Kitchens come in many shapes and sizes. It’s the one room that allows for a lot of customization, the abundance of material you can use in a kitchen makes it a fun project. Even when renovating the room, it is one of the most used areas in the house, you and your family will use it throughout the day. You hardly find it empty. The kitchen not only serves as the cooking area but is often used for eating, working and laundry, let’s be honest, the fridge is in the kitchen, and we all know what goes in the fridge. These are but a few reasons why the kitchen needs to be located close to the dining and family rooms.
The kitchen should also be placed in such a way that you can see the outdoor play areas and also be able to interact with those indoors, especially if you have young kids always running around.
Placing the kitchen next to work and storage areas saves valuable time and energy. It’s a good idea to place kitchens next to carports and garages allowing for easy unloading of groceries.
A kitchen creates its own heat and should be placed in a cooler part of the house unless you are certain you can make provision for cooling and shading. I advise you to place it in a cool part of the building from the start, you never know what might go wrong.
Let’s dive into a few areas in the kitchen and see how we can use them
Storage Areas
Storage should not only look good but must also be practical. The number one storage place for perishable goods is the refrigerator so make sure there is enough space in the kitchen for a large refrigerator even if you only have a small one to start with, families grow but the house stays the same, exactly why I love the idea of the open plan. Space can always be rearranged and walls don’t need to be broken down for future expansion.
Cabinet space
Cabinets are used to store not only dried or canned foods but also kitchen utensils. You must get it right the first time around because they can be one of the most expensive items in the kitchen, go with both a pantry and a tall unit if you have the budget for it like I said before the bigger your family gets the more food will be stored, and this sometimes becomes a necessity in today’s busy world. The pantry is usually closer to the garage,
Food Preparation
The food prep area should be next to the storage and cooking areas, this is again for easy access and kitchens often have more than one preparation area and you can also add an island to increase the work area.
The sink cooking units and clear counter are all parts of the
Preparation area, clear counter workspace is ideal when they are approximately 48”(1200 mm) but can be increased to 1800 mm. This allows for more than one person preparing the food.
Try placing it between the stove and sink or refrigerator and sink or in an island
(The triangle
The design element that makes the kitchen efficient, this is the space or relationship between work areas in your kitchen. The idea is to access all the areas without much friction, take the food out of storage, clean it at the sink, take what’s left back to the refrigerator and go straight to the stove,
These are all just guidelines, there are different sizes of kitchens that contain a lot of appliances so play with the triangle to accommodate different sizes, there’s only one thing you need to be careful about and that is the traffic flowing through your kitchen, the kitchen might be the center of the house but should not have traffic with a lot of interruptions.
Take all this as guidelines, information that will help when you design your next kitchen, you don’t have to stick to them exactly because kitchens come in many shapes and sizes. It could be that you want to design your storage in such a way that it is not visible to your guests if it’s an open-plan kitchen, meaning that your storage could be in the wall without any visible handles or that you want your food bar to double as a sink, totally hiding the sink from view. There is so much you can do, all you need is your imagination………and sometimes deep pockets.
