The Top Ten Kitchen Lessons my own renovation has taught me
By Wendy Moore
1. Start planning early!
The kitchen is the most functional room in the home, with more moving parts, appliances, fittings, fixtures and finishes than any other room. You need time to talk it through, mull it over, research your ideas and get advice. The moment you decide to renovate your kitchen should be your focus. It was literally the first place I started, and it’s taken the longest to get right.
2. Get a mood board
Your kitchen finishes will inform the style of your entire living space, so gather all of your chosen kitchen finishes together and use them to guide the style and colours of the rest of your living spaces. Your sofa, lighting and flooring should all link together if you want a seamless living space. I chose the colour for our cabinetry first, then used that to help choose benchtop, splash back and tap ware. Going for polished nickel tap ware for instance, changed the lighting finishes we would eventually choose. This also extends to the cabinetry internals. The days of just white cabinet boxes in kitchens is long gone.
3. Think about how you cook
Are you always alone in the kitchen, or is meal prep a family affair? Knowing this will help you plan the layout of your kitchen. A one-person kitchen can get away with a 1m distance between island and bench, but it will be a squeeze if two people are working together. This was one of the major changes we made after doing our Kitchen Test Drive with Blum – we ended up pushing our island further out from our bench, so we could both work side by side and have plenty of room to cross over in the space as we cooked.
4. Storage!
Need more be said? Almost everyone I speak to that has done a kitchen renovation will tell you that they underestimated their storage needs. Start with your small appliances, get them all out and line them up and measure the total. There is nothing worse than having to pull out three things to get to your mixer in the back corner of a cupboard! Part of the Kitchen Test Drive with Blum starts with an online questionnaire that makes you really think about what you need to store. It provides some cabinet ideas that you can share with your designer like my favourite pots and pans cabinets.
5. Access all areas
Working out the best places for all of your needs is just as important as how you actually design the storage on the inside. Drawers, for instance, give you a much more usable space because you can easily access the very back, whereas with a cupboard, most of the usable space is just the front row. Once we did the kitchen test drive, we changed all of our under bench storage to drawers and I think our usable storage space probably doubled.
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6. Think about your zones
Blum has an easy system: cook zone, prep zone, clean zone, consumables storage and non-consumables storage. It’s a great way to section out your kitchen needs and make sure that you have not only catered for everything, but that it all works together in a way that makes sense when you are actually preparing a meal. For us, having those zones helped us get our floor plan right, and lead to the next phase of fitting out the inside of each drawer so it was fit for purpose for our lifestyle.
7. Start with the fridge
For me, this was the most practical way to get the floor plan of our kitchen started. The fridge is the most used appliance in the home, and everyone – not just the cook, uses it. So make sure that is in the area that is the easiest to access – without having to walk through the ‘working’ space of the kitchen. It means that kids (and adults) can grab a drink while the cook is at their busiest without having to enter the danger zone. Once you have the fridge marked on the plan, then the rest of your appliances are much easier to plot.
8. Lay out your kitchen
Forget chalk-marks and newspaper on the ground, organise a kitchen test drive with Blum. You can actually send your kitchen plans for them and they will set up a mock of your kitchen in actual size so you can get a feel for the space and how you will work in there. I honestly thought we had our layout right, but after experiencing our own Kitchen Test Drive with Blum, we changed a few major design elements that will make our kitchen so much more usable.
9. Get smart
The kitchen has the most technology of any room, and that can make it a bit of a daunting task. Nothing worse than worrying that your kitchen will be out of date not long after your first litre of milk! The fact is that the best technology is the simple things designed to make your life easier. I love the SERVO-DRIVE system, when you have sticky hands, or even full hands, the ease of simply touching a door or drawer and they smoothly open all the way out. This is the kind of technology that actually makes a difference every day.
10. Take the advice on offer
Given how long I have worked in the interiors industry, I was really surprised by just how many details I hadn’t considered in my kitchen design. Sitting down with our Blum consultant after our kitchen test drive was so helpful, we tested every drawer, looked through all of the inner dividing systems, as well as all of the different cabinet applications and found all the best options for each zone in our kitchen.
I could not possibly have thought of every detail myself, and the advice was so welcome. It wasn’t just the changes we made that made the kitchen test drive invaluable, it was the choices we made for every space that had us both walking out knowing that this was really going to be our dream kitchen.
