:19:36 You'll just take out more loans against your house, you'll just spend more than you meant to, because the contractor just has to keep going, and you've got to keep paying them, and you have to get a kitchen you can live in, and that's what happens.
0:19:45 But, even in that case, if you start with a kitchen and overspend on it, you'll probably not get to that rest of the projects you had in mind for the rest of the house.
0:19:52 That first things win problem is really prevalent in home remodeling stories, and I hear this all the time. So, what I want you to do instead to avoid that mistake, is to follow the step-by-step process of figuring out what matters first, what's important to your home first, all the things you might 
0:20:07 do, and then prioritizing, so that when you jump in on the first thing, you know that first thing is probably the most important, and or it's a good starter project to get your feet wet, and the other things will follow naturally after that.
0:20:21 Managing a remodel is daunting. It is overwhelming. It's usually, most people remodel a house only once, maybe they move and do this a couple of times over a lifetime, but it's probably something you've never done before, and so if you walked into your workplace, and were given a huge, overwhelming, 
0:20:37 complicated task you've never done before, you would probably feel a little overwhelmed unless someone gave you a set of checklist items, or SOPs, or told you how they've done this project in the past.
0:20:48 Master plan planning is that checklist, it is that step-by-step process. So, basically, this just means that when you start from your priorities, and your house, plus your style, you can test out some options in a Goldilocks manner.
0:21:02 Find the right. The right scale and style for you, and then break that down into a set of projects you can knock off one-by-one.
0:21:09 Let's go deeper into that very first one. Start from your priorities. First, a little check-in here. who is thinking that planning a remodel, getting ideas for your remodel, starts on Pinterest?
0:21:20 I-I've done this. I want you to, I don't want you to feel ashamed if this is you. If you go for ideas on Pinterest, Mmm.
0:21:25 That's of, that's of course, plausible. A lot of people get stuck in Pinterest. They have more and more boards. They have, you know, you try to control it.
0:21:33 Break it down for boards by this room, boards by materials, boards by price point, boards by, where you got your ideas from.
0:21:38 this is basically the same as just flipping through Atomic Ranch magazine and getting depressed. This is like scrolling and getting lost in an Instagram reels hole.
0:21:45 It's gonna overwhelm you. And so if you've been doing this for the past, like that's fine. All of these systems have been designed to get your eyes and to trap you in them, but it will actually slow you down.
0:21:54 So you want to do instead, we'll get to Pinterest in a minute, I promise. It's there. but you want to start by dreaming.
0:21:59 This is the most overlooked step in remodel planning, weirdly. And it's for the most, I mean, weirdly and sadly, but it is also the most important because knowing why you're doing something is something is what helps you simplify every other choice.
0:22:15 The feeling of your home, whether it's a gathering place or a retreat, whether it is a place where it's for your daily use in your core family, or it's the place where everybody in your extended family is going to be every single weekend.
0:22:28 Knowing these things will drive every other decision you make and will help you prioritize what you're going to do. So this isn't hard.
0:22:34 This isn't science. You know the answer to this question already, but it's astonishing how much the remodeling industry at large does not ask us to answer this question and how easy it is to skip this step when you start thinking about, how much have I got in my bank account to afford for this remodel
0:22:48 ? Or what are the options in this flip book of past projects that this design-build form has done? Always start from why.
0:22:56 and I think that, you it's really important, yeah, it's really important to sort of come back to this point again and again.
0:23:01 So when I teach this inside of Ready to Remodel or in clinics or workshops, the way that I do it is this, set your goals, figure out what you really want, which is more than an aesthetic update.
0:23:11 Sure, we all want an aesthetic update, but we also want to dig into the deeper why that's driving our process and to check in with everybody that's involved in this process.
0:23:21 Part two. Partner agreement is really important here. And when I'm doing a master plan for a client, I really like to make them have a conversation before I start proposing options so that I know what I'm designing towards that they have agreed on.
0:23:33 Every now and then, we get two opposite points of view and I have to provide two different possibilities and then they can hash it out from there, but ultimately, you want to be on the same page with everyone who's sharing this decision process with you, if you're not doing it alone.
0:23:45 and the earlier you can agree, the more you can save quite dramatic disagreements down the way. Plus, it'll help you save time, money, and energy.
0:23:53 Returning to your why over and over again will help you do everything from decide what order to do the phases of a remodel to which light fixture you're going to pick.
0:24:01 Not kidding. It is every scale and every stage. The next thing that I see so many people other do, so many people out there are doing this every single day is letting someone else tell them what they should do in their own home update.
0:24:18 That might be a general contractor, it might be something they're seeing on the internet, it might be an internet checklist, like 15 things not to leave out of your kitchen remodel.
0:24:26 Now, that's fine if you want to make sure you've thought of everything, but never let somebody else prioritize your home improvement plan.
0:24:33 projects for you, because no one knows what's more important to you than you do. It might seem like you're not an expert in your home remodeling and a GC is.
0:24:43 Someone else knows more about this, they do it every day, they know what a kitchen should include. And while it's absolutely useful to let someone give you good ideas about clever cabinet storage or, lighting situation, this is kind of like, it's really, it's letting them make choices for how you're 
0:25:01 going to spend your money, your time, and live your life after they're done in the house. They're not going to live in the house, you are.
