Master Plan Your Mid-Century Storage.

19 min readYour mid-century home could probably use more storage. Today I am going to ask you to slow down and learn why my Master Plan Method might be the best way to solve your storage woes.

Storage is a near universal mid-century home problem, and it comes up for every design client and every ready-to-remodel homeowner in every space around all of their homes. 

The good news? There are solutions. The better news? There are solutions that can add both storage and charm into your mid-century home. 

First, there is an option that doesn’t involve adding anything. You can weed stuff out, have less and choose to live within your home’s meager mid-century closets. 

You can also go low-ish cost and low disruption by focusing on finding the perfect piece of mid-century storage furniture or the perfect suite of modular storage for every space. A little storage is better than nothing. And this might a great “for now” solution as you (or we) create your master plan. 

And you can combine these lower impact options with more robust solutions based on your goals and budget and the life you want to live in your home. Not every storage solution needs to be solved with beautiful, expensive built-ins. Sometimes the solution is vintage furniture to attractively conceal your items, or wireframe shelves with neatly organized plastic storage tubs in a basement.

And I’m not going to rule out any of these options. 

BUT I am going to argue that using my Master Plan Method to design the right storage for your home and your life is potentially transformative.

Solving the Right Problems by Asking the Right Questions

It is completely reasonable to go from “I feel a frustration” straight to looking for solutions. This is what drives people directly to Pinterest first thing or causes them to rush out and buy storage furniture to cram things into without matching available resources to their actual needs.

In reality, we end up with solutions that really work when we start by asking the right questions. Which is why I begin every design process with a lot of information gathering. I ask about how my clients live in their homes and how it could function better, including questions about: 

  • Daily Routines: When and how do you access your belongings? What do comings and goings look like in your house? 
  • Habits & Hobbies: Are you a Costco family, or do you pick up something on the way home for dinner? Do you have storage-demanding hobbies like woodworking, quilting, or puzzles?
  • Visibility vs. Concealment: Do you like to see your belongings arranged around you because it gives you a sense of pride or peace? Or does seeing a bunch of objects create noise and chaos in your brain, making it better to have everything tucked tidily away behind a cabinet door?

Applying the Master Plan Method to Storage

For anyone rusty on the process, my Master Plan Method uses 5-D thinking to plan the right remodel for your home and life. The 5 D’s are:

  1. Dream: An internal process making mental lists of your hobbies, cooking style, and lifestyle habits.
  2. Discover: Taking stock of your house to understand where the trouble spots are and where there might be missed storage opportunities. Then documenting it with photos of your rooms and specific details. 
  3. Distill: Determining your mid-century style. This sometimes means time-capsule vintage or your style might be a modern update that adds a cohesive material layer to your home.
  4. Draft: Turning clever ideas, images, and advice into a number of plans that bring your house into alignment with your life. I always recommend developing three options for any space.
  5. Develop: Whittling your drafts and style choices down into an action plan that fits your life, budget, and energy level.

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Your mid-century home could probably use more storage. Nearly everyone’s can. This is a near universal mid-century home problem, and it comes up for every design client and every ready-to-remodel homeowner in every space around all of their homes. The good news is that solutions to this problem are many and varied. 

You can weed out stuff and have less, sure, or you can focus on finding the perfect piece of mid-century storage furniture or the perfect suite of storage built-ins for every space. A little storage is better than nothing, and a full-fledged master plan for storage is potentially transformative. So today kicks off our brand new season on mid-century storage solutions and built-ins for every room. 

Today we’re going to begin with, of course, how to master plan the storage solutions for your house. 

Hey there. Welcome back to Midmodern Model. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. 

You’re listening to episode 2601. Here’s a quick overview of what’s coming up today and over the weeks to come. Basically, from now through the rest of the year, we are going to be talking about storage in your mid-century house. 

Today I’m focusing on the process, how to ask yourself the right questions so that the answers you come up with are going to solve your problems. Tomorrow, oh, next week, rather, I’m going to be talking to you about decluttering. 

And I do not mean to make this a should-based episode, a shame-based episode. In some ways, I’m going to give you a permission structure to keep things that are important to you, but I’m also going to be highlighting a book I came across recently on the psychology behind the things we keep in our house and how perhaps touching on the underlying why of the collections or the detritus or the stuff that it’s just hard to get rid of can help us get rid of it more easily or understand it in a new way. 

So, some thoughts on how to clear out extra stuff from your life, because as has said been been said on the podcast before, you can’t actually organize clutter when it’s literally just clutter. Um, purging first and then organizing is a great way to go about it. And you want to figure out that you’re making storage solutions for the right amount of your stuff, then I’m gonna talk about mid-century vintage versus more modern updated, mid-century inflected versions of storage styles, both aesthetically and in the approach that we take to where we’re putting things away and how we’re housing them. 

