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The History of Mid-Century Ranches in Middle America · Mid Mod Remodel

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: We can all use a reminder that history came with context-- what was important and why--before we make informed choices about what we change, and what we shouldn't.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: Hey there.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Mid Mod Remodel.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid- century home to your modern life.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid- century ranch enthusiast.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: Our last episode was all about why ranches and other mid-century homes are so great and yet also a little extra difficult to remodel properly.
• 0:34
  This week I'll be digging into history.
• 0:37
  After all, it helps to know where we're coming from before we plan where to go next.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: The main message here is that this all happens in a context.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: The materials, style, choices, and culture that add up to a mid-century ranch all come from somewhere.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Knowing the history helps us recognize what's still important about our homes and what might not be.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Knowing what's important to you will help you streamline decisions about remodeling your house.
• 1:03
  As always, you can find detailed show notes at my website.
• 1:06
  In this case, they'll be at midmod-midwest.com/ 002.
• 1:12
  Before I get into the history of mid-century homes, I want to take a minute to think about why this even matters.
• 1:18
  Now, maybe it's a no brainer.
• 1:19
  Maybe you're listening because you are an MCM history buff.
• 1:22
  I'm one too, but I think that this is a key idea for anyone planning to update a mid-century home.
• 1:28
  We can all use a reminder that history came with context, what was important and why before we make informed choices about what we change and what we shouldn't.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: It is also really important to remember regional specificity.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: I just had an amazing example of this pop up in my Instagram community this very week.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: I had a great interchange with a number of my favorite Instagram, mid-century friends.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Here's what happened.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: I posted a few pictures from a recent open house of a house for sale actually just down the block from mine.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: One of them was a shot of the garage door of the house, which was an old-fashioned, wood panel door with routed grooves that had been painted in a contrasting color to match the house.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: It was really cute, and I made a comment, something along the lines of envying this original mid-century garage door.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Mine was replaced, and I wish it wasn't.
• 2:18
  Before you tune me out;"Garage doors?!?" The garage is a huge part of how an MCM or a newer house faces the street.
• 2:25
  It's also a big part of your daily experience of your home.
• 2:27
  An average American goes in and out their own garage much more than their front door.
• 2:32
  So, let's talk about mid century garage doors for a second.
• 2:35
  I got a response from@modarchitecture.
• 2:38
  That's Darren Bradley, who is an amazing mid-century architecture photographer.
• 2:42
  He chipped in to tell me that he didn't think that garage door could be original because mid century garage doors of that period would always have been a tilt-slab garage door.
• 2:52
  I was really fascinated by this.
• 2:54
  I'd never heard of the fact that original mid-century houses might be tilt-slab.
• 3:00
  So I took that back to Instagram and updated my story to say, looks like I'm wrong.
• 3:06
  @modarchitecture says that this house w ould had a tilt-slab, and then I threw it open to c rowdsourcing.
• 3:11
  Who else knows about this?
• 3:13
  I got an amazing set of responses from the internet.
• 3:16
  People telling me that their house did or did not have an original tilt- slab, and I followed up on my instinct after I thought about it for a little while, which was to say that I didn't think it seemed very practical for a Midwestern house to have a tilt-slab garage door.
• 3:30
  It would just be a problem if it got stuck in the snow.
• 3:32
  Sure enough, I did a little bit more research, and I found that advertisements for contemporary houses with that and even earlier ones in this area did have sectional roll-up garage doors.
• 3:42
  And while I need to do more research on the subject still, the bottom line is-- this is a regional variation in mid-century homes.
• 3:49
  It's so important to consider how the region affects the history of your house, and it's really important to know what that history IS before you make choices about what is hypothetically correct or aesthetically pleasing for you to consider.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: All right, what do I even mean when I say mid-century modern because that's not what they would've called it back when they were building my house.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: The term was actually coined in 1984 by Cara Greenberg for her book, Mid-Century Modern Furniture of the 1950s.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: She was an expert in mid-century furniture and the term mid-century modern has a lot of broad definitions.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: It can mean different things to different interest groups.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: If you're interested in industrial design, furniture, interior decorating, or homes.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Region by region, MCM faded in and out a t different times.
• 4:39
  For myself, speaking for Madison, it's an easy shorthand to say 1945 to 1965, although even that is somewhat incorrect.
• 4:46
  Our building boom and Madison didn't really kick off until 1950.
• 4:50
  Moving on from definitions, I'd like to put this mid-century postwar building boom into a bigger context, big changing movements that were going on.
