Kitchen Ideas

The kitchen. To many, it is the home’s own castle. It’s the place where you rule, and your mandate is to design a room that will have the hoi polloi shivering in awe.

Kitchen Ideas If You're Home Building
If you happen to be building a home, congratulations! You have the chance kitchen lovers would die for because you have so much opportunity. You could worker with your designer to base the house around the design of your new kitchen if you really wanted to. The number of kitchen ideas at your fingertips is nearly endless: will your kitchen be small or large? Will it have an island or not? Will it have a wine rack or a pot rack? Will it be mauve or eggshell white?

If you’re building from scratch, make sure you have enough counter space and storage room for all of your appliances. Also make sure power outlets are in a convenient (and safe) location. Other than that, the world is your oyster. Make your kitchen your own personal palace.

Kitchen Ideas If You're Buying or Renting
For the vast majority who bought a home or are renting, you had little say in the design of your kitchen. For great kitchen ideas, all you have to do is remember the key to having a great kitchen: arrange and accessorize!

You’ll want to start with a clean palette. That means removing everything that can be moved from your kitchen. Look at your kitchen's landscape and decide which spaces you use most. Next, put all of your accessories and small appliances together and have an objective view of what looks good together and what doesn’t. More often than not, you’ll see what matches and what you still have to purchase.

Now you can start arranging. Starting from the largest accessories, place them on the counter/stovetop/rack one piece at a time. Step back and see how it fits in the overall scheme of things. Arrange your accessories in a way that is at least slightly different than it was before your began this process.

Whatever you do, don’t over-do. You might think that more is always better, but a lot of the time it isn’t. Think of your kitchen as a magazine or newspaper: a publication like Harper’s doesn’t have pictures overlapping each other, there are gutters between rows, and there is a distinct boundary that you might not even notice. All of this is called "white space" and graphic designers use this idea to make words and images easy to read, resulting in a "clean" layout. Do the same with you kitchen. Use white space effectively and make it pleasant to look at. You’ll be surprised how far you can get with very little.

Once you’ve completed arranging and accessorizing, step back and take it all in. Make sure you feel good about your mini-kingdom and soon, you’ll become surprised how much you enjoy working in the kitchen that you created yourself!