You don't need to keep a tub for resale value.

So much of the advice out there about home improvements is focused on the bottom line, treating your home as a commodity.  And sure, remodeling always has a cost. There are financial factors involved.

But I firmly believe that return on investment and resale value are the absolute last things you should be thinking about when you plan a change to your home. Hear me out.

In Today's Episode You'll Hear:
- Why you should remove the tub…if you want to!
- How to treat your house like a home instead of a commodity. 
- Which investments really matter when you remodel.  

Get the full show notes with all the trimmings at https://www.midmod-midwest.com/2306

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

00:00
So much, way too much, in my opinion, of the advice out there about home improvements is focused on the bottom line, treating your home as a commodity. And sure, remodeling always has a cost. There are financial factors involved. But walk with me in this essay, I argue that return on investment and resale value are the absolute last things you should be thinking about when you plan a change to your home. If you're planning on selling it soon, leave it alone and don't do anything to it. If you're planning to stay let's focus on what will make this house your home.
 
00:32
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mode remodel. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I'm your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You're listening to Episode 2306.
 
00:47
So I just published a YouTube on Tuesday that was all about a really specific remodel, taking a house that had been in same family for three generations and making some proposed changes to it that are fairly dramatic, because the new owner's life, third generation in this family looks completely different from her grandparents life. She wants to host in this house differently. She wants to live in this house differently. She wants to enjoy this house differently.
 
01:15
She has different priorities and access to different resources and design tools than her grandparents had, and while her uncle had lived in the house as a bachelor for sounded like several decades, making absolutely no changes whatsoever, she would really like to personalize it for herself before she takes it on. And I encourage this wholeheartedly, the house needed some fairly dramatic maintenance to survive another seven decades, and it also needed some, I'll call them design repairs since day one, for example.
 
01:52
If you go and watch that video, you'll see it had the most ridiculously bad front door entry sequence, where you basically enter a three foot long, a three foot wide hallway that feels like a tunnel that points you back towards a dead wall, cuts you off from all the other spaces and is totally dark. In the history of this house, last seven decades, no one ever uses that front door because the experience of going into it is so unpleasant. So what's the point of even having it?
 
02:21
We can repair problems that the House has always had, but we can also turn it from a classic L shaped kitchen table kitchen into a hostess kitchen, the kind of kitchen that will well serve the extended family gatherings that the house has been hosting all along and will continue to host under the auspices of its new owner. As I was working through this YouTube video, I was focusing on the design details, we were thinking about the space planning techniques. Go check it out if you're curious.
 
02:51
We're talking about slat walls and built ins that connect one room to another, walk through versus view through connections. But underlying all of that is the question of personalizing and tailoring a house in design, and I ended up making that the theme of the video, really that this is your permission structure to make choices that are personal to yourself, to say, Yes, this house has always had a tub in it, but I don't bathe in tubs. I shower and I don't have guests, I anticipate will bathe in tubs, and I will leave the question of, should there be a tub in this house to the next owner?
 
03:28
That that question right there, does there need to be a tub in this house? Is something I encounter. I want to say with literally every single master plan project, but it's not true, because I do have several clients every year who use the tub experience recreationally, who like to relax at the end of a long, hard day in the tub. For those people, by the way, we're still questioning the validity of the classic mid-century compromised tub, shower, tub that is 15 inches tall. It's great if it's in a color block bathroom looking cute, and you're not planning to use that as your primary shower area, but it's not particularly handicap accessible, or, you know, accessibility friendly in general, and it's not a great tub experience and not a great shower experience, and it's basically only contributed contribution to the Room is esthetic. If it is a color block match to the toilet, the sink and the tile, people really fret about getting rid of the tub, even if they hate it, even if they have never used it, even if no one they know in their family bathes.
 
04:37
They will Still stress about this concept of but resale value. But should I, may I do this? And this, I think, gets to the kind of kooky concepts that we have where we in America have conflated our homes with our financial stability since. Since the post war era, since the mid-century era. I mean, it was, it was a conscious decision on the part of the US government. Wow. Am I going off into left field here but walk with me in this essay. I will. I don't want to spend too much time on the history of financial structures and the mid-century post war building boom.
 