So this will be a little bit of a if you want to be a more of a time capsule person, how to think about this. If you’re looking for more of an update approach, how to think about it. And then I’m going to dive into a variety of spaces around your house and talk about some of the specifics, pros and cons, uh background needs, types, benefits of storage solutions for kitchens, for entryways, both front and private, for uh bathrooms, for bedrooms, for basements, for living areas, and more. So I will be talking about storage in so many different ways. 

Throughout the season, I’ll probably point to a bunch of handy resources. Certainly for like kitchen storage ideas, I’ll point you towards some resources, uh both free and paid, that I have for kitchen design solutions. But in general, an overall uh free resource that’s gonna be helpful for this season is the guide to mid-century storage solutions that I’m putting together to match this episode, specifically walking you through this master plan process focused on storage that we’re going to cover today. 

So you can grab that from the show notes page, which is gonna be midmod-midwest.com/2601, or you can go straight to midmod-midwest.com slash storage, and you will get that guide. It’s also going to link to a Pinterest board I’ve put together with a bunch of great image posts collected from across the internet showing both vintage and modern update versions of successful storage solutions for all of these different parts of the house. 

So if what really helps you is visual references that are photographs, go check out those, that collection of organized boards, um, which will be linked to in that storage free resource. So, uh, one more thing before I dive in, which is to say if you are planning to work with Mid Mod Midwest to solve some of your storage problems, or to and to address the rest of your home improvement needs to set a master plan for everything you want to do to your house over the next decade, or to kick off a remodel that’s going to happen in the next year. 

Next year, certainly not in this calendar year, now is a really great time to get your ducks in a row for a 2026 remodel because that’s how booked our we are on our design calendar right now. Our next signed project is gonna start in January, I believe, um, from our perspective. 

Now that’s to say, when we when we meet with a new, when I meet with a new person, we have a conversation about whether we’re a good fit for you, you’re a good fit for us, whether your house fits our criteria and our design services and style will best suit you, and we agree to move forward. 

Your process will begin almost immediately because we start by assigning some design homework. Questions like, how do you live in your space? Some of them will feel related to storage needs. Where do your things accumulate? How, where the what parts of your house do you spend the greatest parts of your time? How do you feel about those places? 

That part and the documentation of the house, floor plan, information, photographs, et cetera, plus the boiling down of what mid-century style to you means, all begin as soon as we’ve got our proposal signed. But our design process won’t be beginning before January for any projects that we have not already got on our design calendar. So if you want to get work done in 2026, design also takes time. We’d love to have your design drawings set for spring 2027, but the time to get started is now. As they say, the right time to plant a tree was 50 years ago, and the next best time to plant a tree is today. So um, if you’re thinking about working with us, then reach out and say hello. 

Also, we are still on the hunt for the perfect new addition to our team. If you have been dreaming of working on designs for improving mid-century homes, if you love to draw mid-century buildings and think about how they could be done better, if you are just curious about what it might be like to work with for Mid Mod Midwest, reach out on our careers page. I would love to hear from you about your curiosity, your experience, your background, your love for mid-century. We are trying to grow our mighty but small team, and we’d love to hear from you about your experience. Or if you know someone who might be a good fit for working with our design and illustrating team, pass them this information. 

Okay, let’s dive right on in and start talking about the way to solve a storage problem. It is so easy to go from I feel a frustration to I’m looking for solutions. This is what drives people directly to Pinterest, first thing, to look at how other people’s entryway or kitchen or bathroom looks. This is why people rush out and buy storage furniture to sort of cram things into without having quite matched the available resources to their needs. 

But in reality, we’ve got to start with the right questions. And I begin every design process with a lot of information gathering. I want to talk to my clients about the way that they shop. Are they habitual pick up something on the way home and then make it into dinner people? Or are they a Costco family? Do they have crafts or other storage-demanding hobbies, woodworking, quilting, Lego, puzzles? What helps you, a potential client, live best with your stuff? Do you like to see it arranged around you because seeing it gives you a sense of pride or peace or reminds you of your favorite thing you’ve accomplished? Or does seeing a bunch of objects around you create noise in your brain? Is it chaotic? Is it always better to have everything tucked tidily away behind a cabinet door? 

Throughout this season, I’m going to talk about the ways that mid-century homes sometimes have incredibly clever, desirable storage solutions that we should reach back in time and connect to, and sometimes then in the ways that they are totally lacking and we can completely improve upon them. 

