Master Plan FAQ

A bit about me. 

I love answering questions and I truly don’t mind answering the same questions a bunch of times. BUT I’d much rather talk about your mid-century house. And your life. And your hopes for your remodel. I hate going into a conversation about a significant purchase without enough information to feel prepared. 

And I suspect many of you are like, “Yes. Same.”  This one is for you.  

In Today's Episode You'll Hear:

• Why it’s never too early to start designing. 
• How much your Mid-Century Master Plan will cost. (Yes, we can tell you that up front.)
• When we’ll need you to move the process forward - and how much time that will take. 

Get the full show notes with all the trimmings at https://www.midmod-midwest.com/2307

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
How soon do we get our master plan document back? How much is it going to cost? Oh, and is that all due up front? Can my contractor build directly from the master plan package? What do I have to do so you can get started? 

These are all questions that come up in nearly every first contact call that I have, and I love answering them, but I also love talking about you your house, how you found it, what you want to do to it. I'm happy to go deeper on any subject in a first contact call, but maybe this will help get a little bit of that out of the way so we can get right into our design dreaming together faster.
 
00:33
Today I'm covering FAQs of the mid-century Master Plan process. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I'm your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You're listening to Episode 2307.
 
00:52
Without further ado, here are some questions that I get all the time on first calls with potential Master Plan clients, by no means am I recording this to stop you from answering a question like this in our first call. That's what the call is for. But I also understand that from my point of view, sometimes I don't want to go into a completely unknown experience. Sometimes you might not want to make that call with too much uncertainty.
 
01:17
I also don't like to go into an information seeking experience on my part, feeling like the person I'm trying to get information from is mostly there to sell me something. All I wanted to know was to know about it and then go think about it on my own. So I also really don't push that hard to sell during our lead calls.
 
01:37
I basically think of these calls as a double blind. Get to know you. Check. I want to know that the person that I'm talking to has a mid-century house loves it, is looking to make mid-century changes to it. I'm trying to get a good vibe. Check that the person that I'm thinking about working with, and it's the chance for the person on the other side of the Zoom call you perhaps, to suss me out, to ask me questions about the system and read my vibe from them to get a sense of what it is that Mid Mod Midwest offers to folks we do a master plan for there's still room to ask plenty of questions, but the more of the questions we can get out of the way before we even start chatting, the more of that call time we can spend talking about your home, its backstory, how you found it, what you were looking for, what design possibilities you've already explored, maybe what you've already tackled, and future fun.
 
02:19
So I'm going to hit a few of those questions that come up again and again and again in first calls in a little more detail than I've got room for in the written FAQ on my website. The first question I want to address is actually not a question I typically get asked on those calls, because it comes up before the call begins. I often get it in an email sent before a call is scheduled, in an Instagram DM. If I ever chat with anyone in person. From my ready to remodel students, if they're thinking about jumping up to a master plan.
 
02:51
One way or another, the way that this question goes is, wherever I am in my process is right now too early to start a master plan. And the short answer to that question is, no, it's very hard to start design thinking too early for success. It is possible. It is certainly possible to start too late, if you're starting design thinking after demolition has begun, or I actually had a call with someone, lovely person, lovely house, lovely mid-century goals. They'd already engaged a contractor. And while we often jump in and help people with design thinking, in between the hiring and the getting to work on the contractor process, they were full steam ahead on doing work already, and there just was not really time to get in and do creative thinking. So they're just going to take their best shot at it and make the best choices that they can under the circumstances.
 
03:44
But too early. I'm trying to think like if you don't own a house at all, that's too early to design changes to a house. But we've also had very successful conversations with people who began talking to us as they were looking at houses, certainly as they had put in an offer on a house and gotten it accepted before they had finished going through the escrow process, we have been able, as long as they're feeling reasonably confident that nothing's going to make it fall through, we have been able to start the process of fast tracking a master plan, and in the general scheme, if your question is, we're not thinking of remodeling until next year, or maybe we're right now, it's February, we're not thinking of remodeling until next this summer. Is it too early to start thinking about design? No, nope, no, it's not.
 