• 4:57
  Before we talked about the mid century, we need to talk about what came before.
• 5:02
  Mid-century Modern, as in modernism, is tied to a style idea called International Modernism, a new idea that came out of Europe after World War One and eventually spread all over the world.
• 5:13
  Big names in this movement you may have heard include Walter Gropius, M LA CORBA, CA Richard Neutra, J B AOD, Phillip Johnson.
• 5:25
  No, this podcast isn't a short course on International Modernism, but in very broad strokes, these guys were all interested in renouncing historicist architecture that looked backward and tried to emulate old parts of history.
• 5:36
  They wanted to explore the possibilities of new and newly improved construction materials like steel frames and glass used in curtain walls.
• 5:44
  They wanted to strip away extra ornament and focus on the beauty of each material doing the thing it was meant to do.
• 5:51
  You might have heard the phrase by Louis Kahn,'What does the brick want to be?' That ties right into the same idea.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: They started a school of architecture, but were basically run out of Germany in the 1930s for being too socialist and having too many Jewish members of their design community.
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: They ended up in future Israel in South America, in Africa, and here in America.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer came to the Harvard graduate school of design and basically remade it in their image.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Mies van der Rohe came to Chicago and founded a program at IIT.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Together they trained a generation of American architects in modernism; the prevailing style of big architecture that would be office building, schools, government, etc.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: , well into the 1970s.
• 6:33
  Now another separate new idea that was coming along around the same time was the architectural philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright.
• 6:41
  He was tooling along in his own lane of traffic, Wright was a dedicated iconoclast who refu sed to be categorized into anyone else's idea of modernism or design styles.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: He went through a number of iterations in his own design career, starting with creating the Prairie School style, which was heavily influenced by both regional specificity to the Midwest, and some Japanese influences to have more long, low broad houses with wide overhanging gable roof lines.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Then he moved forward into a period where he spent a lot of time in Arizona and got interested in designing with sort of Mayan style concrete blocks.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: And then he wanted to create a new American suburban landscape with a house type he called Usonian, that's U S A-- Usonian.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: He designed a handful, I think as many as 50, along with his apprentices-- small houses for individual homeowners that were meant to be built in car-access suburbs.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Uh, the first of which was designed for the Jacobs family right here in Madison, Wisconsin, and just got listed on the UNESCO world heritage site along with seven other Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: He's a big deal, influencing mid-century architecture in this area because of his Madison connection.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: But he also was really pushing the idea of a new kind of living, a little bit more open plan, and yet not quite as harshly grid-based, and you shall live in a glass box.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: If you think of some of the work of his contemporaries like Mies van der Rohe, who was designing the Farnsworth house.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: (Again show notes for images.) Wright was designing things that look a lot more like mid-century ranches.
• 8:31
  But neither Frank Lloyd Wright nor the International Modernists w ere having a huge influence on what the regular American house looked like before the post-war building boom.
• 8:41
  While there were many other historical styles that were popular, one of the most common house forms basically at any point in American history, but also certainly, before the war was the Cape Cod, a very simple house form a plan, one or two stories under a steep pitched roof, probably a 12x12, or at a 45 degree angle, which means you can often fit some extra rooms in under the attic.
• 9:04
  Th is s tyle of house goes all the way back to settlement of New England.
• 9:08
  It always has the long side of the house facing the street so you don't see the gable edge.
• 9:11
  You see the flat angled part of the roof and a central door lined ok ay u p with a c entral hallway and flanked by symmetrical windows.
• 9:21
  If you're interested in the design history of Cape Cod houses, you might want to check out architect Ro yal Barry W ills, a Massachusetts designer who wa s a huge booster of the style.
• 9:30
  (I'll link to a book about him in the show notes) At home in new England, he was a strong proponent of traditional-looking houses, updated for modern living, with slightly modernized floor plans.
• 9:41
  His work was featured in n ational better homes competitions and won prizes in the late twenties and early thirties.
• 9:46
  He continued to practice and promote traditionalist de sign r ight up u ntil his death in 1962-- much to the disgust of architects trained in modernist schools everywhere.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: A 1958 Saturday evening post article called him the big man in small houses.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: But of course we'll come back around in the mid-century period to the heavy lifting of bringing the minimalist Cape Cod to American consciousness done by developers of mass housing like William Levitt.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: We'll come back to this.
• 10:14
  So let's get into our period.
• 10:17
  The mid century homestyle was created by the postwar building boom, and it was basically a perfect storm in history.
