INVISIBLE benefits of design: it's more than tips and tricks

How a master plan can help you plan your remodel depends on your house. And how you want to live in it. But there are some common benefits that I see over and over. 

In Today's Episode You'll Hear:

• Why doing the most won’t always get you the best outcome. 
• When to dream big in order to right size your choices. 
• How the process of design can get everyone on the same page. 

For Buzzsprout

Get the full show notes with all the trimmings at https://www.midmod-midwest.com/2305

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Transcript

00:00
Design solutions, tips, tricks, strategies are invaluable to solving the problems of your house, but the design process, and specifically following the Master Plan method has logistical, financial and even psychological benefits, things like streamlining your whole project work it more efficiently, Goldilocks-ing yourself into the right scale of a firm model to meet your needs without doing too much and spending too much clearing up communication between you and a partner and getting the confidence you need to find the perfect contractor to partner with.
 
00:31
As you consider making a change to your house, how can you make sure that the process you follow not just solves your problems but also allows you to tap into some of those broader benefits. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mode remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I'm your host, della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, and you're listening to Episode 2305.
 
00:56
So I've been talking on and off in the beginning of episodes of the podcast for the last couple of months about the YouTube channel that I have revived, and I've been using the YouTube channel to give more pithy, punchy, how to advice than I often give here on the podcast. 

I'm not going to repeat that right now, because in the most recent three videos, I've just made for the YouTube channel, I'd been making a series of case studies. So I'm sharing floor plan images, perspective sketches from three recent projects. To share some how to advice, I chose three case studies very intentionally to be situations where which remind me of many past projects.
 
01:37
A good example of how to fit clever, small space solutions to live large inside of a very small footprint without adding on. 

An example of how to plan a remodel that changes the layout and function, in some cases rather significantly, without losing all of the original existing built ins. 

And a third example, which was all about a time capsule house that was in a great location, but actually had always been mid-century traditional, and the new owners just really wanted to give it a new lease on life. They were planning to gut and demo the main floor.
 
02:05
The main floor didn't have a lot of mid-century modern charm anyway, and so we were planning for them how they could bring in mid-century modern charm that it maybe never had, and also really take advantage of the site and fit it to their house. Each of these, I thought, had a lot of practical examples, and their situations that come up over and over again, a link to the link to these videos in the show notes, you can find that at midmod-midwest.com/2305 

but in each case, as I was sharing the sort of how to functionality, the design tips and tricks, I started to think about the other benefits that had come out of the mid-century, Master Plan process for these clients and those benefits actually are also things that have recurred again and again.
 
02:52
As I've worked with multiple clients on multiple homes, I've seen them, I've known that they've come to me for specific benefits and given those intentionally, or I've just seen them, derive them almost as a side effect of the process. Get more confident, get more clear, be able to use the materials and the and the decisions that they've made to find the right contractor to work with and match up perfectly, or to solve a disagreement that they've been carrying between them for quite a while as a couple about the scale or scope of something, or the style of something, or just to figure out how to do the least. One of the fun benefits of the way that my personal business design model works is that we're completely scale agnostic.
 
03:34
My interest in helping you find the right solution, whether it's the largest thing you could do or the smallest, most surgical strike tweak you could make to your house. I'll spend the same amount of time thinking about that. And doesn't cost any more or less, depending on which scale you choose. That's not the most important thing to me, as it is in some cases, for designers who are taking a commission on the construction cost. So in each of these, I thought I had said all I needed to say in a fun, pithy, punctual way to YouTube, and then I just kept thinking about those other more nebulous design benefits, something you won't see in the remodel outcome, something that won't show up in final photos, and may or may not even come out in the bottom line, it's kind of impossible to compare what could have been to what is.
 
04:23
But absolutely, I've watched the transformation, the confidence, the happiness, the relaxation in my clients demeanors as I've worked with them from first meeting to final handoff. And I think those are elements of design that are worth considering, and that when you if you're listening to this and you're thinking about work you want to do on your house, however you're going to plan for that work, whether you're going to work with me, whether you're going to sign up and join the ready to remodel sort of homeowner coaching program, or you're going to work with anybody else, a contractor or designer, figure it all out yourselves and DIY it.
 