04:30
The best outcome of a good design process is not that you're planning for the distant future completely out of sight, but that you are getting your ducks in a row for everything you might do, and then prioritizing and then deciding on the timeline, and then sort of setting up. How soon can I begin my first project, and what do I need to have locked in before then? And some process of percolating or letting it sit and rest is also great before you have your first ideas, your first exploration, and then you. Make up your mind about things. So all of that does take time.
 
05:02
And basically, the answer to the long answer to that short question is, no, it is not possible to start on a master plan process too early in the game if you already have the house and you already have thoughts and feelings about it.
 
05:15
Okay, let's get into some of the questions. I had just noticed I did a bunch of Office of calls in a slew in January and early February, and I got a bunch of repeat questions, which is not a problem at all, but it made me feel like maybe I should be being a little bit more clear about some of these things. The first one was, what does the master plan cost, and when will I pay? So this has a couple of short part answers.
 
05:39
The Master Plan process as we perform it has a fixed fee of $7,500 most designers work differently than this. Most designers either take a cut of the ultimate construction cost, perhaps with a retainer put down first, or they have an hourly rate. And the ultimate cost of the project design will be how many hours are spent times the hourly rates of whoever works on the project. Now those are both perfectly fine, acceptable ways to price design services. But I have found that even on the designer end of them, I feel mysterious when people are asking like, how long will it take?
 
06:13
It's hard for me to put a precise number on how many hours it's going to take. It's hard for me to tell people exactly what's going to be involved based on following through in this traditional method of everything that could come up and all the questions that could be answered. What we found is we can deliver really excellent design results within the boundary of this fixed fee, and it gives us and our clients peace of mind to know that we're going to do as much work as we can fit into that bubble, and they're going to get a very consistent result. I'll talk more about deliverables of our master plan method in a bit. And they never have to wonder what, how much more it's going to be.
 
06:46
They never have to sort of cringe at the cost in advance. This allows us to, as I've talked about on a recent podcast episode, think about design unrelated to the scale or the ultimate construction cost of the project. It lets us completely separate from proposing too much or too little, too surgical and micro of changes, our job is to recommend to our clients what we think based on what they've asked us for the best design possibilities to meet their goals. And sometimes it can take us a few more hours than actually fit into that umbrella. But that's me. That's my problem. To make sure that my team and I get it done under budget. But we don't charge more than the $7,500 with a few exceptions.
 
07:28
Those are sometimes it costs more if the house itself is very unusual or complicated. In that case, if we can look at the house, often, an architect designed house falls into this category. Often a very large, sprawling house falls into this category, or a house with an extremely unusual structure. We assess right up front a complexity fee that lets us spend the extra time that we need to understand everything that's going on in the house's structure to make sure that we continue as is always our policy to design changes to a house that are buildable. That are, might need some structural engineering to size a beam. Might need a little bit of cross checking to make sure that the builder is going to agree that there's one proper way to organize the structure. You know is that a slab? Is it a crawl space? Is it a full basement underneath an addition, that sort of thing.
 
08:13
But we want to make sure that we've got enough time to wrap our heads around each project in a really complicated or structurally unusual house, an owner built house put together over years. For example, we want to be able to have enough time to study the quirks. The other reason we will assess a complexity fee is if there's going to be an addition onto the house, and in that case, we just need extra time, more hours in our availability, to add extra drawings to the project, so that we cannot just see how the spaces are going to fit on the inside, but how will the exterior of the house be assessed?
 
08:42
Now, that's not to say we never think about the exterior of the house in a regular master plan. We often think about front door updates or how to create patio space off the back, but when again, when we're thinking about an addition, we've got to make sure we're including concepts for a roof line that's going to feel organic to the house. That we want to make sure that the fenestration pattern, the window organization. Oops, Archi-babble alert, sorry. Is going to work properly. So we adjust. A few extra drawings are always included when we're doing an addition. So that also triggers a complexity fee.
 
09:19
And then sometimes we sort of consider in the master plan scope, we're going to be focusing on four to six spaces throughout the house. A space, to be clear, is not necessarily a room, but it's an area that we're going to be exploring in detail that we might be doing multiple versions for. At each version, we'll have a sketch. We'll be thinking about the details through them. And so four to six areas. Maybe a social space might be more than just a kitchen, but a kitchen and the dining area and even the living room and adjacent to it, that might be one space, depending on how much they are separated from each other or connected to each other.
 