So while we settle in for this next series of episodes, I’m going to constantly return to this first episode of the season, which is to ask about what problem we’re solving before we try to solve it. What’s going on in your household as it stands, what’s going on in your life, the way you’re living it, what would you like it to look like? And from there, we can throw a spaghetti at the wall and try to solve specific problems. 

Before I dive in on the process you should think about, questions to ask yourself as you go through a storage solving process, I want to caveat that storage does not necessarily or does not only mean built-ins, but I’m going to spend a lot of time talking about built-ins this season. In fact, in my head, I was kind of thinking this as the mid-century built-in season. But that’s not necessarily true. 

Um, this, as I was pondering how to begin this, I thought of all the way back to my high school experience, I was on the robotics team, and a crusty old guy in the shop who volunteered to support us had a saying, which he often repeated, which is, with a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. I’ve said that on the podcast before. From him, it was a reminder to us to think outside of our most easily reached for solution. 

He had a bunch of those helpful phrases, some of which were quite contradictory, like he’d pull, perfect is good enough when he wanted us to keep going on something, or good enough for the girls we go out with if he wanted us to wrap it up and get the hell out of his shop at the end of the day. 

And you know, yes, there were also girly calendars on the wall in that shop, and I think I was the first girl he’d ever had on the robotics team in his experience coaching. He was not quite prepared for it. But going back to the hammer and the nail, this is true. And I will just tell you that my approach as an architect is very hammer-oriented. I will always try to solve every problem with architecture. I’m gonna look for a way to look with a structure, to tuck a beautiful, clever built-in into negative space, to recommend that every storage solution throughout the entire house be handled by the one consistent cabinet shop so it can have this beautiful, smooth, coordinating grain and stain and design language, the material language of the house all ties together effortlessly. 

But that’s not absolutely necessary. Not every storage solution needs to be solved with beautiful, expensive built-ins. Sometimes the solution is furniture to attractively conceal your items. Um you can source vintage and add an era of instant authenticity to your otherwise flipped and white painted house. Sometimes the solution is just a bunch of wireframe shelves lining the walls of your basement with neatly organized plastic storage tubs along them. 

Um, so feel free to take this advice when I talk about built-ins as one thing you could do, and know that you have many alternatives. So we’re going to solve the right problems by asking the right questions first. Friends, you’re not shocked, but I’m going to talk to you about how we should use a master plan method approach here. 

Yes, you need a master plan for your entire house before a remodel. And we can also use master plan thinking specifically to look only at your storage issues. For anyone who has forgotten, for if you’re rusty or if this is somehow the first episode of Midmon Remodel you’ve ever listened to, the master plan method is the 5D method for planning a remodel in the right order so you ask the right questions first and answer them thoroughly afterwards. 

The three pre-designed steps to gather insight into the situation are Dream, which asks what’s important to your life, discover, which digs into what’s going on in the house itself, distill, which focuses your style, what your mid-century aesthetic is for yourself. Once you’ve done that, you can move forward into creative problem solving in draft, the step where you try to explore as many possibilities as possible before you settle into what you will actually do with develop and focus mindfully on the solutions that solve all the problems you have at a scale that fits your life and your budget and your energy level. 

As always, if you’re thinking about the big picture of a master plan process, go over and check out my free class, Planning a Mid-Century Remodel to Fit Your Life and Budget, which is an hour-long uh recording of a live event that I do occasionally to walk someone through this entire process. So the master plan approach to your whole house is key to a successful remodel, but this thinking works at every scale. 

I use it when I’m standing in the aisle of a home goods store debating between two products and feeling a little worn out about choices. I speed run a micro master plan process to help focus my decisions. What helps my life in this case? What does the space, the house, need? What are the style through line elements that connect with other parts of the house? What could I choose based on what’s available in front of me or everywhere in the internet in the world? And then what’s the best choice out of all of that? I can sometimes do it as quickly as it just took me to say those five steps. 

And what this often turns up for me is that I can narrow the process right down and pick something in front of me, or hold up my hands and back away slowly from an impulse purchase that I, in fact, did not need at all. So let’s take this and think about how storage solutions can fit into the framework of the master plan. When we start with dream, this is always going to be an internal process. You’re making mental lists of your hobbies, your cooking style, the way you like to stock up on spares at Costco, versus knowing that you are a person who wants to go to the store on the way home from work and pick out tonight’s meal. 

It doesn’t need to be grander or more complicated than this. Reflecting on what makes you different from everybody else is important to figure out how you fit or don’t fit into the storage solutions of your existing house. If this helps, you can also think about how well or awkwardly you fit your things into various rental spaces of your youth or into other previous houses you’ve lived in, or the one you’re living in right now. 

