There’s a few things that very few people think about when designing a kitchen. I’m going to tell you what they are and why you should be considering them in your next renovation.
1. Reflect on What You Love About Your Current Kitchen
What I encourage people to do, and what very few people think about doing, is to make a list of the things in their old kitchen that they really do love and appreciate. Yes, the doors are falling off, the hinges and the drawers are squeaking, you don’t have enough counter space, and you don’t have enough storage. I get it, but I’m positive if you think about it for a minute, there’s a few things about your current kitchen that actually work really well.
Listing these things and making sure that those good aspects of your old kitchen that work really well get translated into the new design is crucial.
2. The Importance of Communication with Your Designer
What can happen? As you go to a kitchen designer, you show them the measurements of your room, and they design you a very functional kitchen for that space. Well, why wouldn’t you want that? It might be missing key elements that you’re used to having that do work for the way you use the kitchen. There’s nothing wrong with bringing some of these older elements into the new space.
It doesn’t have to be the physical elements, like the squeaky drawers and the doors falling off the hinges. It could be as simple as the placement of a drawer bank in a particular area that you find very useful. There’s a lot of miscommunication or sometimes no communication between the designer and the client during this process. You’d think there would be, but believe me, a lot of the time, it’s just “here’s my measurements, okay, here’s your new plan, here’s your new kitchen joy.”
So it’s important for you to think about that. Make a list of those things if you’re designing a new kitchen for yourself or with a designer, so that along with the more storage, the more counter space, and the more of this, that, and the other thing, you can have the thing that you really did love in your old kitchen. Very few people do this, but you definitely should.
3. Reducing Fridge Size in Smaller Spaces
The next thing very few people think about doing has the biggest impact on smaller spaces. However, it can be impactful for any size kitchen, and that’s reducing the fridge size. When you reduce the fridge size, you open up your kitchen for more storage and more counter space.
Now, in North America, we do like big fridges, and many—I’d say most—of the clients that I deal with have large fridges, 36 inches at least. But what if, in a smaller kitchen, you just reduce that to 30 inches?
A six-inch difference in size— you can say, “Well, what is six inches in a kitchen anyway?” It can hardly make any difference. Let’s just pretend that your kitchen has a 36-inch fridge and next to it is a 12-inch drawer bank. Well, a 12-inch drawer bank is horrible.
Very small drawers, just hard to use. There’s not a lot of things you can store in there, except a lot of small little things, which I guess is fine, but it looks funny. It looks odd. It’s not the best use of that space. Compare that to an 18-inch drawer bank and a 30-inch fridge. An 18-inch drawer bank is a really nice size drawer bank. The difference is astronomical between the two when you compare them side by side and you’re using them side by side.
A lot of the time, you don’t need a massive fridge. I mean, unless you do, and that’s a different conversation—you just maybe need a bigger fridge, and that’s just the way it is. But if you really think about it and assess your kitchen needs, think about the fridge size and whether or not you can reduce it and still live comfortably and store everything you want to store.
4. Rethinking Storage: Declutter and Organize
I know for many people, they have larger storage areas and we’re all looking for more storage. But the problem isn’t the more storage. The problem is the way we’re using it. Oftentimes, we are wasting storage space because we’re not purging out the things that we’re not using. There’s just old stuff in there that’s accumulating and causing more need for storage. That’s unnecessary.
Things are cluttered and we’re not organized. If we can get that little part down to a science for ourselves and get organized and decluttered, we’ll find that our fridges and even our pantry areas can reclaim quite a lot of space. Maybe enough to reduce them down a little bit so that they don’t need to be so massive. In a small kitchen, this can mean a world of difference.
6. Dealing with Corners in Small Kitchens
Many small kitchens have corners, and this is pretty unfortunate because by nature, corners, although they have a lot of cubic square inches, really get wasted—they’re not used efficiently. I have a documented love-hate relationship with corners, mostly hate. I’m not a fan of corner cabinets because of the amount of wasted space that they insert into your kitchen.
Magic Corner Inserts
There’s two types of corners that I suggest you think about when you’re designing a small kitchen, especially. The first one is a magic corner insert into a blind corner cabinet. A blind corner is a corner cabinet that has a door and then it goes into the back of the cabinet. This is this massive space that’s really hard to access without something in there that pulls out so you can get at it.