0:25:06 And, like I say here, it is really like letting the used car salesman pick out your car. They're not going to pick it out for you, and I don't think a contractor is necessarily the stereotypical, shyster, used car salesman, but, they are going to make suggestions for questions that they think have worked
0:25:21 in the past, that are going to work well for their team, that they like to do, and you should always be starting from what you want and need.
0:25:29 If you let someone else make choices for you, your remodel will be bigger and more expensive than you'd hoped, because it'll include some of the things you want and a whole bunch of things you didn't need.
0:25:37 You'll spend the whole time you're doing it feeling more out of control and stressed, spinning out, feeling like you don't know what's happening next, and you don't remember why, and with a mid-century house, I guarantee that letting someone else call the shots in the remodel will end up erasing some
0:25:50 or all of the mid-century charm you've got left. So I want you to have the ability to feel empowered, to stick to your guns, and starting from your dream phase is part of that, but also just feeling confident, feeling like you've done the thinking, you have worked through this, and you know why you want
0:26:05 what you want, is going to help you prioritize. And it's going to help you have a good, strong relationship with the people you work with, rather than a negative one where they tell you what to do, you sort of feel like you don't want to, but also you don't feel like you can tell them not to, and then
0:26:19 you resent them the entire time, which is not the right way to spend a whole lot of money on your home.
0:26:24 This isn't your fault, by the way. Let's reframe this problem. because this is the truth, nobody knows more. What you want your home to be than you, the feeling of being at home, embodied in your house, is something that only you know.
0:26:39 But, homeowners feel the least confident people in making the decisions in a remodel. And this is, again, it's the used car problem.
0:26:46 You're doing this once, the people that you're talking to, everyone you're talking to is an expert in their particular service.
0:26:52 But all those so-called experts are focusing on the wrong priorities, and they're not even necessarily doing it doing it out of ill will.
0:26:58 Most of the contractors you talk to are giving you advice that they heard on HGTV or that they've provided to the last five customers they've had, because the last five customers they had said they were happy with the project.
0:27:07 And they're just trying to figure out what the right answer is quickly and efficiently. But they're also hoping to do a little more for you rather than a little less, and then probably make up the difference in labor on cheap materials.
0:27:19 And none of that really You gets to the core of who you are. And the bigger remodeling industry at large, let's call it the remodeling industrial complex, is this huge cycle of tear it out, replace it, it gets old, tear it out, replace it, it gets old, that basically exists to serve itself and to sell
0:27:36 you things. You're going to need to use the remodeling industry to get your remodel done in some way, but you don't have to work for it.
0:27:44 It's supposed to work for you. This is also, Hi. I'm seeing some female faces in the audience. Women end up managing the majority of remodel projects.
0:27:56 This is certainly my experience. I work with couples. I work with men. But in general, we're tending to get more of our communication from a woman in the household about what's going on.
0:28:05 But women also really struggle to feel empowered in this area. I, as a solo single female homeowner and an architect, have been asked by multiple contractors and subs in the past what my husband thinks about the thing I just asked them to do.
0:28:20 I don't enjoy that conversation. I find it kind of rude. And I would find it kind of rude if I had a husband, and even if he was the architect, I'm the person they're talking to.
0:28:27 They should be asking me. So, if you've ever felt like this, my sympathies. And my solution to that is to become as empowered as you can within the process so that when you encounter that nonsense, you can dismiss it.
0:28:40 But this is true for anyone. For anyone in the audience of any gender, you're going to feel sometimes pushed around by esports that are going to throw around jargon, they're going to tell you what they always do, and tell you what you should do.
0:28:51 And, oops, typo. Sorry. that's distracting. That's going to distract me. The thing is that while you do want to listen to experts, you want to take in expert advice.
0:29:02 I don't want you to make choices for your remodel that are not driven by your own needs and desires. But the alternative is, okay, so I heard this story on Monday.
0:29:10 I met two different homeowners who were actually calling into a Zoom to me from two different hemispheres of this earth.
0:29:16 And they told me the exact same story, that they wanted to make some changes to their house. So they started by calling a couple of contractors to find out pricing, but they looked through their portfolios and absolutely everything they had was white kitchens and HGV.
0:29:29 So they were like, okay, great. I guess I need a designer. I didn't want to do that, but I'm going to look for some design build firms.
0:29:34 I'm going to talk to some interiors people. And then they found this out. they found this out. These are. These the real numbers.
0:29:42 The average cost to hire an architect for a residential remodel in America is $47,000 and it can go right up to $300,000 for design, not for the remodel.
0:29:51 And I think that's appalling. And I would be an architect getting paid to do this. Part of the problem is an hourly rate that just goes on and on and on with no boundaries or a percentage of construction costs, fee structure, which.
0:30:03 Thank you very It doesn't encourage any designer to suggest less. it is really expensive and really time-consuming and for some good reasons.
0:30:11 It is labor-intensive to provide the kind of design services that our, again, our remodeling industrial industry has decided are necessary.
0:30:19 And this tends to make people feel like they're totally stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they just call a contractor, they're going to get something bland and generic they didn't ask for.
0:30:26 If they try to work with a designer, it's going to be hugely expensive and it still might not hit the mid-century moment they're looking for.
0:30:32 So, the secret third option to that is to take back control of the process yourself by following the Mid-Century Master Plan Method.
0:30:41 We've just been talking about these pieces here, Dream, Discover, Desil. We're going to get further into this bit as we go forward.
0:30:47 But this is the answer. So, when you can follow this process, you can drive more of the priorities, the decisions.