09:51
But if we're going to touch every single part of the house in our design, again, that sometimes would trigger the complexity fee. That's basically the only reason. That a master plan costs more than our fixed fee in its design capacity. The other additional fee that sometimes gets assessed is for a site visit, an additional service.
 
10:10
So this actually tips me over into another frequently asked question, which is really, it's more of a clarification really, you don't need to see the house in person in order to provide a master plan for it. And the answer is, No, I do not. This comes back to a personal story. I really kicked off this business. I was already thinking about mid-century designs. I was doing master plans in my own vicinity, but I was still thinking about this as a bit of like a freelancing project or an interim. A break in my career, between working in a firm and working in a firm, doing what somebody else told me to do for design. Not focusing on mid-century houses, which I was finding so fun.
 
10:51
But in the pandemic, in the early days of the shutdown, when they told everybody to stay home, I had a couple of different master plan projects on my schedule, And I was at a loss. I was like, well, I can't. I could do the designs right now at home for my computer, if only I had already been to these places and measured them. But I haven't done a field measure. I don't have floor plans. I don't have any sense of what's going in the house. I don't have any reference photos for myself, so I guess we just have to pause. And I reached out to the clients that were on deck right then and asked them, did they want to pause? did they want their deposit back? Like, what? Where were we on their project?
 
11:27
And in fact, in that case, I can't remember, it was two or three, but everybody responded with they all happened to be thinking that they might turn internal and do a little bit of DIY, get the project started, particularly one key space they were focusing on, and they did not want to wait. In fact, they wanted to move forward as quickly as possible with designs.
 
11:47
So okay, I thought, Well, I can do the design as long as I have the plan information. Here's what I would do if I came to your house. So I gave, I made a little tutorial of I think I did it in written form. I didn't have an easy mechanism for making them a video lesson at that point, very early in my online communication career, all's well. But I put together a list of like, here is how I would measure your house. Here are the key pieces of information that I need. Please take an uncountable number of digital photos and send them to me, and then I will model the house for myself and figure out if there's any inconsistencies, ask you for follow up information and move on from there. And that is exactly what we did.
 
12:27
And because fortunately, at that moment, those clients both happened to be kind of handy. And they were familiar with the concept of making a floor plan by hand, they were able to do that. Since that time, I've got a lot of other make it easy for you tricks up my sleeve. So we can use scanning software. There are several easy to use phone scanning software as basically, you just follow the instructions that are given to you, point your camera in different places, and it just measures your house for you. It is remarkably convenient.
 
12:56
But the long story short is that I had been getting messages for a while as I was posting on my blog or on Instagram about great choices for mid-century houses from people far away who would say, oh my gosh, I have a mid-century house, and everybody that I talk to isn't giving me mid-century advice for it. Could you help me? Or actually, what they would typically say is, is there anyone in my area who does what you do. I would like the California I would like the San Francisco local. I would like the LA local. I would like the Seattle local. I would like the Florida local, mid-century architect. And I had to say, there may very well be people out there doing what I'm doing, but I don't know them, and I don't have names to give you.
 
13:40
In a couple of key areas, I was able to point people towards some of my favorite online mid-century interiors specialists, particularly people got lucky in Michigan and in California that way, but I didn't have anyone who could easily offer what I was doing in terms of a mid-century Master Plan service. So after I had done those remote field measures, I was able to say, well, I don't have anyone to recommend to you in your place, but I could do it. Let me show you how to document your house remotely, and let's start a design process as we go. So anyway, all of that is to say, Yes, I absolutely can and most often do, create schematic master plans for my clients that they can then take to a local arc, local builder, run with, build with, and execute on perfectly.
 
14:26
And I never get the privilege the pleasure of being there in person, but I have fully imagined myself into that space based on the magic of digital photographs and an excellently accurate floor plan. That said there are still clients within my let's call it my driving watershed, who do decide that they would like me to come and do that measuring for them. They either, sometimes it's because they have a complicated house complexity fee. Sometimes it's because they're busy. Some people just prefer the concept of having the architect come and see the house. We get to do a bunch of extra bonus things.
 