05:19
But not every country, not every culture, decided to answer the housing shortage of the baby boom of the post war by conflating homeowner equity and putting people into homes. It's not the only way to build generational wealth, although it has with differential quality built generational wealth in the US. It is also because of the inherent racism of the redlining of neighborhoods where certain people could buy and certain couldn't, of the loan structures all sorts of things. It hasn't it has not been a complete success, certainly not an equal success for everyone, but it has locked in this concept that we have of home as equity, which is a very strange thing, and that gets into everything.
 
06:12
It infects every quality of putting money into a house, I think, in a way that really muddies the water, but it makes it hard to decide for yourself what it is that you want. And so I'm going to talk today about a bunch of different things. Why the concept of ROI or return on investment gets into or resale value, for that matter, gets into remodeling decisions in the first place. Why people who talk to you about that are doing it. They're not evil. They're not bad.
 
06:42
What are their motivations for doing that? And if we understand them, how can we then dismiss them, move past them, and also how to go about if you have gone past that moment, figuring out what really does matter to you in making a remodeled decision, what will make you happier? What will be the best way to spend your dollars? What will get you the best outcome for the house, completely aside from the question of ROI and certainly completely aside from the question of making sure that you're making choices for the house based on some hypothetical future person who may or may not buy it from you at the end of your time in it.
 
07:19
The bottom line here is that I didn't have enough time in that YouTube video to talk to people about how much your remodel choices should be personal should be about your preferences, your lifestyle, your personality, your family, your goals, your wishes and dreams and hopes. There are realities to costs, to structure, to maintenance, there are necessities that need to be played into in fixing up a house after 70 plus years of occupation and weather, beating all these things, but ultimately, the way you choose where you want to spend your money should be making the house more and more well-tailored to fit your life, or leaving it alone and not doing unnecessary things to it, if they aren't going to actually make you personally happy, if you're going to go to the time, the trouble and the expense of renovating a mid-century home, you should do it because you want to, and the right choice between several remodeling options is always going to come from your own personal desires and needs.
 
08:19
All right, so let's get into it. I actually had this pop up for me so lightly and unexpectedly in a really delightful consultation call I did, what was it last week with a lovely couple who is in a Taliesin apprentice home in the Greater Milwaukee Area. The basic house is filled with gorgeous Usonian details and woodwork and high ceilings and skylights, and they are brainstorming some changes that they want to make to a bathroom that actually was added on later, maybe in the 70s, maybe in the 80s. It's a little hard to tell, and it just has some very unhelpful layout things.
 
09:01
It's sort of tacked on the access door, pops you right in next to the toilet in a slightly awkward way. It has a very, very small, snug, tiled in shower, and then a big, sort of focal point, Jacuzzi style soaking tub that isn't in good repair. And there's a sort of a step up a tiled floor surface to get into it that's all sort of a tripping hazard. They don't like any of it, and they particularly don't like how small the shower is. So I looked over when I have these console calls, people will fill out a little agenda of what do they want to talk to me about for, you know, half an hour of getting some mid-century specific remodeling advice, I'm happy to talk about material choices, layout choices, wailing pros and cons of different products, just sort of framing the scope of what's possible, whatever's on people's minds.
 
09:48
And they'll tell me what they kind of want to discuss, and they'll share some photos. So I'd been looking at the pictures before we started talking love to the house that they were sharing. The other two bathrooms were in gorgeous shape, some odd choices, some wood paneling. On the walls next to a tub. But, you know, go off tally as an apprentice, as you do, you and I could really see that the particular bathroom they were working with wasn't flowing well, wasn't doing its job. So we got into the call, and they dove in pretty effectively with what's been hanging them up, the logistics of the layout, of what could happen in this space, where could they extend the shower line? How could the tub fit into that?
 
10:24
Should it be closed off with a sort of a glass enclosure to be humidity controlled or not, and the vanity was basically staying where it wasn't doing what it was. And so we talked about that for a while. I gave them some other space planning, some rules of thumb about shower door swings and sort of rotational circulation logistics of bathrooms. Then we took a big step back and said, Okay, so are we hitting the qualities of what you need out of a dramatically improved shower? You've talked to me about what's not working in the shower. Here's what could work in the shower. Here are some ways to work better. What about this tub scenario? What does that need to do? And come to find they don't really use the tub.
 
