In this premiere episode of MM Tells All, Megan is being shown the treacherous before and after photos of her home, the ModPod. The ModPod is the name she and her husband Hugh came up with for their modern mid-century home, which they gave a complete cosmetic makeover when they bought the property in 2019.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
This is… this is so scary! So, what is so funny is that the day the mod pod went on the market, Hugh and I made an offer instantly—full price! We had to have it. When we bought the house and did the first walkthrough, I was so excited that I put it on my Instagram. You know, “This is the house we bought; this is the mod pod! We’re so excited!” People were literally like, “This? You’re excited about this?”
Flashback via Instagram story: “Hey y’all! We are over at our new house today, doing lots of work. We bought a house, and we have a lot of plans to renovate this home. I just wanted to take you all on a tour and show you what we’re up to. As you can see, we have a lot of work to do, so here we go!”
No one saw the vision like we did. Hugh and I saw this very cool, very angular mid-century modern home that hadn’t been touched since it was built in 1981, complete with popcorn ceilings and blue bathrooms.
The first thing that has to happen is these lovely popcorn ceilings. As much as I would love for them to stay—just kidding!—they get scraped and removed, and they’re throughout the entire house. Then there’s this horrible kitchen that we loved; we could see the vision so clearly. Thank goodness our kitchen looks nothing like this now! It was just a diamond in the rough. Actually, I pulled off all the upper cabinets while Hugh was at work, and when he came home, this is a true story—he came home and saw they were all gone. He was like, “What? We didn’t talk about this!” He wanted to reuse those cabinets, and I was like, “You can’t be serious! They’re already off; they’re gone! There’s no way!”
I had envisioned that we were going to do floating shelves, and to me, those cabinets just looked so dated and wrong. We did reuse the lower cabinets, but I did not want those at eye level going all the way around our kitchen, so that was the first thing that had to go.
Oh, this makes me so happy! I think it’s just because this kitchen is where we spend so much of our time with our girls, where we cook with them, and just make so many memories. That is our dining room—that table! Everything happens around that table, you know? Hosting family and friends and all.
The layout and orientation of the kitchen were actually super challenging because we reused every single cabinet and every single appliance that that home came with. Hugh was really the mastermind behind that; he laid it out on paper—maybe not just in his head—and he did it himself. We basically lived in the house while I was pregnant; we were like camping out because we had no kitchen, no cabinets, no countertops.
Welcome to our makeshift kitchen! We’re cooking dinner tonight; this is hilarious—whatever you’ve got to do. Thanks to Costco for pre-made meals and a working oven! He just moved those cabinets around and placed them exactly how our new kitchen was going to be laid out. We got countertops made, and yeah, we pretty much did it all ourselves.
Okay, the counters are in, and they are amazing! We’re in love with them. This is our center island, and we did the waterfall edge on both sides. We definitely agreed on black and white being the color palette of our home. One of the most difficult decisions was the color black for the trim; we tried so many different black colors and finally landed on Iron Ore. It’s been like our go-to paint color for every single black we’ve used from here on out.
We did Iron Ore for the island and then Chantilly Lace on the surroundings—painting all the windows and the lights. We’ll have white with dark windows, and we’re going to keep the Iron Ore front door for now. I love our kitchen; it makes me happy!
If you don’t have to live in your renovation, don’t! That was probably mistake number one. Definitely don’t do a renovation when you’re pregnant—that was probably mistake number two. And live in it. After this, we said anytime we do something like this again, we are going to hire a contractor. We are never going to act as our own contractor on a project. We did that for our next project, and now we’re back to, “We would never hire a contractor; we want to do it ourselves.” So, I don’t know—hindsight’s 20/20! But then again, you know it’s been six years since we did this. We’ve learned a lot about how this works, what to do, and what not to do. If we went back and did it again, I’m sure we would do it completely differently. We would know so much more and have learned from all of our mistakes. But I will say it brings us so much joy and happiness for our family, and I just love it!
Oh my, oh woo! Oh my gosh! Yeah, this living room—with the carpet, the popcorn ceiling, the fireplace mantel—oh my goodness! The first thing I think about when I look at this picture is the huge mistake we made by not taking out this fireplace.
I regret not removing that old fireplace we still have and replacing it with a more modern linear gas-powered fireplace. That was a lesson I learned. Honestly, looking back, that’s the only thing I would do differently. What makes this space so wonderful—and why we knew this was our house—is how the ceilings angle up to around 22 feet at the top. It makes that room feel so much bigger, especially since we have 8-foot ceilings throughout the rest of our home. This design really opens everything up. We also loved the mid-century look of the super angled ceilings; they definitely weren’t cute beforehand, which is why everyone wondered what we saw in this house.