14:51
When I come to do a field measure, not only do I do all the measuring and photographing myself, but we get to have a meeting in this in the house, where we walk space by space and look at it and point at it and have organic ideas come up. Is it better than doing it remotely? It's different. We still actually go right ahead and follow the exact same process for the rest of the master plan process. I still like to have a sit down Zoom meeting to kick off our design project. Often when I'm in a field measure situation, I'm only talking to one, one of two homeowners about the house, and so I really like to have that kickoff meeting with two people. But in any case, long story short, one last fee that can be assessed across on top of the master plan base fee is for a field measure, and that depends on the distance, and it also includes mileage rate for drive time. But those are, those are all the unexpected costs that come up in the master plan process.
 
15:51
So let's talk about that process. This is another question that comes up all the time, what will you meaning me, the architect do, and what will I meaning you, the homeowner, need to do to make this design happen. Well, to answer that, I will say most of the work is on my side, most of the work, most of the hours in, most of the results will be produced by me and my team, creatively, brainstorming, bringing all of our mid-century expertise to the table. However, we can't do that work in a vacuum.
 
16:22
We do need some input from the homeowners, and not just measurements and photographs, because my whole design philosophy is that our designs are specific, not only to the house, but to the people that are going to live in it. If you've been here for more than five minutes, you know that I am all about tailoring a house to the lives of the people that live there. So we do begin by assigning our clients some design homework. It's easy, it's fun, it's not a burden, I promise. But it does have to get done. So that looks like three kinds of information.
 
16:51
The second is that data, the dimensions and the photographs. But the first one, the first thing I want to know from any homeowner about their house, before we get started on the project, is what is home to you? What are you doing in your house? Are you having people over? Is it a retreat from the world? How do you and your spouse and your kids, your extended family, people who stay with you use the space? How does it work for you now? How would you like it to work in the future? And we'll talk about, I've got a bunch of little sort of questionnaires, prompts, etc., that can help get to the depth of this. But ultimately, I'm just trying to get a sense of what makes a house feel like a home in your mind.
 
17:34
So that piece, whether it is very difficult to extract or just rolls right off your consciousness because you've been pondering it, because it's the reason you called in the first place, we will get that, which will help us to do a little bit more. And then the third piece. So first one dream what a home means to you. The second one discover what are the facts of your house. And the third one is, distill, what does mid-century mean to you in this context, everyone that I work with likes mid-century some, but some people are looking for a time capsule house. Some people are looking for something that's actually quite modern and contemporary but just feels like it's not trendy. It's not trying to put anything that's not attuned to akin to the house, into the house.
 
18:18
So we will do quite modern updates of a mid-century house, but still pull from the material palette of the original house. Or we'll pick a couple of shapes, a repeating detail that was built into the house originally a brick pattern, slat wall pattern, you know, we'll find some piece that we can tie back so that the new parts of the house feel connected to the original parts of the house. But figuring that out where you are on that spectrum of Old to New, of time capsule to update, really informs every design decision we're going to make.
 
18:48
Then once we have those crucial pieces of design information, we get started on our part of the work, and that's going to include for us, a lot of brainstorming, a lot of rough sketches. I do a lot of sort of scribbling on top of floor plans. What if there was a built in over here, where in a kitchen, can we move the refrigerator to, like, eight different places in the space? And how does that affect it? We'll always boil that down to no more than three options for our clients, because more than three options is overwhelming. But our first process becomes with brainstorming.
 
19:19
Then we start with boiling it down and making sure that all of the details in a particular scheme add up, refining and finally presenting it in nicely measured to scale floor plan sketches and view sketches that will allow any contractor to instantly visualize exactly what you're trying to get done. And be able to immediately in the top of their in the sort of back of their mind as they're walking a house with you, looking at pictures with you, start to put ballpark figures onto what they're talking about, and get more and more accurate as they grok the house with you, as they understand exactly what you're trying to get done here that process for us is preparing a lot of clearly illustrated options for you so that then we can bring those back to you.
 
19:59
One of my favorite points in our master plan process is the workshop meeting, where we get to share with you the documentation that we've prepared of a branching array of multiple options that can be mixed and matched throughout the house and even within one space, mixing and matching more intense or more conservative possibilities throughout a space this built in detail with this floor plan, with this amount of openness to the adjacent room and really getting to fine tune in that workshop meeting.
 