05:00
Thinking about how going through some design steps can get you some of these non-visual design outcomes is something that I wish for everyone. So I'm not going to repeat what I said in those YouTube videos too much, because they are their own form of content. You can go check them out on YouTube. You could listen to them alone if you want to just play them in the background if you're driving right now, you can. I'm definitely not encouraging anyone to watch YouTube videos while you drive, but anyway, you can. You can listen to that. You can watch them. You can check them out on their own time. But in each case, I'm going to kind of go case by case. I'll go in the same order that they are of on YouTube and talk about the project as a house, the owners needs for design problem solved, and then what came out of the process.
 
05:45
That design quality experience that we got that's more than the design solutions, that's more than where the cabinets go, or how built ins are organized, or getting things up off the floor in a small bathroom, wall mounted cabinets or tricks like that. And it's more than how it looks. It's how it ended up making the owners feel as they went through the process and as they are continuing to go through the process. So in the first house, what they came to us trying to achieve. It's an interesting like this is kind of a tale of a tale of three time capsule houses.
 
06:23
The first one is maybe the least sort of precious. It's just a mid-century modest house has been through a couple of owners. No one had ever done anything too dramatic to it. It had its original kitchen, it had a very lightly updated bathroom but hadn't had only sort of substituted 90s finishes for original ones, and hadn't solved any of the space planning problems, and this house was, as I say in the YouTube video, I think actually the smallest, the snuggest footprint of a house I've ever actually worked on. It had it is a three bedroom, one bathroom house in its original layout, but it has the smallest scale of rooms by inches and feet of any I'd seen.
 
06:59
The bedrooms barely hold a full size bed. The bathroom barely has room to turn around. They use one of their bedrooms as a dressing room because it's just so, so snug, so in the design tips and tricks methodology, what we were looking at, you know, when they came to us to solve some problems in a way that they just couldn't think around a corner about it. And so our focus was to make the most of small spaces, in some cases by clever uses of built ins, in some cases by rearranging spaces. We did consider shifting the bathroom completely out of its existing footprint into the footprint of a bedroom. We borrowed space from the basement. We did consider a big addition. We traded in the social spaces more or less openness for a bigger sense of cross through view, fit in storage, everywhere we could.
 
06:59
But what we were really trying to do was test out the concept of how we could do the least, what was the most effect they could get with the least amount of design moves and construction dollars spent. And the theory, the hypothesis that we were kind of trying to prove for them with them, was that they did not need to add on any extra space in order to make that happen.
 
06:59
Now, the way that we approach that, my team and I was actually to show them two yeses and one no of that hypothesis, we showed them two possibilities, which remained inside the existing footprint of the house, and one where we removed a former sunroom and turned it into an owner's bedroom and sort of dining eat in backyard den. Addition, it's always possible in a case like this that the owner will go for the big solution I show people often a solution that is at, or even in some cases, just past their stated limit, because sometimes they do, then go for it. Sometimes that's the one they want. Sometimes you, when it's you are like, I didn't think that this was going to be worth it to me, but now that I've seen it, I want to wait another year, save another year, and have this dream scenario, but it also really serves, and I often speak about it in this way, as a Goldilocks style anchoring, of that's too much. This is not enough or close. And the thing in the middle is, right now that can be done in a manipulative way.
 
06:59
I think anchor price anchoring is something that sales marketing does all the time. They'll show you an expensive option, a cheap option, and then you're meant to sort of choose the reasonable option in the middle. So I take my responsibility as a designer very seriously that I'm not trying to trick anyone into anything with this. Because again, as I've said before, we use a fixed price, fixed fee design model, so it doesn't actually matter to me from a financial standpoint, what anyone chooses, and as my sort of ethics and ethos as a designer is that we don't need too much. We need right sized spaces.
 