The first thing I’m noticing is this light fixture; it has always been one of my absolute favorites. We had the shades facing down for a long time until my sister and brother-in-law pointed out that the shades were supposed to face up. When they flipped the light around, the quality of light it cast upward was so much prettier than when it shone downward.
That tree you see is one of our very first purchases for the new house. We went to a local nursery — Meeting Green — and bought that huge tree, which has thrived in that window, growing towards the top windows and the light. I don’t know how it has survived, especially since we don’t have green thumbs! Everyone asks us about that tree.
Our big sectional sofa has been with us for six years now, and it’s definitely time for a change. I often find myself saying that the girls are going to keep spilling on it and getting crayon all over it. It has been through a lot with us, so we’re okay with it, but an upgrade is long overdue. This is probably the second space in our home where we spend the most time and love. Surprisingly, it still looks pretty much intact, but anyone with toddlers knows that things are likely to get messy.
Initially, we had a coffee table that was an ottoman with sharp iron corners. When Marion was a baby, we tried to make it safer by putting clear sticky guards on the corners, which looked so tacky. We decided to get rid of it and replace it with a round coffee table—that was one of the first updates we made.
I really wish we hadn’t chosen a white fabric for the sectional. Now, I never recommend white fabrics for sofas or sectionals to my clients, and I wish I had that knowledge back when we made our decision. The level of destruction that kids can inflict on a sofa is incredible!
Oh my God, the bathroom situation is dire! This is part of why this house was perfect—it hadn’t been touched in years. As a designer who loves projects like this, it felt like a no-brainer to us. However, we had a really tight budget at the time. We ended up working with the existing vanity, which we painted black, and now it’s pink for the girls. We kept the awful yellow tile on the floor and in the bathtub, and we had someone come in and spray it. Ultimately, we only replaced the countertops, sink, plumbing, new lights, and mirrors—which I’ve changed out like a hundred times because I love switching things up. We also added some wallpaper, painted the trim of the window, put in a new shade, and replaced the toilet. So, it sounds like a lot, but we primarily worked with what was already there. Using the existing cabinet helped us save a lot of money, which was crucial since this bathroom was mostly meant for the kids—not somewhere worth investing heavily.
Recently, our surface specialist just finished applying epoxy paint to our hall bath. It used to be completely yellow, including the bathtub and the wall tiles. I can’t go in there right now, but you can still see the massive transformation. We went with the brightest white we could find, and it looks so cute now! My niece actually painted that vanity the day before a photo shoot because I had a vision for our lighting photography shoot with those sconces on the wall. I envisioned the girls standing at the little pink sink, looking in the mirror, and taking pictures. The earlier black vanity just didn’t match that vision. So, my niece, who has never painted before, took on the project. She did an amazing job, painting the hinges and everything. The girls love it—it was the best surprise for them to come home to their new pink vanity.
As for weird things we found in the house, oh gosh! The blue bathroom in our primary suite was something else—totally blue tile, blue shower, blue toilet. And not like the cool vintage blue; it was that awful ’80s and ’90s shade. We lived with that bathroom for probably a year before we had the courage to tackle it. Hugh was fine with it—he thought it worked and was functional—but I literally couldn’t shower in there one more time. It simply wasn’t bringing me joy. So one day, we just ripped out the blue bathroom and transformed it into a beautiful, tiled water closet. The new shower turned out amazing!
Do you remember how the floors in the kitchen were glued down? It was such a disaster that we ended up having to take up all the subflooring. I forgot about that part! The not-so-smart thing we did was moving into the house and then, two weeks later, moving out so they could install new engineered hardwood floors. It wasn’t our best idea. When they started, they discovered that all the bamboo floors in the kitchen were glued down. Hugh was pulling up the floors with a jackhammer while I was standing in the kitchen, pregnant. Suddenly, a piece of bamboo flooring popped off, flew across the kitchen, and hit the microwave, busting it open! It was terrifying!
We were handling our own demolition and construction, and because of that, they had to redo all the subflooring in the kitchen, which ended up being a $4,000 expense we hadn’t planned for. At one point, when you walked into our kitchen, you could see through the floor to underneath the house! Those were some special times. As they say, if you can get through a renovation or home build with your husband—especially with a pregnant wife—you can probably handle anything. Life is so much harder now with two toddlers, but back then, it felt like nothing compared to that!