20:27
What's working for you? What we need to add to the sauce to make it really sing? You know, what are the missing pieces? And pull it all together. The last step in our process is to pull together a finalized version of schematic drawings, floor plans drawn to scale and views of each space than the house that we're touching, so that you've got a documentation set that will easily help you communicate with every contractor, supplier and helper along your process of remodeling.
 
20:52
The next question that always comes up after that is timeline. How does this play out? How quickly can it be done? Now some people come to me, going back to the earlier question, is it too early to start? Some people come to me when they've got a wide window ahead of them, and they're not really concerned with how fast can it happen. They just want to know how when it will happen. Other people are a little late to the party, and they're really like, Okay, well, the contractor is pushing on me to have design stuff. I'm carving out a little bit of time. How quickly can we have it? How quickly we can put it together? Depends on a few factors that are in your court and a few factors that are in our court. But the process is fairly consistent for each project.
 
21:29
It's just the timeline individually to each project is fairly consistent. It's just when do we start it, and how much sort of how much attention can we pay to it as we go along the first steps of design begin the minute the proposal is signed. The next business day after you sign your proposal and drop your deposit, you are going to get your starting design homework. What does home look like? Feel like? Vibe like to you? The sooner we get that information back, the sooner we get our measurement information, all of our ducks in a row for predesign, the sooner we can begin this sort of time controlled part of our process.
 
22:05
So we begin that with the kickoff meeting. That's the chance for us to sit down in a Zoom meeting where I can take detailed notes and identify what's important about each part of the house that we're going to be starting on. Between that and the time when we deliver options is between four and six weeks. That depends a little bit on how many other men how many other master plans we've got going, on how many other people are coming back with, follow up, information, additional services for us. But four to six weeks is pretty reasonable, and we can push it towards the four  end for people who are really in a rush to get into construction, who are aiming towards a build date.
 
22:39
Then after the workshop meeting. Well, in some cases of extreme rushing, you can take the option you like best directly to your contractor and start to work with them immediately. And much more often, the format goes after our workshop meeting, you will want to sit with the options for a little while. We generally recommend two weeks as a nice window for letting it percolate in your mind, coming up with some options, remembering to communicate them back clearly to us. A bullet point list, an annotated set of the plans, writing a little essay about which parts you liked most.
 
23:11
And then it takes us another further two weeks to pull it back together and get you a set of final schematic drawings which should be ready to go forward with your builder. The question after that, which is, what are those drawings? Are they blueprints? Can I build from them? Can I get a building permit from them?
 
23:31
Okay, so let's talk about deliverables a little bit. In our process, we give deliverables at two stages. At the workshop meeting, we give a large annotated packet of information, hugely, somewhere between 40 and 60, sometimes more, pages documenting our process and design, showing all of the options, area by area, with sketches of the various rooms and spaces. And we also share a style sheet collection and a style guide of good mid-century design details from our past, coming up on a decade of focusing on this kind of design solutions, those pieces don't constitute anything you could build from, necessarily.
 
24:11
Although you could take if you're if you're locked in on one of the schemes, for example, you could take that to a builder and start the process of development directly with them. But our second deliverable is the final schematic drawings, and this is what we really intend to be a handoff document to go to your builder. It is also not a set of blueprints. The idea of blueprints is actually more of a metaphor than a reality. These days, no one actually uses the blueprint technology, but the set of typically used in a high end residential new build or remodel construction documentation set is not what we're producing here. We are producing schematic designs, but to scale that should be developable into any level of further building documentation or permit documentation.
 
24:59
Okay, so why not just have us go all the way further. Well, a couple of reasons. Every municipality in America has different levels of information that they need in order to issue a permit. They're all so specific, so producing an end result that makes a standard that could hit buildable permit drawings would raise the price of our service very significantly. But what we found is that's really not necessary, because by far the preponderance of contractors that our clients are working with these days have access to and actually prefer to work with an in house drafts person that helps them get this done and helps them to meet the permit process.
 
25:38
They are by far the most efficient person to know what are the local municipal rules for getting permit documents in place, and they are by far the most efficient organization to know what level of documentation their teams need in order to produce good buildings. So this is a great point for us to make sure that we're not double billing our clients by doing a bunch of detailed drafting and thinking through everything the way the design building could be happening.
 
