Kitchen design

It is always an exciting time when we finally make the decision to redesign our kitchen. Most of us wait far too long to remodel the kitchen in our house and when we get round to the task of revamping the most important room in the house it can quickly become a daunting challenge when you suddenly realize we don't have a clue where we should start.

It is much more appealling to many of us to just make things up as we go along when it come to redesigning any room in the house. Of course, this is why few people have truly outstanding home environments and why interior designers make so much money.

If you don't sit down ahead of time and work out exactly what you need you new kitchen to do in a functional sense then you can't be at all surprised when you find your newly completed room just doesn't "work" as well as you would like. An outstanding kitchen should be an amalgamation of funtionality and beauty, and of course the ability to actually use the kitchen as intended will bring more contentment in the long-term then something that merely looks good.

Well the obvious place ot start when you are building yourself a new kitchen is with the planning. Everybody does this before they start thinking about all the new things they're going to buy, right? We you would be surprised. Although plannning the the layout and design of your kitchen to ensure you get everything to turn out exactly as you would like it a worrying number of people seem to give this step a miascule amount of time.

Its all very exciting when you start to dream about the kitchen worktops, cabinets and flooring that's available form the hundreds of kitchen manufacturers out there so its understandable that many of us decide careful planning is too boring a task. Much easier and more exciting to move directly to the colorful glossy brochures and pick out all the beautiful things you can fill your house with.

Designing a kitchen to be an outstanding success in terms of how well we use the available space is not a particularly easy task, and whether it can be judged a success will be down in no small part to who actually has to use the finished product.

You must consider how you personally use a kitchen when thinking about design, disregard advice from poeple or magazines which constantly tell you about what the latest fashion in kitchen design are. If you want to kitchen which if as useful as possible these things are secondary.

Things to think about in the design stages:

1. Who many people live in the household?

2 How often do you cook meals in the family kitchen?

3. How adventurous are you as a chef?

4. How important is it to you that the kitchen lives up to the latest fashions?

5. How much storage space do you need?

6. Do you need a seating area in the kitchen and how large should the table be?

7. What equipment do you expect to have in your new kitchen?

8. How much money do you want to spend?

With all the decisions that need to be made choosing a kitchen can be a daunting process which is why so many people leave it to the professionals. You wiil find that if you do it youself it will be much more satifying in the end as long as you take your time and understand your own needs.

If you break down the whole process of kitchen design down in to small manageable chunks you will find the task much easier.

1. Decide if you want a free standing or built in kitchen - Built in kitchens are great if you have limited space in your room and want to make it as functionally usable as possible. Free standing kitchens are sylish, easy to put in and can be taken with you when you move house.

2. Choose a style of kitchen - You'll want the kitchen to blend in with the style of your house and the decor in the other rooms.

3. Get out a pen and paper and sketch out roughly where you would like everything in the room to go.

4. Choose worktops, cabinets, electrical equipment, kitchen sink and taps, table and chairs