09:52
I mean, the whole reason I have made a career out of working in mid-century houses that I think we don't need to live in McMansions. We don't need new green builds in. Big fields on the far flung edge of town, we can actually make the most of the existing footprints of mid-century houses or little tweaks, little modifications, little additions to them. So my goal when I'm trying to work with a client, when I'm when I'm having my first couple of meetings with them, is always to extract what their comfort level is, what their budget, what their lifestyle need is, and then give them that framing of options One, two and three bracketed very closely around their particular desires, scale, need, expansion process.
 
10:31
So I was really pleased with this one. I was not at all surprised that these clients ended up choosing us a combination of schemes, one and two, largely playing games with the two of them. We showed them like dramatically different built in styles in the two but I was very sure that they weren't going to choose the third scheme. But I did want to show them just so that they could know as they went forward, they would never have to sit in their beautiful, but very snug, perfect little jewel box of a finished remodel. And think I don't know. Is it too small? Do we have enough space between here and the sofa? Should we have just pushed out into the backyard? They don't have to worry about that because they have studied that option and ruled it out, and that confidence doesn't have $1 value, doesn't have a price point, they will inevitably save money. I mean, if they could go and get a contractor's price on what is the big version cost, what is this version cost? And find out the difference.
 
11:25
But the just the confidence of knowing you've made the right choice is really the point. If, by the way, you're curious about what is the smallest, snuggest layout that we've ever done, pop over to the website and you can see the floor plans, some sketches this. I mean, compare it to yours. If you think your house is smaller and snugger than this one, contact me, because I will then make yours the smallest, snuggest house I've ever seen in a mid-century context. But so far, this one's it, the second house we ended up doing a case study for. I thought I chose it because I love original mid-century Time Capsule houses this again, I'm sort of going into the superlative here.
 
12:03
This house had about the nicest original built ins that I've ever seen in a Midwestern, modest builder, grade house, just so well executed built ins all over the place, a full kitchen, U shaped design from the built in kitchen, office desk to wrapping around wall oven Peninsula. Had a, had a, oh, I really loved this. The house had a whole house vacuum system so you could, like, hit a little kick plate button under the peninsula in the built in cabinetry, and a tiny vacuum would suck dust that you had swept from the room into a gap under the kick plate and out of your life so you didn't have to bend down and put it into a dustpan, just all of these little clever, smart space solutions. The hardware was in great shape. The woodwork was in great shape. The whole thing was beautiful.
 
12:52
And the homeowners who were taking over the house of her 100 year old mother, as she passed on, they were not eager to wipe the house clean and start from scratch, although they also really wanted to personalize it and make it suit their needs. So they needed to change the layout without destroying the original features. That's the reason I chose this as a good project for a video case study, and I wanted to show the design solutions we came up to make that possible, particularly in the kitchen. We did just that. We figured out which parts of the kitchen cabinets could stay perfectly intact and then which other parts could perhaps be salvaged and relocated into other spots as we opened up some wall space and considered, again, bracketing, not in this case, the buildability scale, but how much open or closed, open plan or closed, separate rooms they wanted to preserve from the original mid-century layout.
 
13:45
And we showed them three different schemes, one of which was quite closed off, one of which was quite open kitchen, exposed to the living spaces and then allowed them to see what worked for them in a case like that, from my perspective as the designer, I usually don't know where the client's going to fall. I want to show them three wildly different scenarios of openness to see what they're going to respond to. And often the clients themselves don't really know until they have seen it. So because we don't have X ray vision and we can't see through existing walls, it's really helpful to see design sketches to visualize that sort of a choice.
 
14:17
Those were the things; the reasons I picked this for a case study. But in the end, as I was discussing what was really valuable about our design process in the house, what came out of it was our hunt for where to put an entirely new room inside the house. They knew they didn't want an addition. They didn't want to add onto the footprint, and, in fact, their lot size was so small, we couldn't but they did need to add they didn't want to lose any of the other rooms. They didn't want to sacrifice a bedroom. They didn't want to give up the pretty den or cut up the living room. But they, in their current house, have a nice, closed away office with two computer monitors that sit on desks, that they can keep their stuff around, printers, paperwork, it lives there. They go and close the door.
 