26:05
But because we're not going to be there to administer contract selection or construction management, that is not a service that could easily be provided remotely like schematic design services can, it is very inefficient for us to detail out every way that the building should be built, and then have a contractor that's chosen for reasons of communication, talent, good recommendations in the area, come back and say, Oh yeah, I could build it that way, but I don't want to. So I'm going to change the design, and I'm going to build more build in time, into my overhead for redoing design work that the designer already did, that I will now ignore.
 
26:37
I should caveat that by saying that's not even like a terrible, a bad, a negative thing for a contract to do. Contractors often have an idea of what is the most efficient way for them to build a wall, set a foundation. It's going to depend on who their team is, who they regularly work with, who their subcontractors are, micro conditions of the climate, the environment, their habit what they did on the past five projects. There's often a bunch of different ways, oh, I was gonna say, to skin a cat. That's such a horrible metaphor. Anyway. There's a bunch of different ways to build something always and to go too far into design without communicating with a contractor, runs the risk that one theoretical idea that I have about how a project could be built is just going to be not the most efficient way for the contractor that has chosen to build it.
 
27:32
And again, that means design time spent twice on my end and on their end, and that means double billing to our clients. So we have found that this is the best, the most consistently helpful place to hand off our design from one to another.
 
27:38
A follow up question I sometimes get, and I'm not offended by is, okay? Well, if the contractor has a drafts person that's going to draw up the final plans, why wouldn't I just skip this design stuff and go straight to that? Well, of course, if your contractor has a draftsperson, if they have someone in house that they identify as designer, they certainly can have input. They will be the most efficient person to blend design ideas with what will be built by the contractor, but that person, and I say this from deep experience, is almost certainly not very well versed in mid-century design.
 
28:14
And also the kind of person who is hired by and works very, very well - who's really good at their job being the drafts person, or even the designer on behalf of a contractor - their best skill is helping that Contracting Team efficiently execute projects. So what they're looking towards is what, what can this team best do? I will offer options that are closest to that. And while you don't want to ask a contractor to do things they're not good at. That's not a good mix. You are also not best served by someone who's jumping to that end point of what have we offered before that we did in record time we made good overhead on and sure the client was happy about it, but that was a different client, a different case, a different house.
 
29:05
The skill set that makes someone a very good draftsperson or designer on behalf of contractor, is straight line thinking, going directly from a one problem to one solution as quickly as possible. The skill that Mid Mod Midwest brings to the table is helping you quickly and efficiently split your possibilities into a broad range of options that you can look at and weigh against each other and efficiently focus on the right path for you think about a diagram of a branching pattern that then focuses and moves forward.
 
29:41
Our goal is not to quickly take you from one question to one answer, but to open up a possibility of more questions, follow up details, ranges of options, and let you then - again efficiency is our goal too - choose among them, identify what works best for you and get it back down to the straight lines that a contractor's draft person is going to take it to.  But still giving the opportunity to really evaluate and prioritize and consider options.
 
30:07
One of the founding reasons behind my developing a master plan method was to do exactly this, to jump into the gap between a homeowner knowing that something's not right with their house and a contractor who's got some easy answers and the skill to build on those answers, but doesn't really have the time or the inclination or the skill set to provide options, to really brainstorm, to think clearly about what could happen and why before they get to what will happen.
 
30:37
So the Master Plan method is meant to fill in that lack or that difference in focus, from knowing something's wrong but not knowing exactly what, to just making problems go away by making sure that we're making the right problems going away and making sure that we're making the best use of energy, of money, of sometimes tailoring a project down so that we're not doing the biggest thing.
 
31:02
Contractors, I think again, in their very logical desire to please, but also their desire to do a project that pays well for them, often suggest the biggest or the most structurally intense solution. Let's get a giant engineered beam to open up these spaces. Whereas, you know, if we actually had played around with columns in an interesting way, we could create a graceful separation between spaces that gets just as much done and doesn't require nearly as much destructive contracting or big new engineered beams.
 
