Designing your ultimate kitchen should be a rewarding experience. After you have gathered ideas for your kitchen from a variety of sources, the fun begins when you start to actually incorporate all the different design ideas into a coherent picture of your perfect kitchen. This is the time to ask for assistance from a kitchen design specialist, who can work on the design process with you.
The place to start when you are designing your dream kitchen is with a dimensional diagram of your kitchen space. On a large piece of graph paper, draw the outline of the kitchen space, including any doors or windows that you will have work around while you design your kitchen. Accurately mark where your plumbing and electrical supplies are located. You can move plumbing and electrical supply points, but this involves more time and money, and it is always easier to accommodate existing service supplies into your design, if practical.
The placement of your work triangle should be the next step in designing your kitchen layout. The sink, cooking surface, and refrigerator need to be situated within easy reach of each other to allow your kitchen to work smoothly. Here, again is where an experienced kitchen designer can be a valuable partner in the design of your kitchen. They have the experience to know what will and what will not work efficiently, and could keep you from ending up with a kitchen which does not meet your needs. A good kitchen designer will know if your kitchen would work better with an island, or maybe a peninsula, or a movable cart or nothing at all. These are design items that need to be addressed early in the process, and will make the whole design process successful.
The next step is to layout your kitchen cabinets. Standard cabinets come in widths with 3″ increments, so you can use them in almost any kitchen layout. Here is another area where an experienced kitchen designer can save you lots of time and frustration. Once the basic kitchen layout is complete, the designer can assist you in including the details that really make a kitchen a showpiece. How about a plate rail or open end shelves for added appeal? Is a wine rack appropriate in your kitchen design? It is the little details, which you may not have even thought about, that make any kitchen really special.
Tying the whole kitchen together will be your countertop and backsplash selections. You have many options of materials, colors, and textures to choose from that this decision can become quite daunting. Your kitchen designer will be able to sort through all of the options, and help you to pull every design item in your kitchen into a coherent unit. While you are deciding on the features in your kitchen, the designer can be making changes on their computer to show you exactly what the design changes will look like in your finished kitchen. Maybe two great design items that are stunning individually, may not work well together, and seeing this on a computer screen can help you avoid making a poor decision, that you will regret later.
The design process of your new kitchen should be fun and rewarding for you. Take a positive attitude and a sense of adventure into the process, be open to suggestions, and together, you and your kitchen designer will be able to design a kitchen in which you will truly be proud of cooking.