15:00
And they wanted a new to repeat that space into the new house, and it didn't exist. So they came to me with a category of idea that I often find that homeowners have, sort of they will be looking, maybe they're just in the house buying process. They'll look at a house and the realtor will suggest something, or they'll look at it and they'll have a first big idea. We should double the space in this house by taking off the roof and building a second floor onto this ranch house. We should, in this case, cut a new staircase up into the attic, which has some standing room in it, and we'll put a whole new room up there. Maybe a guest room and an office in the attic. Why not? While we're at it?
 
15:43
Sometimes people will also think this is we should put on a very large addition because we need three new rooms, and they can't imagine how they could fit them into the existing footprint. And they'll assume that they need to double the size of the house or put a big put a big game room into the backyard. These big solutions are often the first sort of sketch outline of solving a problem, but they are also often very destructive of mid-century character like taking the roof off of a house and putting a second floor onto a ranch is something that contractors often suggest to homeowners. It is, in fact, now that I think of it, the very first mid-century house design project I ever did, which I've talked about in countless webinars and master classes and sort of how origin stories of this business is a college friend of my sister and her husband were buying their first home, and it was a modest little ranch that didn't have quite enough space and a wrong configuration of space.
 
16:45
And they talked to a contractor about it, and he said, Oh yeah, we can solve that. We'll just make this a whole first floor that has kitchen, living room, three bedrooms, bathroom. This can be the social floor, and we'll put all the bedrooms upstairs, and we'll just, we'll just give it another floor. It'll be great. And I, I heard about this through the gossip network for my sister, and just thought that is so much more house than they need, that is going to cost so much more than they want to spend. I talked to them about it briefly and just felt like they were really being pushed into a too big vision by their contractor. And I ended up sort of flinging myself in front of the moving vehicle of their construction process and saying, let me show you some design solutions.
 
17:21
And we ended up coming up with a very much more modest addition, pushing off the main floor into the back and reconfiguring the layout on the main space turned out to be a much more efficient, effective and livable solution for them. So now they've got their kids bedrooms right off the living room. Everyone can sort of play into the den, be easily monitored. It's wonderful for childhood. They've got their owner suite still on the main floor, where they can be close to their kids, but like in a social hosting area, anyway. Long story short, I've talked about that project in other places, but it was, what if we just thought about design options instead of making the big, obvious move first, without considering anything huge benefits.
 
18:04
And so this house, it turned out to be not just a case study of how to preserve the built ins, but it is a perfect example of how to think around and beyond the first obvious big move. And as I say, in the case study video their thought that they should move up into the attic was perfectly logical. The attic itself had some headroom. Seemed like it was big enough. It seemed like the only obvious place to put an office. And so we did that full justice.
 
18:33
We did a full code study. We figured out what we would need to do in order to get up there safely. How insulation space, because the attic was completely uninsulated, would take the roof line down on the inside, where we could place a stairwell that could go up with proper code compliance, how it would feel connected to the social spaces of the house. Would it sort of destroy the existing main floor plan? Where could we slip a staircase in? We studied and found two very effective options that worked with the existing structure and wouldn't be too expensive and destructive in a relative way to do. But I could tell that that was it was. It was the big, obvious first move, and I could tell that it probably had a better outcome that we could go for.
 
19:15
So the thing I suggested to them was actually a bunch of little niches where we could sneak or secrete an office space for the two of them, kind of hiding in plain sight around the house. We might have been able to fit it into the front hall, into existing coat closets. We might have been able to tuck it into a corner of the living music room in a way that they could be sort of open when in use and closed away as full height built ins when not. And we even suggested a place where they could fit it into their semi-finished basement, if desired, still a run of stairs away. I was also not wild about the idea of them moving into a house that they wanted to age in place in where we're going to do a full remodel in a bathroom to make it accessible and then having to go up a straight run of stairs in order to get to their office every day. That feels like one month you spent in a walking cast you don't get to go to your computer anymore.
 