0:30:53 You can dream up the home that you want. The home, not the house improvement. You can discover what's going on in the house.
0:30:59 Structural issues, technical issues, maintenance issues, history. You can distill your personal mid-century style and then you can come up with options for your, oh my gosh, typos.
0:31:08 Wow. I did do a spell check before this, I promise. I guess I didn't do it very well. And finally, you can develop a plan that's right for your life.
0:31:16 When you dare to listen to yourself first, you'll end up with a remodel that has the ability to change the way you live in a house, the way you experience every single day.
0:31:24 And that is so powerful. So I want to make it easier for you. So yes, you will work with people who will carry out work for you in a remodel and you will seek out other people's expertise, but you are the expert in what you want for your home.
0:31:36 And that's what I want you to Remember. So how can you feel more empowered? Well, this is what, what I teach to my students, what I do less for my clients, but what I teach to my students is that you should figure out what it is that you need to know in order to feel important and expert in your own 
0:31:52 home. This might be, this is personal, this might be that you might need to know some of the terminology you're going to hear.
0:31:58 You might need to do a little googling before you meet with a technical specialist. So that you know the kind of jargon that they're likely to repeat to you.
0:32:05 It might be that you just need to chat with your neighbors and learn the history of your house so that when they come at you with saying what everyone's doing today, you can tell them about how this house was constructed and why.
0:32:13 It might be that you want to just do a bit of code research so you're not going to be surprised by anything that's not legal or not allowed.
0:32:19 It might be that you want to just observe the house yourself. Get a, an inspector, follow them around, ask them a bunch of questions.
0:32:25 So you know, which is this water softener and the water heatener, and what are all those mysterious bubbling noises coming from the basement.
0:32:32 The more empowered you feel in whatever way, the more that you can contact experts, get their opinions and weigh them, and then make informed decisions going forward.
0:32:41 So when I teach this, I am teaching you how to figure out what you want to know most. You don't have to know everything, you just have to figure out where you can stand so that you you're learning new things and adding them to your confidence base, rather than feeling like, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh
0:32:54 god, as you encounter more information about your house. Ultimately, there's no arguing that you know better what you want for your house than anyone.
0:33:03 But also, you've lived in your house. If you're not a first-time new homeowner in your house, you've lived there, you know what it sounds like at night, you know when it's warm and cold, you know how it feels with daylight through the seasons, and so these are ineffable qualities that no amount of expertise
0:33:17 , even I, can't walk into a house and know what it feels like in the winter when I'm in it in the summer.
0:33:22 I can do sun path diagrams, and I can think about the shading, and I can extrapolate a whole bunch of things, but at a glance, I don't know those things that you do.
0:33:30 You are the expert in your own home. So as you assemble your team of other people that can help you, you continue to be the center that all these other people communicate with.
0:33:38 Communicate through, and decide through, and you call the shots in your own remodel. I'm going to use this example of my own little sister and her husband's kitchen remodel from last year.
0:33:48 Baby sister, I'll say. She's a doctor who, you know, many people regard as a respectful figure in the community. She's my baby sister.
0:33:54 She's also stubborn as hell, so she's a perfect example of this story. She has a very, she bought a. really sweet little modest two bedroom house very close to her family practice clinic on the north side of Madison.
0:34:06 And then decided to put in kind of a luxurious magical kitchen in the space because she's going to be there forever.
0:34:11 She loves it. this kitchen, she didn't want to build a brand new kitchen off the back of the house. That felt intense.
0:34:16 And she put it into the footprint it has, which is a very awkward small space with doors on opposite sides, not a lot of counter space.
0:34:23 kind of awkward location of fixtures. We did a lot of work together, brainstorming ways that it might, flow better, troubleshooting options, making models, checking layouts.
0:34:32 And then she reached out to a very well-regarded, but very conventional contractor company here in Madison to do the work.
0:34:39 And they walked through with their GC on the first day and said, oh no, we can't put a built-in bench in that corner.
0:34:44 There's not enough room. She knew. That there was. She had done mock-ups. She had done testing. She had decided she was willing to compromise on a 24-inch wide oven.
0:34:52 She knew she could have that corner bench, and she did not let them talk her out of it. And she and her husband, and their two cats, live on that corner bench.
0:35:01 They are trade-off cooks, so they hang out with each other while somebody cooks dinner. They eat breakfast there. They have tea there.
0:35:07 They have drinks there in the evening. Their cats are there next to the heat register all day. All hours of the day and night.
0:35:12 And that corner bench is kind of the center of their whole house. And a contractor who wanted to hire them to hire him, who really liked them, who wanted to give them his best advice, looked at that space and said, no, can't do it.
0:35:25 Won't. And so only her determination and her preparation gave her the confidence to say, I would like to hire you, and I think you can do this job, but a corner bench will fit here, and I'd like you to make that happen.
0:35:35 And in the end, they, they loved the project, they bragged about the project, and they agreed with her that corner bench was the right decision.
0:35:42 So when you do your homework, you can stand on your own soapbox and know that you are right. This third mistake, we're going to go through pretty quickly, because I think this is part of the reason you're here.
0:35:53 Making trendy choices for a mid-century house is the wrong choice. And it probably feels like everyone you talk to, all of those contractors, everything on Pinterest, everything on television, certainly, all of HGTV, keeps telling you to follow the latest trend.
