Top 10 Mistakes in Kitchen Design | South Bay Remodeling
A kitchen makeover can add to the value of your home and make your time cooking more efficient and enjoyable. There are plenty of reasons to renovate your kitchen, but beyond the siren call of the glossy design magazines and those shiny appliances you’ve been eyeing at the local home improvement store, there are some lurking pitfalls that you should be aware of.
Thanks to TLC for this fantastic article – Top 10 Mistakes in Kitchen Design. Shared by Titan and Co, a South Bay Remodeling company.
10. Making Room to Work – Planning Your Counter Space
One of the biggest complaints about kitchen design is the lack of countertops. You want your countertops to be decorative, but they have to be functional, too. When updating your kitchen, make sure that you have enough countertop workspace by evaluating how you use your countertops now and planning for your future needs. The amount of space you need will be specific to your circumstances and will vary with the size limitations of your room and budget.
Understanding how traffic will flow through the kitchen is a useful tool in organizing countertop space so that it will be efficient and comfortable. Make a list of the types of activities you need specific countertop areas for, and evaluate how they may overlap when more than one person uses the kitchen.
Materials matter, too. Where laminates are rugged and heavy-duty, some of the high priced stone, concrete, metallic and natural wood countertops need regular maintenance and special handling.
Lastly, you’ll probably need to have some appliances permanently located on the countertops. This may be a can opener, toaster oven, food processor, coffeemaker or a host of other gadgets. Having outlets where you need them and choosing what appliances you want to place in specific locations will help you plan your space better and control appliance creep, the tendency for appliances to start accumulating on countertops, taking up precious workspace.
9. The Golden Triangle – Good Layouts
In interior design, the kitchen triangle links the three areas of greatest activity: the sink, stove and refrigerator. There should be unobstructed access to and from all three of these locations. Of the three, the sink will see the most action and should have easy access to the stove and refrigerator, as well as your countertop workstations. Narrow aisles, inconvenient door swings and islands that cut off direct access to these key areas make kitchens less efficient and less convenient. When you’re in the design stages, a few extra steps may not seem like much, but after a few hundred trips around a jutting island corner, you’ll start to feel differently.
Once you’ve established a good flow, give some thought and attention to other areas in the room. There are secondary areas that need to be easily accessible to perform specific tasks, too. You’ll want the trash close to the exterior door for easy disposal, or at least have a clear path to the door from the trash bay. You’ll also want convenient access to a countertop where you can place groceries when coming in from out of doors. Another consideration is the communications area. If you have a desk, table or counter where you have a phone, writing material and possibly a computer or cookbooks, you’ll want to position it so that it has, if not completely unobstructed access, at least relatively easy access to the other workstations in the room.
Evaluate how food will be served and eaten using your new kitchen design. Will you have in-kitchen seating? If so, how many people will you need to accommodate? If you will be serving food from the kitchen to a dining room, you’ll also want an unobstructed path there from your prep station in order to move dishes in and out easily. View the rest of this article.