20:04
Is not an ideal solution, but the best way to resolve these things is to fully study that idea, to take it seriously and see if it can prove worthwhile. In the end, they took the two attic solutions that we thought were most effective and showed them to their contractor, got some pricing on it, and found out that it is pretty eye openingly expensive to add on new mid-century ranch space into an attic that's never been finished before. So they rolled that out, and then they came back to us a couple of months later with the perfect solution to repurpose and save and salvage existing built ins in their laundry sort of mudroom, which was, again, this house was filled with gorgeous built ins. Was a really nice laundry mudroom, right off the kitchen, right off the garage, close to everything. And they ended up proposing a design that we then refined for them into a beautiful setup for some living space, some working space, all adjacent to each other. And I just thought it ended up being not just a case study for preserving buildings, but a case study for taking the big first idea and giving it justice, doing it justice as a design concept, but then also identifying the complexities, the two bigness of the first big idea, and boiling it back down again to what is really important about this. What are we trying to achieve? What's the non-negotiable element of this? We need an office. We need a place for two computer monitors.
 
21:25
But that actually doesn't need to move us up into the attic. And if we can't move up into the attic, that doesn't mean we have to give up the two computer monitors, we just have to find a different place for them to go. So this, to me, is the not the design outcome, but the design process really serving in this case and for these folks, they have just gone from sure that they liked this house but not even sure how to describe what they liked about it, to feeling really well versed in mid-century features and feeling really confident and choosing a contractor, finding a contractor that they were able to sort of say, here's what our bottom line is. We love these cabinets, and we want to change the layout without losing them and finding the person who was willing to say yes and really give them that sort of improv night yes and response. That is exactly what you want from a great contractor, homeowner pairing.
 
22:22
So now they are going to be able to salvage and rework their existing built ins into beautiful new solutions, and the house is going to probably feel very much like nothing ever happened to it, except that it's perfectly suited to them and their needs, as if it was designed for them, because it was the third case. Again, I picked it up. I was going to kind of do tale of two time capsule houses, and now it's turned into three. This was the time capsule house that was mid-century traditional. And I wanted to use an example of what you do when, when you're kind of starting from scratch on interiors. And you're going to try to put Mid-century Modern choices into a new build remodel, where you're starting from scratch on kitchens, starting from scratch on bathrooms, you're changing the layout so much that you're going to lose your original features and quality.
 
23:09
That video very much, ends up being about what's up, what's wrong with a mid-century traditional house when it's trying, when it was always trying to look like something it really wasn't quite. And in this case, it actually doesn't just have mid-century traditional fake black shutters on the outside of the brick structure, but it also has a very old fashioned division of spaces cut off kitchen, a separate sort of casual eat in breakfast room that doesn't have good views or a nice light, and then all the sort of nice parts of the house that face the big, gorgeous view of the water that's behind it. The reason this the new owners are choosing this house were only for the sort of like entertaining formal living room space that they are not a formal living room family.
 
23:55
So we really needed to change a lot of things about the flow, the layout, even the structure of the house, and that meant starting from scratch on our built ins, on our design details. So check out that video if you want to see some of the ways that we tried to bake in mid-century modern ideas to those features. But ultimately, this couple is there is a bit of unique case. He is actually a contractor and came to us looking because he was realizing that he was working on a new style of house mid-century was not his typical contracting style. And he wanted to make sure he was getting those details right.
 
24:33
But the two of them identified together that he is a big personality. He likes to see an idea and see it through. He talks fast thinks fast has an idea, likes it and doesn't like it almost before it can even be explained and sort of conceptualized to her. And so he's jumping five steps along. This is feasible. This isn't feasible. Let's do this. And she's like, Wait, what are we talking about?
 