• 10:25
  The great depression and world war II had created a huge housing bottleneck compounded by the population boom and an industrial leap forward propelled by the war.
• 10:33
  We basically had a huge amount of energy resources-- everyone pulling together, and a much more homogenous idea of what it meant to be an American during this period.
• 10:44
  It all added up to a giant pressure cooker that as soon as the war ended released a couple of things: GI is coming home and ready to get on with their delayed lives and households, industries desperately looking for ways to switch from full wartime manufacturing mode into something they could sell to peacetime.
• 11:01
  And that manifested in things like: war nylon supplies being turned into a wall to wall carpeting, the float glass technology that had been developed during the war was turned into a large-scale window manufacturing, and the plastics that have been created to replace limited availability of metal and wood during the war were recycled into a myriad of home goods.
• 11:26
  Groups and business owners, for example, the Levitt brothers, had perfected their mass home manufacturing techniques while making fast, temporary-housing for servicemen during the war, basically just rolled that business model over into new development.
• 11:39
  Harvard professor Ba rbara Miller L ane in her book, Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in the American Suburbs, 1945 to 1965, cites four major events responsible for the dramatic shift in housing types during this period.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: 1: increased car ownership.
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: 2: the new interstate highway system.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: 3: the low interest longterm government loans that are available for veterans, and 4: the rise in the bottom line for lower and middle income families.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: So the results of all of these things was a huge expansion of urban areas with the new highway connections, making it possible for people to live farther from where they worked.
• 12:15
  That combined with the FHA loans, gave us the broad reaching American suburbs.
• 12:21
  Now, it's easy to poke holes when we look backwards.
• 12:24
  We can sing songs about the houses all being made of ticky tacky and complain(as I do) about the damage we've done to our society by creating a world built around cars and highways-- when we used to have this amazing interconnected transit system of trolley lines and street cars that we took out and threw away.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: But what's important to remember is that these early suburban ranch neighborhoods were exactly what middle and working class families have been clamoring for-- for a generation.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: The war/depression era had put an unbearable squeeze on new housing development and congested cities were becoming unlivable.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: The depression and war had drawn people into urban areas from their origins in small towns, rural areas a nd other countries.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: The cities were packed with dense, out of date housing that didn't meet modern standards of l ight, fresh air, privacy, or even electricity.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: People were demanding a change.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: Note: A lot of emphasis is put on white flight, which is part of it, but while there were a number of moves to close the door behind white families that were moving to the suburbs and k eep black o nes from following them, the reason that everyone was racing to the suburbs was because they thought it was a better life for their families.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: So this is a good time to call out the racism that is baked into mid-century housing history.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: The expansions that were accelerated by new housing laws aimed to make home buying more affordable, lower down payment costs and introduced the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage were available only to white families.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: They made the dream of home ownership possible for some, and they entrenched historic inequities in our communities for many other people.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: The federal housing authority loans were not available to black families.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: A policy known as red lining basically divided up cities into maps and small neighborhoods to see which would qualify for the loans.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: A good quality neighborhood wasn't determined by infrastructure or any other factors.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: It was basically, do any black families live here?
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: And if so, how many?
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: And so, basically, you could downgrade the federal mortgage rating for a whole neighborhood if even a single black household moved in.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: The segregationist lending policies and realtor association policies(which would basically club together to refuse to even show families of color a house in a nice, new neighborhood that was going in) made a huge difference.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: Red lining., that policy of downgrading neighborhoods, wasn't outlawed until the Fair Housing Act in 1968, which means that families of color basically missed out on the potential for home equity-derived prosperity of the entire mid-century era.
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Do you want to learn more about this horrifying element of America's housing history?
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: I recommend that you start with Ta Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations, published in Atlantic.
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: (I have a link to that in the show notes.) All right, so back to our housing boom.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: I would cite that there are two big direct influences on the middle-American ranch house.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: We have to remember that there was a culture war going on between modern versus traditional design approaches at that time.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: On both sides of the issue, people were arguing that this was not just an aesthetic decision, it was a moral one.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: Modernism, the kind t hat's associated at the low end with ranches and at the high end with the kind of classy, post-and-beam, California-style architecture was a signifier of wealth, intellectual, artistic, elite and prosperity.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: It was being pushed by designers, but it was not necessarily being picked up by the home buying public.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Regular folks, were often looking f or a very traditional or normal looking house.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: By that, they meant minimalist Cape Cod colonial style.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: So during the immediate post war, the Cape Cod house was the most common house type.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: But then as it passed into the early fifties it lost its title as America's most popular house, and the ranch became the most popular.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: But the Cape Cod was a staple of American home design all the way through the period.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: When you look back at the references, professional architectural magazines were publishing only modernist houses, but popular home magazines, like Home and Garden and House Beautiful, were showing both modern and colonial Cape Cod style homes.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: In either case, they had the same kind of guts inside.
