Kitchen

Of all the rooms in the house, perhaps the kitchen is the one that is used more often that others aside from maybe the bathroom. For cooking meals and cleaning up, this is where it all happens and where many other non-food related activities also take place.

It is quite common for hobby enthusiasts to take over a flat surface in this room to assemble models and repair an assortment of items in what is generally a useable space with plenty of light and elbow room to work. However, for the purposes of this section of the site, I want to take a look at the culinary aspect of the kitchen and the many ways in which it is made use of by the person (or people) that do most or all of the cooking and clean up afterward.

Improving Your Kitchen

When you own your home, it is natural to want to make improvements in certain areas of the house, even if it is just to stamp your own personality on the way it looks. You can start with a small project and build into a larger one or start out with a big collection of changes that you want to make and attack them one at a time.

The choice is yours as it is your place, after all!

Getting together some ideas for remodeling designs and plans for your kitchen is a good way to get started. Or you could start in one corner of the room and plan how you want that to look.

Just form an idea in your mind and then sketch it on paper. Your drawing skills don't need to be artist quality as long as you can get down more or less what you want in basic outline form. The important thing to remember is that you should try to finish one aspect of your project before starting ion the next.

It sometimes needs a little motivation and that just takes wanting to do it more than just reading about how to do it. After all, what you want is a finished refurbishment and it will never get finished if it doesn't get started!

Getting it Right When Designing a New Kitchen

Getting the design stage right for a new kitchen if you decide to refurbish or redecorate is really important if you want to be the proud owner of a great place to prepare and cook your food. But when you only have a limited amount of space to work with, things get a little more difficult to fit in without making it seem overcrowded.

So some workable remodeling ideas always come in handy before you get started on yours to make sure you end up with a space that you can use without tripping over everything.

So Many Ways

There are many ways you can design your kitchen space, but the emphasis has to be on creating sufficient work space while optimizing storage space and still managing to fit in all the important appliances. So the first thing to do is to get some graph paper and a pencil, then start drawing!

Of course, drawing to scale is preferred and that's why graph paper is best as it allows you to size all the fittings, furniture and appliances to fit into the floor space while still allowing enough of that floor to be visible. A neat trick is to get some tracing paper and draw each appliance to scale on its own sheet.

Then you can overlay them onto the main graph and see how it all fits while being able to move stuff around without endlessly having to erase pencil lines.

Clean and Simple

What you are aiming for is basically a clean look with plenty of worktop space with things like the sink and drainer, the cooker, oven and grill and the fridge as the main appliances all sited where they can easily be accessed without obstacles. Smaller appliances like the microwave, mixer, coffee maker and anything else can be stowed away in cupboards or, as in the case of the microwave, fixed above the workspace so you don't use up valuable worktop area.

You can use slim cabinets to save space, with retractable drawers for easier access to whatever you intend to store in them. A pantry with retractable shelves is a real pleasure to use, as is a bin that sits behind a cupboard door under the sink.

Overhead storage space is ideal for those items you don't use much but still have their place in your itinerary. Use light colors for doors and tiles with effective lighting to enhance the feeling of spaciousness.

As home improvements go, the kitchen is so important to get right in the design stage before a single screw is turned and this is even more crucial when your space is limited. When you get it right, the result is a kitchen space to love because it's a place that you'll spend a good deal of your time in.

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