24:56
It's an interesting actual in one couple the embodiment of what often can happen in the best nature of kind of a homeowner getting a little pushed around by their contractor who sees things very practically, who's trying to do things the efficient way, the way they've done it before, follow a past success to a second success, and can kind of steamroll a homeowner who doesn't have as much confidence, doesn't have the vocabulary, doesn't have the building experience to know what's going to work and what doesn't work. And in this case, it was all happening in one couple, and they were very aware of it.
 
25:30
That means that they wanted to externalize their design process, and this is something that I think they probably could have done for themselves, but at the shorthand for it was just to hand off the design responsibility to me, and that was, you know, great, easy, obvious solution, bring in a mediator, a third party, so in a way of acting a little bit as a couples counselor, a coach, a therapist, but also solving design problems. But this is something that actually comes up a lot of the time in a couple that's not as dramatically different. There's often someone who is more interested in a remodel process than their partner, who has been thinking about it for longer, who maybe grew up in a handier DIY or family, and just feels like they kind of get it. What is buildable, what is plausible, what is logical.
 
26:17
And their partner doesn't see things the same way doesn't visualize the same way, doesn't have the same facility with the ins and outs of construction. This can really create an imbalance in the way that you can talk about possibilities, weigh the pros and cons. Agree on something, and it's something I encounter quite a lot as I talk to clients. In fact, I just took a call today with a prospective Master Plan client for the future who it's not that she and her husband, in this case, she's the person who's feeling like she's got a little bit more skin in the game, and she wants to bring in another voice to make sure that his perspective is being heard.
 
26:53
She just has spent more time thinking about what they might do with their future home, a house they already own, but can't live in yet, and he's been too busy to engage in the process. So it feels to them like any process they start now together would either need him to spend a lot of time and energy to catch up, to do the imagination stages, to do the visualization, to consider pros and cons and possibilities, to research things he likes, or they need to even the playing field by being able to look at and talk about and see a set of drawings that have been prepared for them that include some of their ideas and needs that they can then have a new, fresh conversation about on an equal footing.
 
27:33
So one of the benefits of design that does, I was a lot of the other things I've been talking about, you can explore your big first idea seriously and then challenge yourself to come up with alternatives for it. You can Goldilocks yourself into your own right sized remodel by intentionally bracketing your own choices. And this is something I teach to my ready to remodel students as well. When you have an idea for how you think a layout should work, test it, try something else that's less and something else that's more, and then compare the three of them together and see if, as Goldilocks found, the middle path is the right one, or actually, if you're drawn more to actually, we could get away with less. We don't need this big of a problem.
 
28:15
We could go with the smallest solution. Or, you know what, now that I've seen a bigger, cooler solution. That's the one that I want. So one way or another, those are things you can do for yourself, getting an arbiter, a third party perspective, to provide you with options that you can both consider neutrally, or to sort of listen to both parties equally, and then give you an evenly balanced set of design options. That is maybe something that is maybe something that takes an outside party, but it doesn't have to be me. It could be a contractor; it could be another designer. It is, however, a wonderful benefit of engaging the design process, and I've seen it happen again and again and again, done right?
 
28:54
I have also actually told a story many times of one of my most frustrating projects at my last job, where that did not work out properly, because it was a process where all of the design input that was going to my old firm, to the design team, was coming from one partner, and then the second partner would come in at the end of every phase and just veto things or change the design parameters entirely. So part of getting that sort of arbiter, outside party, third party communication, evener effect, is having everybody put the same input in at the start of the process, so that whoever is working with you to give you a neutral perspective, or multiple perspectives that you can discuss between yourself neutrally has all of the information that they need to give you plausible science solutions that are going to work for both people.
 
29:46
That's really important in the process one way or another, though, I think that this the success or failure of a remodel. Project can never be judged only by how it looks. You know, when we look at a house in a magazine, we can see a house as objectively gorgeous. We can see built ins that are beautiful, decorating details that are thoughtful, light that shines in and makes the space look really, really beautiful from an esthetic perspective. But we can't ever really know how well that design suits the homeowners. We can't ever really know how many lost nights of sleep they had during the process, and we can't really know how long it's going to last, how well it's going to modify itself over time, to grow with the couple, or if they're or the individual homeowner, or if you know it's going to change hands in a few years and become unsuitable for the next folks.
 