0:36:07 They are. The reason for that, again, is the kitchen remodeling industrial in- in- the reason for that is the kitchen remodeling industrial complex.
0:36:17 That is a self-serving cycle that wants to tear out old things. Things and make them new. And new trends is sort of the divi- the driving factor of fast fashion.
0:36:27 It also is the best way for anybody that comes in. A designer like myself, somebody who's designing on a TV show, anyone in a magazine wants to show you a before and after.
0:36:35 They want to put their stamp on the project, they want to show they made a difference, and the easiest way to make a difference is to change something.
0:36:40 that might be splash some white paint on something that was a color before. That might be tape. Hair out something that was there before.
0:36:45 That might be start fresh on a kitchen that didn't really need refreshing, it just needed tweaking. So, when you fill a mid-century house with 20, 25 choices, it'll be bang on trend and look very photo-ready for a few years, and then it'll start to look tired, and then it'll start to look dated, and 
0:37:00 if it was fast fashion, it'll start to wear out, and you're gonna find yourself in the cycle of having to repeat this process.
0:37:05 So, I don't want you to turn your, Could be right now, gorgeously charming, could have been damaged, but we have the potential to put it back, house, into something sad, sterile, and boring.
0:37:19 This, I'm not gonna get into this sort of what not to do too much here, but if you want to take a screen grab of this, no shaker cabinets, not even a slim shaker, I'm getting that question all the time right now.
0:37:26 No subway tile, no brushed nickel fixtures, no shiplap, no fake crown molding, no painting, anything can happen. Hadn't been painted before.
0:37:32 These are not the trick. Instead, you're gonna use the style guide system, and this is gonna help you choose to create finishes that are in line with what the house was originally doing.
0:37:42 Now, there isn't a right or wrong answer here. There is not a set of correct answers for all mid-century houses everywhere, but you're gonna find the right combination of answers that are right for your house and right for you, using them at the third step.
0:37:55 The third the master plan method to distill. This is, by the way, also, it's not just gonna result in the right house, a coherent, pull-together, clean aesthetic that looks like a designer did it for you.
0:38:06 It is also going to be easier, because when you have everything on the internet available to you, that's instant overwhelm.
0:38:13 If you can boil it down to the correct choices that are gonna work right for your house, your style, and your sort of era moment, Thank Thank you.
0:38:19 You can weed out everything that's not possible and have a much simpler process. So how do you figure out your version of mid-century style?
0:38:27 Well, you're going to guide your choice with two factors. Oops. What appeals to you personally and what blends with the era of your home's construction.
0:38:34 So when I teach this, this is, this is the Pinterest bit, this is where we get to play with this.
0:38:38 We begin with Pinterest, with choosing ideas that appeal to us, with things that are fun, colors you like, if you follow the MidModMidWest Pinterest board, you'll see this one as a place to jump off.
0:38:47 It's got 531 pins of kitchen ideas. I've got more for bathroom, bedroom, owner's suite, all these things. But what good is a Pinterest board on its own?
0:38:57 Not a lot. You can't show a Pinterest board to a contractor. They don't have the time for that. You can't really use it to make decisions.
0:39:04 To apply the ideas you might see in someone else's home, to your own home, you need to simplify and focus.
0:39:10 This is actually something I teach in detail in this two-hour workshop. the style guide system, here's a long, a long Google doc to walk you through the process.
0:39:19 But one of the most essential steps along that process is to figure out your mid-century moment. What year or decade in time are we aiming to?
0:39:26 And how much are we preserving a time capsule versus updating sensitively? I'm going to go ahead and assume that we are not necessarily talking about museum-style restoration here, and we're certainly not here to talk about sterilizing a house and painting it entirely white.
0:39:39 oh, Leah said the More Than a Mood board clinic was amazing, loved it. I'm so glad you found it helpful.
0:39:44 Yeah, that really is, the style guide, everything you need to know about that, you've got in that, that two-hour workshop of it, is what is appealing to you.
0:39:51 It's going to walk you through how to set up style shifts, and this is also something I teach inside of Ready to Remodel.
0:39:55 This kind of material palette, for each room, but for the house at large, are going to help you to think about what you have already, maybe an existing wood floor, maybe an existing style of front door, maybe existing brick, and then how new materials are going to play nicely with those, so that the 
0:40:11 whole thing ends up feeling very tied together and appropriate. Now, everything is easier with templates, so I will share those with you.
0:40:17 if you're inside the program, and also, we can take it down to specific materials that you're looking for, but ultimately, the most important thing you can do is this, it's the style sheets, which will help you, as you look for every single product, ruling out 90% of what's out there, and so you're just
0:40:32 looking for one of a few options from each individual supplier that are going to work for you. Again, it's not your fault that this is overwhelming, it is kind of design-wise, and also, it's just the nature of our modern world, but once you've got your style guide set up, you don't have to do the entire
0:40:48 project at once to make it feel cohesive. You can do one room following your style guide, and then carry on rinsing and repeating as you go through, and that's the case for Maria, who had a 19- here we go again, an earlier house with a mid-century middle, a 1915 cottage with a 1960s overhaul and addition
0:41:05 that she had. She wanted to make more mid-century. So this is the secret third option between just letting a contractor do what they want to hiring a designer that's going to charge you an arm and a leg.
0:41:14 You taking yourself through the master plan method is the middle ground, and the easy straightforward path to a regret-proof remodel that won't overwhelm you.