11:02
They're not tub people. Their kids have grown up past that point. They don't soak. And they sort of had a an imagination of like, oh, I don't know, maybe if you were sick, it would be nice to be in it. But we don't actually do that. They started to talk themselves into the concept of, when would we could we use this tub that we're planning to put in? And I certainly wouldn't push them into not having a tub if they didn't want to. But I was interested in asking the question, do you need this tub? Allow me to give you a permission structure to not need this tub? What would happen if you didn't, and what would you miss?
 
11:42
Honestly, the thing is, even for people who are like, I would love, I love the idea of soak in a tub, and I probably do it three nights a year, I would say, for the cost of three nights a year in a nice tub environment, when what you really want on a daily basis is to have plenty of room to shower in a pleasant way. That's the experience you're gonna have on a daily basis. Daily basis. Go get yourself an Airbnb with a nice soaking tub once or twice a year and save the square footage and save the cost of remodeling around a tub. Leave the tub out anyway.
 
12:16
I threw that out to them rather fliply, but I really do this is something that comes up again and again and again with my client base. And it's funny, because not you know, as I say, not everybody wants to get rid of the tub, but everyone is afraid to get rid of the tub. And so this really comes into the question of remodeling for resale value and remodeling for financial considerations in general, the concept of return on investment. It is fascinating to me, because I have this question, even from people who when I've had my when I begin a conversation with someone, I talk to them about, how did you find your house.
 
12:54
What drew you to the house? What's the story of this search? What were you looking for? How long are you planning to stay here? Most of the people that I work with describe the place that they have come to as some species of their forever home. They want to stay here with their kids. They want to retire here. They want to live here as long as they possibly can. They're often asking me questions about, How can I build more accessibility into this house so that I never have to leave it until the last possible moment if you're going to spend literally the rest of your life in a house, who cares, who lives there after you, and I actually mean that. I mean that, like, why would you defer to popular culture? Why would you defer to current trends?
 
13:37
Particularly, why would you defer to current trends for what's good in a house, in your remodeling choices to please some hypothetical person, 3040, 50 years from now, whatever choice you make right now for resale value is going to seem incredibly data to that person, so you might as well do whatever you want and assume they'll change it later. But also, why do we assume that our preferences are so dramatically different from someone else who might want to live in the house. As someone I have the benefit of being someone who works again and again with different people coming to a mid-century home, living in it, loving many things about it, needing to change some things.
 
14:14
And while every individual client I have is unique, their situation is specific to their personality, their life, their family structure, their work, their recreation. There are also some major sea change type of trends afoot. People are needing wanting less overall square footage. People are needing more offices than bedrooms. They're sometimes sacrificing even garage space for offices. They're interested in the concept of guest rooms, although in this Airbnb era, I've definitely had people say, Oh yeah, we have long term family come and stay near us, and they don't stay with us, and it's great.
 
14:56
So we don't need to remodel a big addition into the house for some long out of town, family members to come stay with us. They just stay near us, and then we get all of the personal space and all of the togetherness time that we want or other people are planning to put an Airbnb suite, a rental suite teenagers returning to home after college, suite, a caring for my elder family suite in these are things that are very that are based on the specifics of people's lives, but are very common. They come up again and again, multiple times a year, Multiple Master Plans per year.
 
15:33
Am I sort of meeting the same design questions? So if you're going to make a change to retrofit a mid-century house from its original design parameters, which was husband who works a wife who stays home, three to five kids and a dog all in one bathroom into to fit your modern life, work from home for two different adults who need to take zoom meetings all day, plus their kid plus their mother in law who might come over, why assume that you're the only person who would need to make that change? Why not just lean into it and think about this as personalizing your house to set it up for the next person?
 
16:19
I think that the question of resale value and the question of sort of financial responsibility in a remodel is so interesting because I am a very price sensitive remodeler in my own life, and I'm also very interested in doing the least that's necessary for my clients, when that's what they're asking for. If they're asking for design drama and gorgeousness that will cost but sometimes, they're asking for what? How little do we need to change in order to make a change? How much can we leave the structure intact and still open up sight lines? How much of the kitchen plumbing or bathroom plumbing can we preserve while still opening up space and making more working area?
 
16:57
These are fascinating questions to me, but the question of making a choice for resale, or, as I've been talking about this whole episode, ROI return on investment, just absolutely blow my mind. I don't I don't understand it personally, particularly this concept of people wondering about the ROI of a particular remodeling task, because when you go and look it up, essentially, there are only two home improvement projects that have a true break even. Roi, I think replacing garage doors can sometimes pay back.
 