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: The open plan was the defining element of modern home design, and it reached America via the ranch house.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: If you have time to follow up on the links, I'd love to show you this image of a speculative home plan.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: The floor plan is exactly the same, and it has two options for how you can build it.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: You can either build it with a little peaked roof, like a little cottage, or you can build it with a California flat roof.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: And it's very modernist and avant guard, and it is exactly the same house.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: So I'm talking about the history of the ranch in middle America, not necessarily a California style ranch.
• 17:19
  From our perspective, sitting here in Madison and the Eastern middle of the U S, we've got this idea of the California ranch coming at us like a freight train from the West.
• 17:26
  We also have the very different influence of the traditional Cape Cod, being mass manufactured, coming at us from the East.
• 17:37
  In either case, a mid century ranch here is going to look very different.
• 17:41
  It's partly due to climate.
• 17:42
  We needed to design homes a little differently to accommodate big seasonal weather swings and snow loads on the roof.
• 17:49
  I think in many ways the most modest Midwestern ranches look like a hybrid-- a cross between the California avant-garde and the more traditional Cape Cod cottage.
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: So, let's talk about these two styles.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: The California ranch is credited to a fellow named Cliff May,and he had this idea pretty early.He was already working on it in the 30s.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: He was not an architect or even trained as a designer.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: He was a saxophone player turned furniture designer who created the first ranch house as a fancy showroom to show off his furniture.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: There's an interesting factoid, from Bruce Robertson's essay and carefree California cliff may and the romance of the ranch house.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: He points out that May had cut his teeth on home maintenance working on his family's suite of rental properties, and because his mother was often sick, he and his brother had to do a lot of traditionally-gendered, female housekeeping duties.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: So Robertson speculates that by taking on those then housewifely duties, it might've inspired the adult May to embrace the efficiencies of a modern open plan layout and open kitchen.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: For Cliff May, his design of the ranch house had three basic tenants: livability, flexibility and unpretentious character.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: By livability, he meant open floor plans that were informal and created a seamless flow between rooms.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: He wanted attached garages to integrate the car into modern life, and he wanted a friendly informal and as he put it, gay environment within the house.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: He wanted flexibility with multipurpose rooms, sort of casual family dens rather than formal living rooms which could be adapted as children aged, and family needs changed.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: He also wanted an unpretentious character.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: He wasn't looking at a fancy, highly-embellished type of house with a formal entry or a symmetrical front on the street.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: He was looking for a casual house, where you could throw an informal party or host a barbecue.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: So, basically, remember cliff M ay's idea of the ranch-- livable, flexible, and unpretentious.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: The flip side of that coin was the mid-century Cape Cod, or as it's also known, the minimal-traditional house.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: The idea behind this kind of house was basically efficiency.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: The Levitt brothers at the height of their era were doing these incredibly quickly, and they had an assembly line system set up in open air.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: So basically one truck would come and start pouring the concrete slab for one house.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: It would go on to the next property and to the next property.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: Meanwhile, another truck would come along and deliver all of the studs, wood framing, and finish materials in a giant pile.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Then a crew could come along and start framing.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: A different crew would work on finishing.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: A different crew would work on painting, and these houses could be smacked together as quickly as possible.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: He knew what people were asking for, and so he was giving them that reference to the traditional throwback in it's basically most boiled down form.
• 20:44
  But the most urgent factor for postwar home design, whether ranch or Cape Cod, was low cost.
• 20:49
  Right after the war, there was such a crunch that houses had to be very low cost and very small, usually under a thousand square feet in 1950 and only a third of new houses built in 1950 had five or more rooms-- a three bedroom house, basically.
• 21:09
  The more common four room house was a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms.
• 21:13
  These houses did have bathrooms inside, but somehow that didn't count as a room.
• 21:17
  One of the reasons that people were emphasizing the patio as living space was because there wasn't quite enough living space inside the house.