0:41:24 So we've talked about weeding things out, focusing through the first step. First three steps, dream, discover, distill. You do then not come to an answer right away.
0:41:34 I want you to open up possibilities. I want you to widen your scope during the draft phase, and then finally focus it down to the choices you're going to make here.
0:41:42 Let's talk about you've gotten everything together. This is exactly how they do it on a cooking show. Ooh, like, you know, a calm, pleasant cooking show, like Bake Off, not an American fight to the.
0:41:53 That's kind of a cooking show, but the reason they put all their ingredients out in little bowls first is so they don't mess it up.
0:41:58 full disclosure, this is not how I cook, but it is how I plan a remodel. As we think about those options, where to go next, this is where you have the biggest opportunity to meet your dream, where you are, to actually change the way you live in your house.
0:42:13 Because great remodels don't just happen. If you call a contractor and ask them for a new kitchen, odds are they will put in a brand new 2025 set of cabinets in the exact same pattern or a very similar pattern to the kitchen you had before.
0:42:25 I want to check in with you. Are you thinking about changing the layout of your house at all as you remodel?
0:42:30 Now, not in a destructive way, not to throw out what's good, the baby out with the bathwater, but if you aren't considering options to shift the way your house lives, you're not really thinking really looking into everything that's possible.
0:42:42 Now, I'm here, I'm seeing a no layout changes. That's fine. If you, if you feel like that's not necessary, if the house is already living for you perfectly, that's great.
0:42:49 But I want you to consider possibilities because the most effective way to transform your house into your actual home is to adjust, even just to tweak the layout, not just to change how it looks.
0:43:01 Although, you know, aesthetics are important too. I want to warn you against just playing around with sort of layout software options, because those are, I don't even know any names to suggest them to you because I don't use them, but sort of room recipe kind of places that help you plan out different
0:43:17 furniture or art on the walls are going to necessarily sort of think of your house as room by room by room, and I don't want the limits of an app to prevent you from having good ideas, because I think again, you don't have to do it, but I want you to consider layout changes when you plan a remodel.
0:43:35 The things that push you to a remodel often stem from frustrating or outdated floor plans, so you can fix and supercharge your project, not just by giving yourself new cabinets with more drawers in them, but by changing the outlook of your kitchen so that it supports more social space or more collaboration
0:43:52 , than it originally did, because the person it was originally designed for was probably a homemaker who was making and prepping and delivering food by herself in that space, and that is very probably, although not necessarily, not the way you live your life.
0:44:06 So, what I want you to do, another mindset reframe that I hope you can just, like, take this away from today, your house isn't necessarily made up of rooms.
0:44:15 It's made of spaces. And particularly, a mid-century house doesn't need to be made of rooms. It is made of spaces.
0:44:20 There are lines of structure, sure, but you can connect the spaces that work well together and separate the spaces that need more privacy, and that is a much more powerful way to think about it than just, what are we going to do in the living room, what are we going to do in the kitchen, what are we 
0:44:33 going to do in the dining area. When you're thinking about how to push your boundaries, see outside the house that you're used to, I want you to use use, the Goldilocks principle to break up your mental blocks.
0:44:44 Here's an example. This is, by the way, when we do design work, when we prepare a master plan for any of our one-on-one clients, we are always using three as three social space options, three kitchen options, three addition options, three bathroom options, to give our clients a manageable number of possibilities
0:44:59 to consider, and we're organizing them as, sort of, the least you might do, relatively small, small changes to the layout that are going to be less expensive, but also less transformative, up to the most you might do.
0:45:09 Blowing up the ceiling height, shifting a staircase, making big, dramatic changes that are going to cost more, but also give more value, and then allowing, you know, within the bubble of what our clients have told us they're curious about, exploring, and their budget.
0:45:22 That allows you, when you do this for yourself, to double-check the idea that you solution you thought was right. Check something bigger and check something smaller and see if either of those two work better, or could be adapted into and added on to the plan you already had.
0:45:37 So when I teach this, the most important thing to remember about this process is that I want you to literally hit the drawing board.
0:45:45 Hand-drawing, or possibly a loose-form modeling, I also teach people how to use the program SketchUp, but this is the way to think outside of the room structure.
0:45:55 No sort of room planner app is going to give you the freedom that even a bad, you know, you don't have to be an artist here.
0:46:02 Graph paper and a ruler or chicken scratch layouts are all going to be more powerful than just sort of thinking about what the house is and then moving one wall or opening up one little doorway.
0:46:15 After you've explored possibilities, you'll focus it down into what you're actually going to do. And this is, you know, our goal from the beginning is a confident and focused remodel process.
0:46:25 So this phase, this final step of the master plan method, it's not called done. It's called develop because it does kind of go on.
0:46:34 And this is also where we control the budget. Now, a lot of people, start their remodel process by looking at the bank right now.
0:46:43 Or maybe looking at what they can save and what they might plan for the next five years and thinking about the bottom line.
0:46:48 And that's totally understandable. I also don't want to plan a remodel I can't afford. And I don't want to plan a remodel for anyone that I work with that they can't afford.
0:46:55 But ultimately, you control the cost of a remodel not by saying you need it to cost X, but by adjusting the size scope of work, and the intensity level of the work.
0:47:05 Anything else is just wishful thinking. And so many people rush past this, they'll try to fast track it by asking me, or asking a contractor, sort of, how much kitchen can I get for $50,000?
