Decades ago, the kitchen was meant only for the preparation of meals and washing dirty dishes. However, this has changed, with the kitchen being the heart of the home today. This is because it has transformed into a space for many purposes such as eating, cooking, drinking, working, relaxing, and socializing with your friends and family.
But if your kitchen isn’t as spacious, it can be a challenge to make it functional and perform all these duties with ease. So, if you’re wondering where to start, worry not. Here’s a guide on the insightful ideas on making your kitchen practical without compromising its functionality.
Install A Kitchen Island
The kitchen in the past wasn’t meant to be ventured by visitors, but this has now changed with a kitchen island. As a result, your kitchen is now more functional and practical. It can now be used for more activities instead of only cooking and washing the dishes placed on the kitchen flat pack.
The kitchen island should be positioned at the center of the room to ensure enough space to move about in the kitchen. You should also make sure it has a robust countertop to prevent it from easily getting destroyed by the slightest impact.
Place Utensils And Dishes Close To The Dishwasher
You should always make the most of all the time available when cleaning your kitchen. This is what positioning your dishes and utensils near the dishwasher helps you accomplish. You won’t need to move around the kitchen while cleaning, which is a daily routine. This can save you a lot of time in the long run, allowing you to attend to other essential matters later in the day.
Upgrade The Lighting
While proper lighting is crucial for all rooms in your home, it’s especially important in the kitchen than anywhere else. This is because, in the kitchen, you can find dangerous items such as knives or delicate things such as glasses. Therefore, your kitchen should have enough lighting at all times to ensure you can easily see the exact position of everything. This way, you can easily go about your cleaning and cooking duties with ease.
The best way of achieving this is by harnessing natural light. You can accomplish this by installing neutral cabinetry to maximize the sunlight that finds its way into the kitchen through the windows. To further improve the lighting in the rooms, you should add ceramic tiles on the range hood and walls, which do a great job of boosting your kitchen’s overall lighting by reflecting light.
But while natural light is effective at lighting your kitchen, you’ll still need extra lighting from electrical sources. This is necessary because natural light won’t be enough when it gets dark at night or during winter. Therefore, you should upgrade the lighting in your kitchen to improve its visibility. You can do this by adding LED lights inside the drawers and cabinets, adding undercabinet lights, and installing pendant lights. Adding lighting fixtures such as chandelier or pendant lights over the kitchen island is also ideal if you’re looking to make a statement while creating a dramatic floating effect all over the kitchen.
Utilize Vertical Spaces
The wall space and ceiling rack are often left unused even though they’re ideal spots where you can store many of your kitchenware. You shouldn’t make such a mistake in the hopes of improving your kitchen’s functionality and practicality. You can do this by using hooks, rods, and magnets to store your kitchenware tidily. Using these vertical spaces comes in handy when you have a small kitchen that doesn’t have enough space to store different items.
Some of the kitchenware you can hang on the adhesive hooks include oven mitts and measuring cups. By hanging these kitchen items on the available vertical spaces, there’ll be more room in your kitchen cabinets.
Use Drawer Dividers
Drawers are the perfect place for storing all miscellaneous kitchen items. However, placing these without any order leaves these drawers messy and hard to locate whatever you want. This is why buying drawer dividers come in handy. There are numerous dividers on the market to choose from, which are all designed to fit different types of drawers.
With drawer dividers, you’ll have an easier time locating the kitchen items inside, saving you a lot of time. Also, you’d avoid having your hand accidentally being pierced as you find the item you need.
Design Hideaways For Storing Essentials
First impressions matter a lot. Therefore, you wouldn’t want that the first thing your friends or family see right after entering your kitchen is lots of appliances scattered all over the countertop. The best way to avoid this issue is by designing hideaways to easily place essential kitchen items that shouldn’t be placed right in front of your eyes.
There are creative ways to do this, including maximizing the corner cabinet space or installing a sliding door. Another great idea is having frosted cabinets, which are a practical way of storing the essentials you aren’t using but within easy reach.
Put High-Ceiling Cabinets
Most kitchens have standard upper cabinets, which only accommodate one or two shelves. However, these aren’t enough to provide the needed space for all your kitchenware. In addition, there’s a lot of space over these cabinets that’s free and goes to waste. Installing high-ceiling cabinets is the perfect solution to wasted airspace, which is especially useful for small kitchens. These cabinets create an illusion that the available kitchen space is a lot more than it looks.
Takeaway
Making a small kitchen practical can be a huge challenge as you need to think of creative ideas on how to make the most use of all the available spaces. You should do this while ensuring there’s proper positioning of kitchen appliances, so they’re quickly accessible and there’d be ease of movement. This guide has outlined simple tips on how to best make your small kitchen spaces practical and functional. Consider the ideas mentioned here as you maximize your kitchen’s capacity.
