Mid Mod Midwest is hiring! And that’s not all…we have a LOT of news to share! From podcast format changes to new faces, we’ll cover everything you need to know in this tiny but mighty mini-sode!
First up – our team is growing!
Mid Mod Midwest is hiring a designer to create amazing schematic designs for mid-century remodels.
Our new Master Plan Design Lead is someone who loves solving tricky layout problems and making snap pronouncements about what people ‘could do’ for their homes. You’re crazy about mid century design and enjoy thinking creatively about how to stay true to the style while creating spaces that work for our modern lives.
You’ll work with clients to develop a Masterplan to guide the transform the house they have into the home they will love (with multiplied MCM charm). Sound like you or someone you know? Apply now on our careers page!
Mid Mod Remodel is back … FOREVER
This was going to be Mid Mod Remodel Season 10 (!) but instead, we’ve decided to be all podcast all the time, and no more waiting between seasons.
As we transition to a weekly podcast format, we’re eager to hear your thoughts on the “new” show. Let us know if there are topics you’d like to hear! Would you like the episode to be shorter, or longer? Would you like more interviews (I have a few planned!)? What topics have you been waiting for me to dig into?
Our Masterplan Process (from your perspective and from our!)
Finally, we take a quick trip through our Masterplan Process from two perspectives – client and designer! Whether you’re curious about working at Mid Mod Midwest or with our team as you plan your remodel, this episode includes all the must-have deets on how we create a Masterplan!
Listen Now On
Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher
Resources
- Work at Mid Mod Midwest! Apply here.
- Work with us to create a Masterplan for your mid mod remodel! Learn more here.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Mid Mod Midwest is looking to hire a new designer. Is this you or someone You know? I would love it if it were. Send this episode to anyone who’s looking for a chance to be part of something amazing, helping homeowners plan tailor-made remodels for mid-century homes to fit their lives, fit their budgets, and keep the mid-century charm alive while they update. If you’re not a person planning to be hired by mid mo Midwest, keep listening anyway, because I’m going to give you an outline of the latest, greatest mid-century master plan process, and I thought talking to you about how we do the design work that we do would be very useful, both for the regular listeners to the podcast. Hello, and for anyone who’s wondering whether Mid Mod Midwest is the right home for their design skill. 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 season 10, episode one or in the new system, episode 1001. Before I get into talking about the hiring process and what our master plans look like these days, I wanted to give you some news. We are going to be adapting from our former season model of a handful of themed episodes grouped together with breaks in between, which is the way I’ve been producing this podcast for the last nine seasons or three years, depending how you slice it. And instead, we’ll be going to a weekly format. I am so excited about this and a little bit scared, but at this point, I think you and I both know that I’ve got planning to say to you on the topic of mid-century home updates, and I bet you could use a little regular and consistent infusion of mid-century design into your week.
As we shift the format of the podcast, we will be exploring more interviews, more design tips, books, resources and tool recommendations, and other fun ideas. If there’s an element of podcasting that you love in other places and you’d love to see us apply it to mid mod remodel, let us know. Now. This is a great time to reach out through a review, a direct message on Instagram, a Facebook message in the mid mod remodel group or carrier pigeon. Good luck with that last one though. We would love to hear what you want to hear in future episodes. I can’t wait to start bringing you some fun weekly mid-century ideas. Next week we’ll be starting off with one of our greatest hits episodes. Stay tuned to see which one we pick for you. Find the show notes with links to our job posting and learn more about how to hire Mid Mod Midwest to create a master plan for you.
Plus, get the transcript of this podcast episode at midmod-midwest.com/1001. Okay, so on to our main topic. Mid Mod Midwest is hiring and the person we’re looking for right now is going to do the work that aligns with our core business. So to describe the job, I’m just going to describe to you what it is we do for our mid-century master plan clients from two perspectives, both what it looks like from the homeowner’s point of view and what it looks like for us internally. In case you didn’t know, we’ve been a fully remote small team for a while. I don’t do this all alone. Rebecca keeps our operations running smoothly. She coordinates workflows to keep in touch with clients, plans, the podcast, and ready to remodel. Scheduling shares in our love for mid-century design passionately and generally keeps us running on all cylinders. Our clients get to know her through her pre-design information, checking emails and touchpoints, and our team coordinates regularly through online meetings and asynchronous messaging.
Evan, our peerless design assistant, helps brainstorm remodel improvements for projects, keeps us up to date on modern technology and culture, and produces most of our beautiful final plan and prospective sketch drawings to show off the design solutions we create for our clients. Then there’s me. I do everything else. Our new designer will work closely with me, with all three of us, in fact, to help turn the dreams, houses, and mid-century styles that our clients come to us with into thoughtful creative design suggestions, and then well documented master plans to set them on the path to the right remodel. This person will be someone who loves mid-century homes and always has an eye towards finding budget friendly, but dramatic shifts and strategies that can transform the layout of a snug or closed off ranch into a more open, well-connected home. An appreciation for adding or putting back mid-century materials and details that match is essential.
Now, our design process works a little differently than it does at a traditional residential architecture firm. The traditional model can be a great choice for someone who’s looking for a detailed design, input and management, and every step of project remodel planning and execution process, and is willing to pay for it. Here, Atma Midwest, we have a different system that we feel works better for us and for many of our homeowners. For us, it helps us move more quickly through projects while still meaningfully engaging with the homes and homeowners. For the homeowners who hire us, it means a fixed price for a clearly defined service and a result that gives you just the right amount of clarity in two key areas to end up with a remodel that is head and shoulders above the result you could get by simply calling a contractor from the phone book and following their pattern, but still fits within a more conventional homeowner’s for model budget.