0:47:17 Which, yeah, ultimately that is the answer we're trying to get to. But you're never going to get there by asking if somebody else's remodel costs X, and can you do that to your house?
0:47:26 Because it's not a one-time to one translation, and they don't have the same priorities, needs, and values that you do.
0:47:31 Taking a little bit of time, though, to do this process, even if you do it incredibly fast, in a weekend, even, or over the course of a month, or a year, it's going to give you infinite benefit in terms of priorities, and knowing what you can ask for as you go through the process.
0:47:47 In the end, it's always faster to plan first rather than dive in and then realize what as you have a whole bunch of unanswered questions.
0:47:52 And also, it is cheaper. Let me just say, when you're working with a general contractor, you will have a contract, that's where their name comes from, and if you make a change to the plan after you've signed that contract, even if that change is to do less, you will still pay a fee for changing your 
0:48:09 mind. A change order fee. That's, I mean, that's necessary for them because they are changing their plans, adjusting what they're going to do, that's causing them to do trouble to do less.
0:48:17 So, having a very good right-sized idea of what you want to do from the beginning will also save you money, whether you're spending more or less than you'd originally thought.
0:48:25 So, you're going to create your own remodeling style, and you're going to set it up so that you can tackle it in whatever order.
0:48:31 This is an example I love from a past Ready to Remodel student who actually did her own kitchen, pretty much DIY'd it, in three distinct phases over There's several.
0:48:39 years. She was one of my earliest Ready to Remodel students, came through the program in Fall 2021, and she began by doing just a little of adjustment of the L of her kitchen, and then putting in a temporary piece of furniture to serve as an island.
0:48:51 And then eventually she came back and put in an island, and at the same time put a gorgeous skylight above it.
0:48:56 And then in the end, she came back and did the rest of the room, putting in more built-in pantry storage.
0:49:00 This is a middle phase where it was just more shelving units. Peace. But at every stage along the process, she knew what she was working towards, and she felt great about it.
0:49:07 In the end, it looked exactly like she'd dreamed, and she'd been living in an improved kitchen from the first year.
0:49:13 So, as I said, nothing is more expensive than changing your mind mid-remodel, so we want to think it through first, by assembling all the possibilities from the draft phase, and then creating your own prioritized travel guide.
0:49:27 through this project, setting what matters most to you, and what matters less, what needs to happen first, and in what order, and then who you're going to work with to get it done.
0:49:38 I generally use a metaphor of levels for this, so a level one project is something you buy and stick on the house, replacing one light fixture with another, or maybe just a weekend-long project.
0:49:48 Getting into a bigger project that you handle yourself, maybe with some subcontractors, this is a level two, and you could remodel an entire house, transform it over time using a number of level two projects.
0:49:57 If you're going to hire a general contractor and just have it be their problem, that's a level three project, and that, kitchens are generally level three projects, but the thing to remember is, choosing a level ties in with budget and timing.
0:50:10 It's slower and cheaper to do it yourself, and faster and more expensive to have someone else do, but it doesn't actually have to be the same answer for every part of your house, either.
0:50:19 When you've got the big-picture vision, when you have master-planned, you can choose to hire a contractor to do your kitchen, and three other bits of built-ins around the house, and then have a friend who's handy come in, or a handyman contractor who's a little slower, but, much less expensive, and take
0:50:34 care of some less necessary projects over time, that all match what you did in the first place. Because you thought it out through from the beginning.
0:50:40 So, here's basically the point of today, is that I want you to believe that it's possible, not only for your mid-century house to be remodeled in a great way, but for you to lead this process.
0:50:50 And if you take one thing away from today, it's that it is completely doable to create a great remodel for your mid-century home, and you don't need a design degree, you don't need to hire a designer, and you don't need to be a designer to make it happen, you just need to think it through step-by-step
0:51:05 , and you don't need an infinite budget. It's possible to make really, really lovely choices for your home on a shoestring budget over time, or to spend a little bit more to get a different result, but it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg.
0:51:17 So the question is, have you got enough? Do you feel like you know how to apply the master plan method to your own remodel.
0:51:23 We have run through basically the core, the philosophy. We have everything you need to know right now today. I hope that this feels empowering to you.
0:51:31 I would love to know, actually. How are you feeling right now? If you want to let me know in the comments.
0:51:34 Are you feeling like you've got a little bit more of a handle on it? You've got a bit more of a vision of the step-by-step process, because I really hope that a class like this gets you feeling like you've got new ideas.
0:51:45 Take your breath. You can handle this in the right order. You know where to begin on the process, and if that's the case, then my mission here is accomplished.
0:51:54 But if you need more support than that, I also have assistance for you in the form of workshops and lessons, like, Leah called out that she really enjoyed the More Than a Mood board workshop.
0:52:04 But I also have this, the Ready to Remodel program. And I created this program a few years after I had started doing one-on-one projects for people to give everyone that wanted it the ability to DIY a design for their own home that they could lead with confidence and clarity and make the most of their
0:52:20 budget, whatever it was. So inside of Ready to Remodel, we go through every step of what I've just talked about.
0:52:26 Over a 12-month period, you can take any amount of time you want, fast or slow, and you can follow this at your own pace.
0:52:34 You know what? I'm just gonna really quickly pop over and, rather than give you, sort of, five slides of what's included in this program, I'm just gonna show you a couple of the pieces.