17:35
If you replace your garage door right before you sell the house, you can see that the house sells for fully the cost of the replacement garage door, more than it than a similar house. Some people will say replacing your front door with another is nearly as good as that. But all the other projects, you know, put money into a new kitchen so it'll sell faster, okay, but you actually will put in more money into the kitchen than you're going to get back out of it. And I suppose you could say the difference in the cost is that's for your pleasure, and then you want to get some amount of dollars back for an investment.
 
18:09
But ultimately, I think if you want to invest, put your money into the community, put into the stock market, you know, think about financial instruments that are designed to provide you a return on investment. Your home isn't the place, at least, that's what this residential architect thinks. The other place I encounter the concept of ROI most is as I am developing this business, Mid Mod Midwest, thinking about ad spend and where I'm putting my energy. I personally, much prefer to put my time into something like, for example, this podcast, like making YouTube videos. I prefer to spend my creativity and my hours rather than dollars, to market the business, rather than taking out an ad. Even in the periodical I love as much as like atomic Ranch.
 
18:58
I always feel like I just, I would just rather share more information to the internet at large. And perhaps I'm not the best example of effectively using math of ROI for various ad spend activities, partly because, you know, Hi, I'm an architect. My degree is in architecture, not in business. Everything I know about running a business, about marketing, about promotion, is self-taught and figured out over the last nearly a decade of trying to create a lifestyle out of trying to support myself and now, as at this point, supporting three employees with the business of helping people Plan great mid-century remodels.
 
19:40
But this is another case in which I experience the long game rather than a fast return on investment. I do get clients who realize that they've just bought a mid-century house. They go googling. They're looking for information about what to do, and they find my name, they find a website, they find. The podcast, they find the blog, they find the YouTube channel and then reach out immediately. But I also regularly get new clients who tell me in their first call, ooh, we've been listening to your podcast for years, and we're so excited we're finally ready to go.
 
20:13
Frankly, even the people who Google me discover me just immediately and then go are finding mid-century remodeling information I placed on the internet years ago. So I am a long term thinker in terms of how I spend my time, energy and money on this business. But I also feel that it's a similar it's a good metaphor actually here, because I love this work. I love talking about mid-century homes, it gives me great joy. It also could be considered maintenance, necessary structural reinforcement of the business. I don't want to play too long with this metaphor, but, but just Yeah, every time you talk about a remodel idea with a friend or a family member or a contractor or a real estate agent, and they end up talking to you about something that feels like they're treating their house more like a financial instrument than your home.
 
21:11
They're doing that because they've been trained to because we work in an industry, the home improvement industry is definitely a for profit thing. They are speaking the language that seems to give people comfort, and they're trying to advise you to spend your time, your money and your energy appropriately. But I would also argue that they are incorrect, that they're looking at this from the wrong angle, and so if you need to take this from actually an expert, don't take my word for it. Let's talk about Adrian Kinney, real estate agent in Denver, Colorado, a mid-century expert, specialist.
 
21:46
I've chatted with him on the podcast a number of times before, and you can go back and find him saying this in this episode where we talked last June. I loved his take on this that the return of the money that you spend on your house isn't always monetary. It's not one to one, getting back the dollars that you put into it. It's the experience of coming home to your house, to the space that you've created for yourself, to sleeping well every night in the bed, in the bedroom that makes you happy. It's waking up and enjoying spending time in your kitchen.
 
22:20
So whatever the cost of that is, and it doesn't have to be huge, this isn't saying spend indiscriminately to feel pleasure. It's saying that whatever you spend, the time, the energy and the money that you put into your house gives you back more than just $1 value. It gives you happiness. It gives you comfort. It gives you security. It gives you specificity. It gives you the encouragement to spend your time on the hobbies and get togethers and with the people that you love most.
 
22:52
So if this is what real estate agents can say about the house, please feel free to personalize it to yourself. And I think that actually thinking about Adrienne throws me back to a conversation I had with a real estate agent up in the greater Minneapolis area a couple of years ago, who reached out to me because she had a time capsule house that would have been owned by elderly parents. The adult children of the house were now trying to figure out how to get it ready to sell, and she found my name and was wondering if I could give them any advice on how to remodel the house.
 