To illustrate how this works exactly, I’m gonna walk you through our master plan process from two different points of view, the homeowners and ours inside of mid mo Midwest. For both, we follow the steps of a master plan process, dream, discover, distill, draft, and develop. Here’s how it looks from the homeowner’s point of view. After we’ve decided to work together, they began the process of documenting what they want to have happen for their home. We share with them questions to get them starting on their dream process so they can tell us what’s most important, not just for the checklist of what they wanna change about their house, but the why. We also help them to document and discover their house. In some cases, we come and do this for our clients if they’re local and they’d like to choose an extra service, but in many cases it’s fully possible for the homeowner to discover what they need to do to create a floor plan, either using an app or simple measurement tools and to fully photo document the house.
Then they gather their personal style vision, pulling together pins that make their heart sing. Taking our mid-century style quiz and generally helping us know what kind of a vibe we’re looking for, either verbally or visually. Are we going full preservationist vintage or really pretty contemporary, but still using the mis, the materials in the methodology of a mid-century design. All of that, that’s century design. All of that homework comes together and then we schedule a kickoff meeting with them. The draft phase from the homeowner’s point of view is largely about waiting. If that’s you, you’re going about your daily life wondering what will come up with, and eventually we send an email saying we are ready to share, and here are the two big documents that come outta that process. The mid-century solutions package, long document that shows sketched floor plans, perspective sketches and options for different parts of the house and how you might handle them, and then also a document that provides style suggestions.
I’ll talk about this a little more from our inside perspective in a minute. Basically, those two documents set you up to have our workshop meeting. At this meeting, we come back together again and we talk about what’s working for you and what’s not. For some clients, this then becomes an opportunity to ponder and contemplate for a long period of time. Other people come to the meeting with a bullet point checklist and some notes on the drawings. We pull them all together, but the final process is to get your final schematic drawings that show what you plan to do for your home. Now we call this phase develop because it can go on beyond there. Some of our clients stay in touch asking for hourly design call setss or a little bit more design work, focusing or developing some specific area of the house over time.
For others, we just get pictures of how the remodel is coming along as they carry it out. Now it looks a little bit different on the inside for us, we follow the same steps after we agree to work with each other. Dream, discover and distill start to happen. Now for us, this is where we wait. We know who you are and we’re excited to work with you. So we basically sit around rubbing our hands together, getting ready to hear that you’ve done your pre-design homework. I’m kidding. We’re working on other design projects while we wait. Once we’ve got all the pre-design information together, we schedule our kickoff meeting, making sure we understand all the details of what you want to have happen for your home. And then we go into the draft phase. This is where we study everything. We’ve got notes, plans, photos, Pinterest boards, and begin to brainstorm.
We identify what areas of the house we’re going to propose multiple solutions for, and where we think there’s just one or maybe two correct answers to radically improve the way the house is working based on your requests. We model the project and look at anywhere from three to a dozen micro solutions that can work in different parts of the house and then focus them down to no more than three schemes to share with the homeowner because we draw up floor plans from those schemes and create perspective sketches to illustrate them clearly, and then we gather them all into our first document, The Mid-Century solutions package. The solutions package is organized with both drawings and annotation text so that whether you work now immediately after our process goes forward with a contractor to do everything in one swell food, you’re set. But if you are also someone who’s gonna take the project in phases, you might pick up a floor plan three years from now and not really remember the details we discussed at a meeting, but we’ve written down the nuance for you so you can always come back to all the design ideas that we considered at the time of your workshop meeting.
At the same time, we’re pulling together an array of smaller design recommendations and a style guide for each room, a material palette of images that work together cohesively. We also include a draft scope of work, a written list of the things that will happen in the project, which will serve our homeowners as a jumping off point when they start comparing contractor bids. We schedule our meeting and meet depending on the decisiveness of the homeowner. Finally pulled together our final schematic drawing set a single version of all our schemes to carry the client forward into the future. Then we look forward to staying in touch as much as is desired by the client after we finish the master plan process. This is, in my opinion, the best way to essentialize the services of a traditional architectural process and focus them into getting you the schematic ideas that will help really change the way you live in your house, move a wall, open a window, connect to the outside, relay out your kitchen in a way that will do more than just update the surfaces.
And then jumping forward the style guide portion of the document. Act as if we were helping you choose every finish and material, but at much less cost. This system is the one that I’ve created to solve the remodelers regret that I’ve heard way too many times from people who thought they couldn’t afford to work with an architect or just didn’t realize that they could offering this short, punctuated period of design, which in some ways requires more collaboration between homeowner and designer than the traditional architectural process, allows people to have such a better result for their home. And since we share your passion for mid-century detailing, we ensure that your home will end up as mid-century or more so than it was when the remodel began.
If our somewhat unorthodox method of helping people plan amazing mid-century remodel seems like exactly your cup of tea, I hope you’ll get in touch with us, asap as a designer, Check out the careers tab on our homepage, or if you’re a mid-century homeowner and this episode just clarified for you that we are exactly the folks you’d like to help you plan your mid-century remodel, then you can get started by checking out the “Work With Us” tab on our website. Find those and the transcript of this episode at midmod-midwest.com/1001. And as I mentioned at the top, if you just have some ideas about how we can make the podcast even better over the next weeks, months and years, get in touch by any means you’d like. I look forward to hearing from you and you know where to hear more from me. Take care, mid mod remodelers.