0:52:44 So let me switch my screen. This is the core of the self-study master plan method. It's got three components. This is what you need.
0:52:53 If you're gonna, if you've got a weekend or a month to spend on this process, stick in here inside the master plan method.
0:53:00 Follow these steps. This This is going to include. Let's see. I'll just click in here. this is going to include easy bite-sized formula.
0:53:10 I'm going to walk you through what's necessary, what you need in order to get through the dream process. And remember, dreaming is not just about a wishlist.
0:53:18 It's about getting to the sort of core why for what you're trying to do and what's important about it. And I'm going to ask you some questions.
0:53:25 Questions to dig deeper than, the kitchen is shabby, I want a new kitchen. We want to get to things like, the kitchen is cut off, and so I can't see what the kids are doing when I'm putting together dinner, and so they're getting more screen time that I want.
0:53:37 We need a kitchen remodel so that our family can spend more time together. Or, the kitchen is shabby, I'm actually a little ashamed to have friends over, but we want to be doing more social hosting.
0:53:47 I'm just not getting to know our neighbors in the way that we could build a deeper community because I feel a little unsure about having them into the space.
0:53:54 Or, the kitchen doesn't have enough co-working space, so one or the other of our two partners has to make dinner every night, and we don't get the core socializing time between each other that we were looking for.
0:54:04 We're feeling divided as a couple because our kitchen doesn't support team cooking. These are whys that are going to drive you towards a remodel that matters, and not just one that looks good.
0:54:14 So, in each of these cases, I'm going to ask you these questions. I also, you can listen to them as audiobooks, if you're a ready-to-remodel podcast listener, and you can also go through these little workbooks, which will summarize what's going on, and then ask you the kind of questions that you need
0:54:27 to get to these deeper core whys. As you go through each of these lessons, you'll get a deeper and deeper insight into what's important to you.
0:54:35 And then we'll talk about the discovery process, and lastly, like I said, this is about knowing what's important to your house.
0:54:41 Now, I will teach you how to draw a floor plan, because you need to have a floor plan in order to think about design decisions, but I'm also going to talk to you about how to bring more people into, into your process, how to understand what's going on with the building code, how to reach out to experts
0:54:55 who can help you to get the information that you need to understand it, and then we'll talk about design decisions.
0:55:00 Instilling your personal style. This is actually, this is where, if you're going fast, stick here in this simple, sort of, bite-sized lesson that's going to be just 12 minutes.
0:55:09 If you want to go a little deeper, I highly recommend that you go straight to our, oop, not this one.
0:55:14 You go straight to that free workshop, which will be included, it's a paid workshop generally, but it's included inside of Ready to Remodel, on the morning of the No Mood Board, that'll walk you through the entire style guide system, from setting up sort of your, your mid-century moment, you'll recognize
0:55:30 some of these pieces, to thinking about what, where you can go for resources to get vintage examples, to thinking about what's going on with Pinterest, and then boiling down product selection, searching for more ideas and identifying how to organize and store your ideas.
0:55:46 So that you can really keep everything moving logically, rather than just getting overwhelmed by an ever-larger Pinterest board. Eventually moving your way through templates that can help you set up your style guide, and finally, taking you through to the actual product selection, style guides for every
0:56:02 room, and finally, product selection for everything you're going to pick in your process, how to keep that organized with templates and guides.
0:56:09 As we think about, those first three steps, dreaming, discovering, distilling, they take you to a place where you can think about options.
0:56:16 And, I also, within this program, oops, my face is in the way of things I want to click on. I also, within this program, I'm going to walk you through a bunch of my own backlog of materials, so you can watch some of those design clinics on kitchens, on owner suites, and take, I'll take you through everything
0:56:32 I, I believe, about designing those spaces well. I also have handy little style guides for what's going on in bathroom and sleeping spaces.
0:56:40 What's a good idea for a kitchen design? Easy, step-by-step, sort of, methodology. And then, also, I have pulled together material guides and layout guides.
0:56:51 Like, here, I'm gonna navigate straight to corner dining nooks. Not everybody needs one, but if you want one, you want one.
0:56:58 And there's a bunch of different ways to do them, even with built-in storage. If your kitchen is short on storage, you can hide some right under the eating space.
0:57:04 And you can fit in a larger table when you push it against a corner like this, as well. So, okay.
0:57:10 Once you've gone through all of these, you've got access to things like my design idea library, a bunch of trackers and tools and things that are really helpful.
0:57:18 This is gonna give you a lot of what you need for So, if this is what you're looking for, this free class I just gave you is like the MapQuest directions.
0:57:26 Hi, fellow millennials. Remember MapQuest? Sort of, go, turn right at this road, proceed for an hour and a half, get off at this exit.
0:57:34 But if you're looking for more of a guidebook, this is what the Ready to Remodel program is. And you can join it this weekend for pay in full for just $6.50, or you can set out a monthly payment plan.
0:57:44 For $54 starting today. And it will do more than just give you lessons and guides and practical stuff. It will help you get on the same page as your partner and minimize disagreements.
0:57:54 It will help you plan a more efficient remodel that you can get done the way you want. And it will help you feel more in control of the process all the way along and like what you get better when you're done.
0:58:04 You can learn everything you need to know about this program right now at midmod-midwest.com. Get ready if you want to peek over there at this moment.
0:58:10 but if you're looking for more personalized support, handholding from me, hi, I also offer that in a ready to remodel plus format.