Now, some of these questions are less important to you to ask yourself, although it doesn’t hurt to just stop and think about, you know, what what are my habits that create storage needs? But they’re very important questions to answer and to be able to clearly share with any designer you may enlist in the aid of your remodel. Because while it is obvious to you, knowing whether you’re a shoes-on or a shoes-off household is not obvious to everyone else unless you tell them and it makes a big difference to storage. 

Does all of that need to happen at the entry transition zone, or are shoes primarily stored in each person’s room where they get taken off during the evening? So doing a little ruminating on how your lifestyle relates to things is very important. And also, as I said earlier, one of the questions that I always like to talk to my clients about as I’m preparing to do a master plan for them is how much they want to see, how much do you want to see all of your belongings around you visibly versus how much do you want them all to be closed away behind drawers? Behind doors or drawers. 

Now, the next step in the 5D process is to discover. And in the case of storage solutions, dream and discover really can go hand in hand because what you’re looking for is trouble spots, and you’re gonna see them very visibly around your house as you go around your house and take stock of what storage you have, especially if any of it might be sitting empty or is poorly used, and separately, the places where things are piling up because there is not sufficient storage. 

I’m going to tease a solution here that will come up many times through the season. Um, a simple framed closet. You know, like the kind of space, it’s a tiny room with a door. Uh you open the door, and inside is a two foot deep and two or three or four foot wide space with a single hanging rod and a shelf above it. This kind of closet is the builder basic most common default storage unit in a mid-century house, and it is notoriously underused storage volume. 

It’s really hard to properly fill that space up and still have access to all of the things inside of it. So, one of the steps in the discovery process is going to be to open every closet door in your house and see how much empty volume is in there. How fully loaded is the upper shelf? Is the hanging rod space totally used? What about the space underneath the hanging clothing? What’s on the floor? Is it easy to reach in and see everything you want and grab it, or is it kind of a mess with jumbled objects blocking each other from view? 

Similarly, you can go downstairs if you’ve got a basement, peek into the attic if that is a place where it’s safe to store things in your climate, or out to the garage if you’ve got one of those and take stock of empty storage volume. How big are your unfinished spaces? And do you use them for anything? If your kids are playing floor hockey in your back basement, then there’s not any possibility to fill it up with storage, as there is if the only thing that ever happens back there is you walk through it to get to the laundry machines. 

Um if my bringing up the idea of storage in a back basement room immediately triggers you, no, Della, I don’t have room for the stuff that is my everyday, always touched stuff, then I would ask you, what’s being stored in the closet and storage furniture inside your main spaces? Is all of that stuff daily necessary stuff, weekly necessary stuff, or even seasonally necessary stuff. Perhaps some of that could be shifted to more out of the way locations to free up space in your close to daily life areas. 

So you’re took you’re taking stock of what is the empty, if any, capacity of your house. And this is your answer will vary depending on how jam-packed you are, how long you’ve been in the house, um, how much you are an accumulator of things, how carefully you can pack things away. But you always want also want to see like where are where are the non-stored items piling? Um the best time to look for this is when things have been going a little screwy lately, not right after you’ve just cleaned up everything for company. 

Although if you clean up everything for company and then wait a week, you’ll definitely have an opportunity to see, okay, where are the where’s the fresh clutter? Um, but you’re gonna look through the house for where is there a pile that doesn’t belong? Where is there uh a sort of things piled on top of a storage unit as well as sitting inside of it? Where is there a pinch point where you’re shuffling around, uh scrabbling through a drawer to find the one of an item that you have too many of stuck into one small space? 

Some of these things, if you’re anything like me, will slowly become a little invisible to you over time. And so you’re gonna kind of have to do fresh eyes. This is definitely a place where you can walk around and look at your house, but if you’re like, I don’t know, everything is messy and I hate all this clutter, and you’ve gotten into the bad habit, well, or perhaps the self-preservation habit, of just kind of not looking at your hotspots, at your clutter piles, it can be also helpful to take photos of the room. 

It’s wild to me whenever I’m taking a picture of a space in my house. I’ll look at it, be like, yeah, that’s pretty clean, the dust is all gone, it looks good. I take my camera out, take my phone out, take a snap, and I’m like, okay. So there is an out-of-place piece of junk on that coffee table, and there’s a cord visible, and the curtains are crooked, and I immediately in the photo see like five things that are wrong with this picture that I didn’t notice in real life. 

So if you’re having trouble thoroughly documenting where these spots sort of pop up, then taking photos of your house might be good documentary evidence against yourself, what you want to improve upon. Uh, a nice before picture, if you will, and also will help you identify where are your most troubling clutter spots. There are some of these, though, that need no reflection whatsoever to be like, I can’t stand coming into my entry one more time and tripping over the giant, unorganized pile of shoes in there. It has to be changed. 