23:25
Actually, she was wondering if she should invest on their behalf or encourage them to invest in a master plan for the house, to remodel it, to get it ready to sell. And while I loved that she found me and that she was curious about making mid-century choices for the house. My advice was, I really think, looking at the photos of this house like, yeah, it's got some places that are run down, but it has some real time capsule qualities, I would put this on the market exactly as is, and focus your outreach, your perspective, your pitch on finding people who want that time capsule house, or who want a house that they're going to do their own thing too.
 
24:04
And from my own integrity as a designer, I could not, and in fact, I told her that I would not be able to provide a master plan for the house, because I can't do a master plan without a client, the needs, the desires, the preferences, the personality, the lifestyle of the people in question are, are the inciting incident, are all of the information that we are, a big chunk of the information that we take.
 
24:33
So this actually brings us right through to the last thing I said I was going to talk about, which is, how do you make choices for your home? Evaluate one remodeling, move after another, weigh two options, in a way that's not just about cost. Now, certainly, sometimes it does come down to the bottom line, am I going to choose this material or this one? Well, which one can I afford?
 
24:52
But when you're thinking about the bigger picture, will I break the project up into phases? Will I do anything at all to this bedroom or is it fine? Where do I want to concentrate my resources? Or do I want to do a little bit of work in every part of the house and sort of evenly distribute them? This is going to come down to asking yourself personal questions, questions no one else can answer for you.
 
25:13
It's part of the reason that my master plan delivery includes giving people, usually three possibilities tailored to what I think they might need, but showing them different strategies, different levels of intensity, different levels of drama, so that they can respond to them and feel which one hits right and that comes out of the master plan process. It's harder to do, to just walk through a house cold and say, What could we do? And therefore immediately jump to, what should we do? Hopscotching over the predesign elements of the master plan method means that you are not asking yourself the right questions. You're not beginning from the right questions, so you can't really get to the right answers effectively. 

But just like with this consult call that I had, we were talking about bathrooms, we immediately jumped to logistics. What will fit, what is necessary, what is code, what is structure. But the questions really opened up. The conversation really opened up when we came back to what do you want out of this space? What is it going to do for you that your other bathrooms aren't doing for you. What should, could will your life be in this space depending on different options? So there is always going to be the structure. 

And in fact, in that conversation, one of the things that I wanted to consider was, could we make their life easier? They couldn't make the shower any wider because there was a bit of a pipe that was running up a vent going from the basement to the ceiling through this space they were worried about trying to fit a shower into the narrow gap. I said, let's forget about it. Let's move the shower forward and have a deep closet that frames right around that pipe and keeps it concealed. We don't need to move it. We don't need that space, particularly if we don't need a tub. We can have a very generous shower with completely different dimensions beside it, rather than tucked into the corner created by it. 

So cost and effort are part of it. Moving structure falls into the question of cost and effort. Esthetic preferences are absolutely part of it, but it's also what you need, what you like, your family, your tastes, your lifestyle. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. 

I just, I really just wanted to come back after putting together more of a pithy YouTube video about what you can do to make improvements to a house, and how to think about shifting spaces around, and just talk about that. It's okay. It's okay to personalize your house, and particularly, it's okay to keep mid-century features you like because you like them, rather than update them to fit modern trends. 
And it's also okay to change dated layouts that don't work for you to fit your life specifically, because the odds are, I mean, let's what's the worst case scenario, you make an unusual remodeling choice. You plan a house with no tubs in it. I just love that as an example. 
 
28:07
It's a very it's a very one off case, but it stands in for a lot of other personalizing choices that you might make. So you make a house with no tubs in it, one of two things is going to happen at the end of your life in the house, when you sell it on, someone's going to buy the house that really wishes it has a tub. They can put a tub in. They can also remodel. Someone's going to wave off and not buy the house because it doesn't have a tub sure. 
 
28:28
There's lots of houses out there. Or what if someone else who doesn't like tubs buys your house because it has the perfect shower that you created for yourself? What if they choose the house for the specific choices you've made, rather than avoid it because you didn't go generic enough with your remodeling decisions. This is the happy outcome that I hope we're always reaching for as we think about remodeling choices. I don't want anyone to put the structure and finishes of their house into a dumpster and replace them with brand new products manufactured in whatever way we are manufacturing products right now for any other reason than because it's going to make your life better.
 