0:58:17 So in this case, we also have live calls once a month. Every first Monday of the month, we have an architect office hours call.
0:58:24 I held an open version of one of these earlier this week on Monday and I shared the recording of that on the podcast this morning.
0:58:31 If you want to give it a listen, this is an opportunity for you to ask a question, share on your mind, get a sense of community with other people.
0:58:37 And let me just share, this is cherry picking a little bit, but this was maybe one of my favorite examples.
0:58:43 We have, by the way, not only do you get the live calls, you get access to every call we've ever had.
0:58:47 And there have been how many years of these? my face is in the way, but going back to 2021. One.
0:58:54 Wow. That is a lot. Okay. But here we go. Office hours, calls. This is a particularly good one that we had a, we had somebody share an example of what they had done for their own house.
0:59:04 That was really impressive. am I going to find that here? Pop it up in my own face. We talked about fencing and privatization.
0:59:14 Oh yeah. So, okay. All right. I'm not promising you've joined ready to remodel to be able to make, create a model of your house like this.
0:59:19 Full disclosure, the homeowner who made this model works in graphic design, but they also have a really cool house to start with.
0:59:25 But we were looking for different options of screen walls and they were able to show us what they were talking about.
0:59:29 And we workshopped it in real time to create a little bit more alignment, a little bit more congruence and create a plan that really worked.
0:59:35 And then later on that same call, we had a brand new homeowner or a new homeowner. To the process who, had just purchased a house where all the brick had been painted and he was asking, you know, what can we do about painted brick?
0:59:46 I gave him some of my standard resources, pointed him towards some internet sources. I like some inspiration, a couple of Instagram accounts that have done this process, but then another homeowner on the call was actually able to chip in and describe what he's been doing in his own home.
1:00:01 You can see, the paint removal going on right here, and he was able to share what it smells like, how long it took for the house to air out, how much elbow grease it took, the specific products he had tried and liked and didn't like, and now that's a resource that's there forever inside the program, 
1:00:16 information I didn't personally have, and that's kind of one of my favorite things about the office hours calls. They are just so empowering.
1:00:23 So, you can get your questions answered by me, an architect. You also feel free to feel a sense of community that's going to help you go forward, and one more thing we offer for the Ready to Remodel Plus students is that we do a Layout Buster Challenge Workshop every now and then.
1:00:36 Starting right now, we're about to do more than monthly calls. We're going to do a call every two weeks through the beginning of December, and one of those calls will be a Layout Challenge Workshop, where I will ask you to bring in your floor plan, and we will do a layout improvement option, in real 
1:00:51 time, on the call for what you could do in your house, and you can see here's an example of me scribbling in yellow over somebody's floor plan.
1:00:56 This is a really fun example because they came in believing they had very limited options, because of an existing condition of a screen porch that blocked off some of the windows, that they confessed on the call they were planning to take out, which allowed us to immediately blow out the scale of their
1:01:10 kitchen, and again, they were extroverts, hosters, they wanted a space to gather community, and we were able to create a big island design that they didn't believe was possible, figuring out structural issues as we went, because of, you know, just knowing what's going on with the roofline, and being 
1:01:24 familiar with them from multiple calls in the past. This is the kind of revelation that we get to have over and over again on these calls, which is just so, so much fun.
1:01:33 So, ultimately, if you're, if you're looking for more support, I encourage you to join the Ready to Remodel Plus program.
1:01:40 this is the way that I can sort of be face-to-face with you on a regular basis, learn a little bit about your house, and where you can find a sense of community among other people who are currently making choices for their mid-century homes at the same time.
1:01:50 It's so much fun. And just to encourage you to, to get off the fence and start working, for anybody that signs up this weekend, so now through Sunday night, a bonus one-on-one Zoom house audit is on the table.
1:02:04 people use these calls for all sorts of things. Sometimes people will schedule their call right at the beginning of joining Ready to Remodel, and then I can use it to sort of point them in the right direction to the resources, to the fast track that they're looking for.
1:02:13 Other people like to save them to use when them at a time when they're going to be able to get reinforcement, advice, a double check whenever they need it.
1:02:21 these are available to the general public, but they're a paid service. So if you want one for free, why not get the support and the system and the master plan method that you've been looking for all started this weekend.
1:02:31 So enroll by September 28th, that's tomorrow, for a free house audit, and There you can do that. by the way, I want you to be totally happy with this process.
1:02:43 If you sign up for Ready to Remodel and figure out it's not for you, you've got two weeks to back out of the program.
1:02:46 That's just fine. I don't want anything holding you back from making this decision right now, right away. So what happens next?
1:02:55 If you want to go ahead and do it, it's so easy. You just go, click on this, the link you'll find on this website ready to go.
1:02:59 Ready to Remodel, oh, slash ready. you'll go to a quick payment form. It'll take you through the process and you'll immediately be popped into the program.
1:03:07 You've got instant access to all of the recorded materials. And then Rebecca will get in touch with you on Monday to let you know if you have access to a one-to-one call and all the other resources you can get access to Ready to Remodel Plus or the self-study version.
1:03:20 And I think you're going to find this incredibly and helpful and empowering. And we'll start right away with a mid-mod or mod squad that is going to kick off now.
1:03:27 It's going to kick off on the first Monday of October and have calls every two weeks right through December. Sort of fast tracking your process and getting you all the support you need.