The kitchen is the centre of the home. Food preparation may be its main activity, but it also serves as a family gathering place, dining area, meal-planning area, and social centre. If you're a family that takes their evening meals together, your needs are different to those of a 'singleton' that eats out a lot.
A fitted kitchen makes the most of available space. You can choose for flat pack, rigid or custom built. It will add value to your home, but can't be removed when you move house.
Consider engaging a professional designer. You can pay them just for the the completed job or the design only. Regardless, planning the project is most important. It can save you hundreds of pounds and weeks of bother.
The mystical "work" triangle concept for kitchens was developed nearly sixty years ago by the Small Homes Council at the University of Illinois in the USA. The sink, refrigerator and the oven represent the most used 'activity centres'. The efficiency of a kitchen worker is greatly reduced if these activity centres are spread too far apart. The ideal distance is a straight line from the front centre point of one of these three activity centres to another, and should be between four and nine feet. The sum of the three triangle legs should be less than or equal to twenty-six feet.
All kitchens contain invisible 'corridors'. These are the connecting routes between other rooms and doorways. To stop collisions between the cook (carrying hot food or liquids) and visitors e.g. small children, no single leg of the work triangle should cross these invisible pathways.
If there will be young children in the kitchen, consider the layout and the positioning of kitchen appliances.
A kitchen remodeling with new lighting, fixtures, cabinets, appliances, flooring, and counters will probably take in excess of three months. The three-day effort on television is fantasy.
If you’re a serious cook, you're more interested in appliances and food preparation. If not, you may want to dedicate more of your budget to the cosmetic elements.
The main purpose of a kitchen is food preparation and your appliances should be the best quality your budget allows. Keep utensils near to where you are most likely to use them. This will make your kitchen more efficient.
Plan the main areas (sink, food preparation and hob) close together. This will make your kitchen more efficient.
The cabinets in a kitchen should reflect the style of the rest of the home, as they will be the decorative focal point.
Storage space is important. Large deep drawers, pull-out shelves, an island in the center of a large space, drawer dividers. Room to store and room to work.
Decide which part of the kitchen area you want to commit to seating and work the kitchen around it. In a small kitchen a large seating area is impossible, but a small breakfast table might fit in nicely. In a big kitchen, the seating area can take a bigger part of available space.
Countertops can be made of tile, granite, wood, and moulded resin. Adequate worktop space adjacent to the sink and oven is needed for food preparation.While natural surfaces look best, synthetic ones are more hard wearing. Make a choice based on the look you require and the kind of work that'll be done there.
Keep the existing service points in mind when planning the kitchen as rewiring and re-plumbing takes a lot of time and money.
Consider the ventilation points when planning your kitchen. Don't plan cupboards over them.
Flooring in a kitchen should be hard-wearing and attractive. Cleaning is much easier with a hard surface floor, such as tiling, hardwoods, marble, or concrete. Make sure sure it has good cushioning, as you’ll be standing on it for a long periods.
Kitchen lighting should provide illumination at different levels for all the work spaces.
The hardware and fixures should blend with the style of the whole space and enhance it. Options are chrome taps or antique brass, brushed nickel, or burnished copper.
Placement and accessibility of the rubbish bin needs to be planned as part of the food preparation workflow. Near the sink is best.