29:09
So that's the bottom line for me. What can we do to continue to spread the word? And if you're listening to this podcast, I know you're already with me. I know you already believe this, but do you believe it with your whole heart? Hopefully I've just convinced you a little bit more. Maybe you can also provide excellent advice to other friends, family, acquaintances, who are planning improvements to their house, rather than thinking about the bottom line.
 
29:35
Before I wrap up, I actually want to take a complete left turn and talk about my experience in my very first job out of architecture school, where I worked for a company called Whole Trees, it's still around, although they don't do houses at all anymore, they provide large timber frame structures to like replace industrial steel support the double height space of a grocery store or a warehouse building. But when I worked for them, they were just getting the idea off the ground.
 
30:02
We were still doing SBIR funded grant doing structural testing on the strength of trees, but we did timber frame structures that didn't mill the trees into rectangular chunks and then put them back together again like little Erector Sets. Instead, we used the Y connection of a tree branch as structural cross bracing. And we would use round trees intact, hanging on to that structure that like if you think about slicing a carrot and haft and immediately goes twisty on you. If you keep the carrot whole, it's stronger. It's sturdier. It has all this, all the little concentric rings of strength in it. It's very strong.
 
30:37
So my alignment with this business was perfect, because I love residential remodels. Obviously, it's what I still do today. And at that point, they were kind of testing the idea of, can we use trees as structure on one at a time, homeowners who were willing to take the leap on the concept, rather than trying to sell it to big commercial who were going to be thinking more about ROI people loved doing these houses, because they're beautiful, they're sculptural, they're gorgeous, they are filled with natural materials, but also they're resource light.
 
31:11
You're able to harvest trees from the local watershed. In fact, my parents’ home was the last of these houses that I worked on before I moved on from business, I moved out of that area into another place, and all of the house, all of the trees that formed the structure of my parents' house were harvested from their own property, just thinning out the local forest. So just absolutely minimal environmental impact, really from the fairly high labor cost, but almost no material cost. So which kind of balances out? It ended up being a fairly cost effective custom home.
 
31:47
But as a result of working for this business, we were constantly working with other sort of green energy, sustainability organizing technologies, because our clients were interested in that. So the kind of person who wants to build themselves a timber frame house with straw bale walls and a sod roof is also the kind of person who's curious about solar, PV, solar, hot water, geothermal, a bunch of other green technologies. And so we would go as part of the promotion, or sort of client finding the marketing of this business.
 
32:23
We would go to like green energy fairs and have a booth and talk about them and show pictures and talk to people about the structure, and if they were interested in building a home this way. And I would have conversations with other vendors at these green energy fairs about like, So, what is up with geothermal these days? What's the latest in solar PV technology, and I was interested, and then eventually frustrated and finally, kind of ticked off by the way that every single green energy supplier, small business or advocate that I talked to always wanted to frame how useful their product was, how much better it was to have solar thermal, which means you're heating up water and you're putting hot water into either the pipes of the house or into the floor to heat the house, versus solar PV, which is you're gathering electricity on solar panels, and then you're using that to power the house, maybe to do electric heat.
 
33:19
All these various things they always wanted to talk about the payback lifetime. Oh, well, this one pays itself off in just 10 years. This one pays it off in 15 years. Well, we are beating this other industry because of x, y and z. This worked occasionally, for whatever industry was winning, however they wanted to slice the math. And often, if you would talk to two different people from two different organizations at the same energy fair, they would do the math two different ways. Ours pays off faster. Ours has a lower embodied energy cost this and that they'd find some way to run numbers so that they were winning. But there might be people, I mean, there are certainly people who are interested in the question of, if I pay for solar PV, how much money is it going to save me? That it shouldn't be entirely a luxury expense.
 
34:10
But it also felt like all of these different organizations were shooting themselves in the foot by pitting themselves against each other, rather than saying, Look, we're all trying to find alternatives to our consumption society. We're all trying to find better ways to live, to be more effective. You might want to combine some of these systems. Your choice might depend on whether you have you know the location, for example, my personal takeaway from all of this, and I did a fair amount of research back at the time, I'm not gonna let him up on it today, is that Geothermal energy is actually a terrible choice for an individual residence. It just works better at scale. It's about it's a great idea for, for example, a corporate office structure that has a big drain field. It's got a big area under its control, and they're trying to sort of create thermal lag, slow down the heating and cooling cycle in a big space. It's a very expensive choice for individual residences.
 