• 21:25
  Thomas Hubka is a professor of architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture, and he specializes in vernacular, or basically regular people, housing.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: I was able to interview him for my recent article, and he pointed out that the ranch was such a shocking departure from everything that had gone before because up until that time, going back to like the 10th century, a double-story house, two or more floors had always been the aspirational house, the Mark of Gentry.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: So the idea that middle-class families were aspiring to single floor houses, and that even wealthy people were building high-end ranch houses, single floor- just with a few more bells and whistles was really a dramatic change.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: He studied the basic spatial organization and he sees the defining qualities of a ranch as being divided into separate areas for car, for living, and for sleeping- often lined up right next to each other: garage living, kitchen, bedrooms area.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: But that on the outside, it's presented as a unified whole with little differentiation between the three.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: The ideas that started out really big in California back in the day had been boiled down to smaller, more modest ideas here in the Midwest.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that we can't, tie back and forth between them.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: The bottom line is you can never go wrong by learning more about the history of your home.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: That might be learning more about what was going on in the year or decade when it was built generally across the country.
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: What was going on in your region specifically?
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: What was normal?
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: What was the contemporary best building practice?
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: Why designers, builders, and homeowners did what they did.
• 22:58
  I recently heard from someone who just bought and is planning to remodel their mid-century home.
• 23:03
  They have a closed kitchen, and they're deciding whether or not they want to open it to the rest of the house.
• 23:07
  But one of the things they learned is that the original architect has been quoted to say that he wasn't very interested in kitchens, and he thought if people wanted to eat they could just eat out.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: So that's one thing to factor in as they consider how precious his design of a kitchen might be to them.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: If he didn't care about it, maybe why should they?
• 23:25
  It is also really interesting(as with the garage door) to learn what was going on at the time of your house in other regions.
• 23:32
  Was there a great idea that was absolutely contemporary with your house but just didn't happen to be hot in your area at that time?
• 23:40
  Maybe the time has come to cross pollinate your house.
• 23:43
  I think one of the best resources to do your own design research is to just look around your own neighborhood, to look at other neighborhoods in your area built at the same time but with different budgets or styles or different contractors.
• 23:55
  One thing you can do is just talk to your elderly neighbors and ask them questions about how the neighborhood has changed.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: You may also be able to find primary sources.
• 24:03
  For myself, I am so lucky to have access to the Parade of Homes.
• 24:08
  In Madison, this program started in 1952, and every year at the local builders association would get together 10 to 20 local builders who put their best, cool ideas into the most modern house of the moment.You can go around and see them built in neighborhoods across the west side of Madison, or you can go to the Home Builders Association office and visit their retro ad literature.
• 24:29
  For each one, they've got a blurb, a sketch, a plan, and a perspective of the house.
• 24:35
  They tell the features of the house, which is interesting in two ways.
• 24:38
  1: it tells you what was new about this house, and 2: it tells you what they thought was worth mentioning.
• 24:45
  The advertising literature for the 1952 parade of home is so modest.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: They're saying things like, Hey, come check out this amazing two bedroom house.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: It has a bathroom.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: The bathroom has a really nice mirror over the sink.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: It's an amazing insight into, was that the coolest thing you can think to say about this house to sell someone on it?
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: Anyway, looking into the history gives this idea of what people at the time thought was cool, and what they took for granted, and then we can make our own choices about how we want to work with that.
• 25:16
  Knowing what's important from history will help us place things into context.
• 25:22
  It will help us recognize what's still important about our homes and what isn't, and it'll help us make important decisions that'll streamline the remodeling process for each house we take on.
• 25:32
  Thanks for listening while I dug up a little bit of housing history to help us position the MCM ranch into its broader context.
• 25:39
  I'll continue to weave in historical background of mid-century homes as the season continues.
• 25:44
  In next week's episode, Then a nd Now, I'll talk a bit about how life and lifestyles have changed since the mid-century era and how that affects the way we live in homes that were built for our parents' and grandparents' lives.
• 25:56
  There are some necessary updates to match mid-century homes to a modern life.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: If you want to dig a little deeper, I've put together a list of my favorite mid-century resources, books, articles, websites, product suppliers, etc., and you can find all of that in the blog post or a downloadable PDF that is attached to the show notes for this episode.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: Download that and explore at your own pace.
• 26:18
  As always, if you have ideas, comments, or questions about your mid-century home remodel, drop me a message in the show notes or hit me up via direct message on Instagram.
• 26:26
  I'm@midmodmidwest.
• 26:28
  You can find those detailed show notes this time with so many ways to follow up and learn more about mid century history plus a bunch of pictures to illustrate all the buildings and style ideas I've been talking about on my website at www.midmod-midwest.
• 26:39
  com/002.
• 26:44
  If you liked this podcast help me spread the word by sharing it with a friend would also find it useful.
• 26:50
  So long for now.