The magic corner is an accessory that is inserted and utilizes that space more efficiently. Now, it is a little bit expensive, but because of its shape and its two-tiered mechanism, you’re able to occupy most of the dead space in the back of that corner cabinet. Many people want to use every square inch of their kitchen, so if you are a square-inch saver and you want to use every bit of that in your new space—which is totally understandable—then that’s the type of corner cabinet I would suggest.
Blocking Off Corners
The second is the thing that causes me trouble, and that is blocking off the corner. I do this for myself, so I’m not just talking like this is just an idea. I’m not going to pretend that the blocked-off space isn’t wasted. It’s completely wasted—gone out of sight, never can be used again, blocked off completely.
However, the other parts of that corner section that are accessible and usable are used to the maximum efficiency possible, and that makes a big difference in a small kitchen. You can design this so it’ll store everything that you were thinking about putting in that corner cabinet anyway, and in terms of capacity, functionality, storage capabilities, and efficiency, it outperforms a 90-degree corner with a lazy Susan every single time.
If I had the option between one of those two things, I would always block off the corner. Now, this is not something that everyone is comfortable with, and I totally get it. I’m certainly not suggesting that you do it in your next renovation just because I said so. But I am suggesting that you think about it. Plan out an iteration of your design to show what that could look like and how it could function, just so you can have peace of mind that you’re making the right decision for your corner. You’re going to deal with it for a long time, so you want it to be the most functional corner possible because it’ll be the most annoying part of your kitchen.
7. Rethink Appliance Garages
Appliance garages are all the rage, but in a small kitchen, I don’t actually recommend them. In a smaller space, they’re actually visually intrusive and can make the room feel even smaller. Whether or not you have an appliance garage, the capacity for storage is still the same, and seeing your things is not that big a deal. Most people, when they walk into a kitchen, are accustomed to seeing things on the countertop, and a lot of the time these things are small appliances, which get stored in appliance garages.
Much easier and more efficient, in my opinion, to not have the appliance garage in smaller spaces, so that the countertop space is more fluid with the rest of the workflow of the kitchen, instead of being blocked off by a cabinet that’s taking up that space permanently.
Any decision you make in the kitchen, you have to weigh it out against your needs, your wants, and what’s going to make the most sense for your space. In smaller kitchens, appliance garages don’t make enough sense for me to recommend them highly. In a bigger space, you have the expansive countertop that you can waste a little bit of this efficiency, then go for it. But in a small space, I would rethink that one.
8. Consider Changing Your Window Location
This next one, very few people think about, and when mentioned to clients, I’d say there’s the most amount of resistance. Now, it’s not resistance because it’s a bad idea—oftentimes the client recognizes that’s a great idea. It’s just that it’s usually out of the scope of the kitchen design process.
Changing your window location can mean a world of difference in the type of design and layout you can have for your kitchen, but it is not something that everyone can do or has the budget to do, or maybe even allowed to do because of an HOA or something like that. However, I suggest that you think about it.
If you’re planning a kitchen, go down the rabbit hole, find out how much it costs, what it’s going to do to the outside of your home, how much of a nuisance it’s going to be, and how much it’s going to change the outcome of your kitchen design and your kitchen layout. In the design phase, you can do this easily—just have your designer move the window, put that window in a location that makes the most sense, and let’s see what it looks like. At least give yourself the information that this is what could happen if we move the window, and this is what can happen if we don’t.
At the end of the day, you have to make the decision based on all of those factors. If you can’t move the window, fine. But if you never think about it, or you never know to think that you can move the window to a different location to make the kitchen function like a dream, then you should at least explore that idea. Again, very few people are going to probably do this, but I think everyone should think about it and at least plan out what it would look like if they did.
9. Plan Your Storage: Where Will Everything Go?
It was always amazing to me when I used to work with clients face-to-face and was selling an actual kitchen product that very few of them had any idea where things were going in their new kitchen. There needs to be an in-depth look at the things you own and the things that are coming into that new kitchen and where they’re going to be stored, so that you don’t end up in your new space with items that you’re like, “Where does this go?” and you’re like, “I don’t really know, it doesn’t fit anywhere, we never thought about it,” or it has to fit sideways somewhere, or we’re taking up all this space to store it because we never thought through where it’s going to go.
If you take the time at the beginning of the design process to list out the things that you own and even measure them so that you can accommodate them in the new design, you will save yourself so much trouble later on, and you’ll be that much happier with the way your kitchen functions.
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