35:06
How long it takes to pay itself off against an energy grid is an irrelevant question to that there are certain houses based on their site, based on their location, based on the energy use patterns of the owner, or the preferences that are going to benefit more from PV and electric power that can be controlled with a smartphone, versus solar thermal, that will create a more slow moving heat, but a more consistent heat source and supplement hot water.
 
35:32
It also comes down to who you are. There's a phrase in the green energy business, passive solar, active owner, because if you are depending on passive solar heating and cooling, you do have to take an active approach to it. You need to run around the house twice a day, every day, and raise and lower curtains to make sure sun is coming in when you want it, and then you're insulating at night when you don't want to lose heat, or in the summer, closing curtains and shades to make sure sun isn't hitting the thermal mass in your floors and warming them up when you don't need that, and then opening it back. Then opening it back up and opening the windows at night to vent the house out. It takes planning, attention time.
 
36:07
It's a preference thing for some people, people like, for example, my father, it is a joy. It is fun tweaking. It is like retiring from your job as a lifelong engineer and then getting to engineering your house recreationally for the rest of your life. That's not what it's like. That's exactly what it is for him. But for other people who don't find that fun, who don't have the time and energy attention for it, it's not a good system. It's not a good fit.
 
36:32
So it's so much more about what matters to you, what will make you feel well about your house, feel good about your house, sleep well at night. What will give you peace of mind? What will let you feel like you're giving back to society, taking a little bit of pressure off the grid, adding a little bit of consistency to an energy and consistent world? Those, to me, are far more interesting questions. And then the question of like, how, how do you want your heat delivered? Do you want it long and slow with a big planning horizon, or do you want it immediate when you flick a when you flick a switch? Do you want to start blowing warmed air over yourself?
 
37:06
Where are you going to source the energy for those two different experiences is different, so I feel the same way about the entire home improvement industry as I do about the way that I always rolled my eyes at the sort of bickering subspecialties of green energy technology back in the day, and I, of course, got to be above it all. I was just the person who was working directly with homeowners, recommending to them what I thought was most effective, and kind of listening to the pitches of all the different subspecialists who were giving them slightly financially motivated advice. So I didn't have to be in the bare knuckle fight of pick me. No, pick me between the industries. But I also just, I always felt like it was a mistake to root the question ultimately in we are the financial win. Pick us because of the shortest payoff time.
 
37:58
These aren't choices, individual homeowners are not making choices that are strictly financial. And I think that at base, that's always been true. It always is true, even when we're trying to spend our dollars wisely. And I yeah, and I think the same is true of the way we think about our home improvement projects today. So thank you for coming to my TED talk.
 
38:20
And I hope that I've just created a little bit more of a permission structure for you to lean into your own choices and preferences and to see how much I mean, gosh, I wouldn't violate their privacy was a one to one call, but the delightful, the delightful conversation that I had with this couple about the possibilities in their bathroom was fun from the beginning, but we just took it up to a whole other level of idea resonance when we started talking about what was personal, what was specific to them, to their needs, not just discussing the layout and the structure and the strategy and even the financial the sorry other the mid-century style, all of the other pieces. The master plan, the structure, maintenance, necessity, the esthetic mid-century style are hollow, ultimately, if we're not talking about what matters to you.
 
39:06
Your house is more than just an investment. It is your home. And when you think about it as a home, your preferences will start to rise to the surface so much more effectively and immediately. It's not even funny. So, yeah, I'm going to link to the episode I mentioned the Adrian Kinney episode in the show notes for this.
 
39:26
If you want to read the transcript of this, or refer to any of this, if you need any of this as a backup argument when you're talking to someone you love about why you're not going to use ROI or resale value as the driving factor of your decisions, find it at mid mod dash midwest.com/ 2306 and I will be next week back talking to you about what. Oh, I'm gonna talk about some FAQs I get about the Master Plan process, the way it works when you work with mid modern Midwest.
 
39:55
And so if that's been on your mind, you will get some very useful, I think, answers to quest. Ones you probably have on your mind that you will ask at our first meeting, and I'll save you the trouble. And if you're not, maybe you'll just find it interesting as an insight into how this particular small business runs, or I'll see you the week after that. But for now, focus on what matters most to you, and I'll catch you next week, mid mod remodelers.