- Leave plenty of counter space for food prep.Kitchen image by armanxo from Fotolia.com
You want your kitchen to look beautiful while looking functional, so you must carefully plan your kitchen layout. You must take into consideration every element that you want in your kitchen and decide what needs to go together. For the aesthetics of the room, you need to balance the forms of the appliances. Map out the dimensions of your kitchen and make a list of what you want to include. - According to the Kitchens website, the National Kitchen and Bath Association recommends that you establish an invisible work triangle. Arrange your three main work areas, that is, the cooking surface, sink and refrigerator, in a way that you can make an imaginary triangle by drawing lines from the center of each. To ensure that the work areas are close enough for proper usage, the sum of the three sides of the triangle should be no more than 26 feet, with each leg ranging from 4 to 9 feet. The work triangle ensures that the major work stations are close to the cook at all times, while allowing the kitchen to feel spacious. The triangle should not overlap major traffic flow and should not cut into an island any more than 12 inches. If you only have one sink, place it across from, or between, the preparation area, cooking surface or refrigerator. If you have more than three major work areas or multiple cooks, you may want to avoid a simple triangle pattern. Instead, make room for what you need, and arrange for the sink and preparation area to be in a central location to ensure an easy transition from refrigerator to preparation to stove.
- You are going to want cabinets to tuck away your cooking items. Make sure that you have cabinets close to your stove for your pots and pans. Place cabinets close to the refrigerator and preparation area to hide mixing bowls, blenders, mixers and other prep items. Place cabinets close to your sink and refrigerator to accommodate plates and utensil storage.
- Make sure that your kitchen layout leaves related items in close proximity. Unless you prefer to lug the rinsed dishes across the room, place the dishwasher close to the sink. Locate your food storage near your preparation area, and the preparation area near the cooking surface. Place at least two waste receptacles in your kitchen, with one near the sink and the other for kitchen recycling. Never place the cooking surface under a functioning window to avoid fire hazards from the window treatments.
- The door or entryway in and out of the kitchen needs to be at least 32 inches wide. No doors, either the entry door or appliance doors, should interfere with one another. If you can only open your fridge or your stove, and not both at the same time, you are going to have problems.
- Ideally, you need a total of 158 inches of countertop frontage, with a depth of 24 inches. Leave at least 15 inches open above the counters to give you room to work.
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