31:34
That's just one example. But our goal as a designer dovetails nicely with both homeowners and contractors done, right.  But we do see the world a little bit differently as the design part of the process, and so without the slightest possible ding on excellent contractors everywhere, a good contractor, when faced with a challenge, will reliably deliver to you what they have done for the last several happy clients, plus a few tweaks and add ons that you specifically ask them for, but you as a homeowner only know how to ask them for what you already know of.
 
32:07
So the ideal outcome is to find a reliable, consistent, organized, skilled and detail oriented contractor who builds high quality remodels that pass inspections and leave homeowners happy and then come to them already with a clear list of mid-century house specific details that you want and family specific changes to the house that you have thoughtfully selected from, from your own thinking or from the design work of an organization like mid mounted West. Then let them work with the local supply and demand, communicate with the local permit office and inspection process and create a great remodel for you. It is a win win win scenario that way.
 
32:41
Okay, so we've talked about when is the right time to start. We've talked about what does a design cost and when do you pay? We've talked about the process and the timeline, the deliverables, and the eternal question, why mid mod Midwest does not create blueprints? I mean, the short answer is, when I used to work in a format where we took projects from schematic design to construction documentation. I'd spend three months to half a year on one project, and that would be ruinously expensive to the scale and scope of costs that my master plan clients look for now.
 
33:14
But at this point, I really do feel like honestly, the cost of the mid-century master plan is much more likely not to add on to your cost of construction, but to end up saving you money on your overall construction cost, and certainly to create a result that is going to make you feel happier and more content. And will feel more long lasting, will be more stylistically long lasting than simply going along with whatever was most popular in the Parade of Homes in your town last year. Which is very likely to start looking dated in approximately 5-10, years at the most from now, and be kind of painfully quaint in 20 years. I don't know, maybe even, like, cheesy, cute again in 30 but like, who's gonna wait that long?
 
33:58
So if there's a these are the FAQs. These are the frequently asked questions. But if there's a question you have about the Master Plan process, I would love for you to ask it in any way that feels comfortable to you. I'd encourage you to just go ahead, reach out today and schedule a first chat. Because, like I say, it's never too early to have a first chat, and I hope that it's clear by now that when I have a conversation with a homeowner, I think probably about half of our first calls do result in signed Master Plan proposals.
 
34:28
That's because most of the people that come to talk to me are pretty ready to make a good decision about this, but the people that don't sign, I still have lovely conversations with them. I still end up giving them some good advice on their house. We still end up debating the merits of a particular contractor in their area or the possibility for design. It's always a wonderful conversation, and honestly, I really only want to sign a master plan for someone who is excited to engage in this process. So taking the time to talk to people about their mid-century houses is one of my favorite ways, other than making content for this podcast, and you know the core of what I do all day, every day, which is thinking about design solutions for my ongoing clients and students.
 
35:06
But I'd love to talk to you about your bit century house. I'd love to answer any other questions about your house or our process that you have. We have a really quick light screening process before I get on the phone with you on a zoom call, to be specific, Zoom Yes, phone calls, oh, god no, but we'll basically just ask you a few questions about your house, about what's going on with you, about what you might tackle in it.
 
35:33
And that helps us just make sure that what you're calling about is a mid-century house, and that what you're looking for might be a master plan. And at that point, we'll send you a scheduler, and you and I can be talking any point a few days later. So let's talk about what are the possibilities for your house when you want to make changes to it, how excited you are or nervous, and start to get the ball rolling on the first phase of what you might do to your house, or on a clean sweep of updating, maintaining, repairing, removing old, bad remodels that don't work, and generally tailoring your mid-century house to the way you want to keep on living in it for decades to come.
 
36:12
You can reach out by going to midmod-midwest.com/services or find the information you're looking for on our show notes page at midmod-midwest.com/ 2307.
 
36:25
Let's see before, Oh, before I let you go. Quick tease of next week's podcast, I'm going to be having a conversation with the founder of Kerf. If you have not already seen the Kerf kitchens on the internet, go Google it right now. I will be putting a lot of pictures into my blog post for next week, but also just having such a fun conversation.
 
36:47
I'm really excited to learn more about how this business got started, what drives this amazing designerly approach to it's so mid-century, at its core, making these gorgeous esthetic kitchens out of really basic industrial materials, plywood and just find out the whole story, the backstory behind kerf designs. So stay tuned for that. I know you're gonna love it. And so long for now, mid mod remodeler.