So, again, as I often say about the dream stage, this does not have to be rocket science. This is just knowing what you know and making a note of it. All right, dream, discover, distill. This is slightly jumping the gun, but let’s think about it as a treat to yourself. What is the ideal aesthetic of your storage? Should it be time capsule vintage? And if so, from what sort of style or era or micro note inside the mid-century years are you looking for? Or should it be more of an update? Um, more visible, more open shelving versus more closed? Are you looking for uh an opportunity to blend a light wood Scandinavian style into your older, darker amber mid-century home? 

If you’re doing a full pass storage overhaul of your entire house, this is an opportunity to bring in a new consistent material in such a way that feels very tied together and purposeful and can add a beautiful layer to the material palette of the house. If, on the other hand, your house has already been subject to somebody else’s bad comprehensive remodel in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, or a flip in the last few decades that has scoured out most of its original built ins and woodwork and character, this isn’t. 

Opportunity for you to feed two birds with one scone and really plan thoughtful storage solutions that both declutter your life and also bring back in a mid-century flavor to multiple rooms in your daily life. Only once you’ve gone through those three steps can you get into the hunting down clever ideas. 

This is where we get into draft. This is where you turn to Pinterest and look for other people’s clever ideas. This is where you check out what influencers are recommending on TikTok, on Instagram, etc., on YouTube. This is where you might find like a 90s published Better Homes and Gardens guide to storage ideas around your house. And the style of them will be completely, I don’t even know what blonde wood or white painted everything. But you’ll find some glarely clever answers to the questions that you’ve already been asking. 

If you’re looking for a suite of my own solutions to some of these problems, one place to get started finding good storage ideas for every space in your house is to just wait and keep on listening to the rest of this season. But you can also go back and check out a bunch of previous mid-mod remodel podcast episodes, case study blog posts, videos on the Mid-Mod Midwest YouTube channel where I sometimes show examples. 

Or if you’re focused on one specific part of your house rather than a comprehensive sort of solution, you might want to check out one of my several past live mid-century design clinics. I’ve done design clinics on kitchens, on owner suites, which is bathrooms and bedrooms, on additions, which covers a lot of living room space, on exterior spaces, which include sometimes garages and carports. 

So there are storage suggestions built into each one of those clinics. Those recordings are available on the courses page of my website. And yeah. The ideas that you’re looking for here do not necessarily have to come from or be planned for mid-century houses. This is where you can get a good idea from your neighbor. You can go down to several local cabinet shops and look at their showroom for clever storage solutions. You can surf the pages of Plykea or Kerf Kitchens and see what clever little storage solutions they suggest. This is where you start to accumulate a laundry list of wish list sort of items. I wish I had a pullout drawer for this, and I wish I had a tall sort of can storage pantry pullout in my kitchen. And I wish that the trash cans in the kitchen were in drawers rather than as a unit sitting outside of them. One drawer for trash and recycling would be amazing. 

This begins as a laundry list of ideas. And ultimately, as you shift from the draft stage where you’re testing out possibilities to the develop stage where you’re whittling it down, you’re boiling it down to the actual choices you want to incorporate in your home at the price point in the stage, in the steps that will work for your life. 

And with a cohesive vision that’s going to help you do a solution here that leads to a solution here that helps you lead to a solution here, then you’re getting into creating your action plan. Incorporating all of your storage solutions into the design package that you hand off to a general contractor also lets you then give them a little, not too much, but a little of your pre-designed thinking of your needs, your lifestyle, your house’s problems, and your taste, and asks them to input some more of their own clever storage ideas. 

And it also just helps you make sure that what you’re getting from them is not just the default, but is specific to you and to your family and to your life. So, for a quick overview of the steps of the applying the master plan method to specifically storage solutions, don’t forget to download my free guide, which you can grab at the show notes page or at midmod-midmas.com/slash storage, and it’ll stay with you and be a good companion to you throughout the rest of this season. I am going to be back next week with more on specifically how to think about the stored objects in your home. 

I’m not going to call them all clutter, but if you feel like they are clutter, like anything you own feels clutter-y, we’ll talk about how to address that. But for the moment, I am still, at the time of this episode airing, in the active process of recording the rest of this season. 

So if there are specific areas of your mid century house where you have a particular storage struggle, this is a great time to reach out to me on social media or to drop an email to Della at midmodest.com and tell me about what you’d like to hear on the rest of this podcast season. That’s all for now. Catch you next time, MidMod Remodelers.

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