30:43
I think that one of my favorite parts about design isn't just the outcome, it's the process, and trying to create a process that allows for as much compromise and vision and clarity, knowing that you've considered possibilities, ruled them in and out, and moved yourself towards a new state of rightness is one of the most important parts of the process, and that's really why, instead of someone saying, Hi, I'd like to hire you to do a master plan, and me saying, Great, send me pictures of your house, I'm going to tell you what to do with it.
 
31:16
I engage in such a long process, and I encourage you, is as the sort of homeowner thinking about things, to engage with yourself in such a long process of dreaming about what matters most to you and what your priorities are and what kind of spaces you need to host your friends or even just your hobbies. So you really feel like you've considered everything that your home could, should and will be over the next phases of your life, and to think clearly and cleverly about what is necessary in the house so that you can feel familiar and get confident in what are the quirks of your home? What are the structural basics of your home?
 
31:52
So when you're starting your conversations with contractors, you can sort of feel like you're speaking at least partly. You at least have a sort of a phrase book of the language that you're speaking to them in, and to focus your style so you can get the details all right, but all of those things coming together and then testing out the options in the drafting phase lead to an outcome that's not just the final decision, but How well getting to that decision went, yeah. So anyway, I encourage you to go over to the channel and check out the imagery and the examples that I'm giving of how to strategize for keeping your built ins, or how to strategize for building remodel character back into a house after it's been stripped, or if it didn't have the mid mod quality you were looking for in the first place, or, as in the first case study, how to make the most of a tiny, tiny, tiny footprint with clever use of built ins and space planning.
 
32:49
But beyond that, what I wish for everyone that ever listens to the mid modern model podcast is that you also think about how not just your home makes you feel, but how the process of changing your home makes you feel, and can make you feel and following a really thoughtful design process, following along on the steps of the master plan method, which you can do on your own, you can do with me. I would love to help you in this process if you're curious about it.
 
33:14
But really, I just wish that everybody thinking about a remodel would take the time to follow a design process, rather than just picking up the phone and calling, you know, ABC contractor to replace what exists with something that's new. Just for the sake of newness, you're always going to get something more, if you can, even in micro moment, even in a day, even an hour, even in a month, however much time you have before you need to jump into making changes. If you can walk yourself through a little bit of a design process, a little bit of a master plan process, not just the outcome, but the entire experience can be so positively affected.
 
33:53
So yeah, that is my sort of psychological case study of three design case studies. And if you found that interesting, I'm going to continue to mention at the end of each YouTube video, sort of some of the other broader benefits of the process, because I would like to get that out there even people who are looking for tips and tricks. But this might be a place where I come back and sort of rehash some case studies and talk about the way that our opportunity to pause and reflect on all of the possibilities for these houses really just, I think, is going to create longer lasting remodels, more cost effective remodels and remodels taken on by homeowners who feel less stressed out and less strained and more happy and have better teams at their disposal all the way along From start to finish.
 
34:41
So isn't that the ideal design outcome? If you want to check out those videos, you can find them on my website, also a transcript of this episode. If you feel like any of these pearls of wisdom were worth quoting or looking up again, that'll be at mid mod midwest.com/ 2305.
 
35:00
And meanwhile, stay tuned for next week, when I'm planning to talk to you a little bit about how one of the most common ways that remodeling costs are discussed on the internet, ROI, or return on investment, is probably one of the least effective ways for you to consider whether a remodeling choice is a good idea for you. So more philosophy of remodeling coming at you soon, and in the meantime, I hope any choice you've made for your home has felt as pleasant, as productive, as expansive as some of these processes have felt for my clients, and if not, I'd love to talk to you about making sure that happens for you in the future. Stay cool, mid mod remodelers.