5 Top Tips for Redesigning Your Kitchen

If you’re ready to embark on the task of redesigning your kitchen, you may feel a combination of excitement and anxious nerves. It can be fun and exhilarating to dream of your perfect kitchen, but you may also understandably feel nervous about getting your kitchen redesign done right.

In order to help make the process more enjoyable and hopefully less nerve-wracking, we wanted to put together a collection of some of the best tips from kitchen pros to address the most important kitchen redesign concerns.

If you’re ready to upgrade your kitchen, here’s a list of 5 top tips compiled by our team here at RTA Wood Cabinets to make sure your remodel will be a success:

1. Form Follows Function

Louis Sullivan, the prestigious American architect and mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, captured this principle most succinctly: Form follows function.

In order for your kitchen design to be a true success, it has to serve your purpose and needs. Of course, not everyone’s goals and requirements for a kitchen will be the same.

If you’re someone who loves to eat out and only plans to prepare occasional, basic meals in your new kitchen, your ideal kitchen will be different from that of an elite chef who wants to experiment with fancy food preparations at home.

For this reason, your first step should be to carve out some time to seriously reflect on all the uses you may want to have for your kitchen over the next approximately 10 years. Creating a list of priorities will help guarantee you get your dream kitchen in the end.

2. Let There Be Light

Unlike many other rooms in your home, it’s not enough for your kitchen to merely have some overhead lighting.

In order to create a safe, efficient work environment for food preparation and a sense of ambiance when you set out and serve your final dishes, you typically want three kinds of lighting:

• General Lighting – for this you might want recessed or track lights that will give bright light to fill the kitchen.

• Task Lighting – you may want under-cabinet lighting if you’ll do most of your food prep on your countertops, or a pendant to give extra illumination over an island.

• Accent Lighting – when it’s time to serve/and or eat food in your kitchen you want to avoid a harsh glare by using lights on a dimmer switch and/or sconces that can add a decorative lighting touch.

3. Power Up

In order for your kitchen to be truly functional, you need to make sure you have enough outlets in the right places to be able to power all the appliances you may want to be using in your kitchen.

You don’t want to be one of the homeowners who realizes too late that your electric wiring won’t support outlets where you need them.

It’s also a good idea to measure your large appliances (refrigerators, dishwashers, ovens, stovetop), and make sure they will fit in comfortably in the spaces where you’d like them to be.

4. Create Room to Work Efficiently

When designing your kitchen, you want to make sure it will be easy and efficient to prepare food and clean up afterwards.

One basic principle for kitchen layout is the work triangle.

Essentially, there are three basic areas to a kitchen that you can think of as 3 points on a triangle. In order for traffic to flow easily in your kitchen, you want to make sure the perimeter of this triangle is under 26 feet. The three points to the kitchen triangle are:

• Food Storage Station (Pantry, Refrigerator, Cabinets)

• Food Prep Station (Stovetop, Oven, Counterspace)

• Food Cleanup Station (Sink, Dishwasher, Trash Disposal)

5. Allow Space for Storage

One of the most common mistakes that homeowners make in designing a new kitchen is not planning ahead for adequate storage.

Ideally, you should be able to make full use of the space you have so that it’s easy to create a designated spot for every conceivable item you may want to store in your kitchen.

For example, overhead cabinets ought to go right up to the ceiling, and you’ll want deep drawers to easily access pots and pans.

If you’re ready to take the next step in upgrading your kitchen, we’ll be happy to offer you a FREE Kitchen Design. Just call RTA Wood Cabinets at: 800-788-7575.