The kitchen, no matter the size, is usually the heart of the home – the place where life-sustaining food is prepared, where intimate bonding meals take place, and where most of those crucial heart-to-heart talks happen. But sometimes a kitchen is just too small for everything you need to have and do in it. But don’t despair – you don’t have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for an expansion and remodel. Instead, let us show you how to maximize a small kitchen space in your Essex County house.
Use Every Bit of Storage Space
When refurbishing or moving into a small kitchen, you have to take advantage of every storage opportunity and space. Using cabinet add-ons is a great way to maximize a small kitchen space in your Essex County house. It will allow you to make more efficient use of the interior of the cabinets and will streamline the kitchen workflow.
For example, hang large spoons, ladles, spatulas, and the like on the back of cabinet doors, and hang cups from the underside of cabinet shelves. You can even hang utensils, say, pots and pans, from convenient ceiling areas and use corner shelves for smaller items. Just don’t waste any space, and the space you do have will be maximized.
Go Vertical
Your small kitchen may not have much horizontal space, but it has the same eight or ten feet of vertical space that every other kitchen has. So in order to maximize a small kitchen space in your Essex County house, make sure to use that vertical space.
The obvious move here is to build cabinetry higher, all the way to the ceiling. And that high space is where you can also work in some decorative grace, without sacrificing any of your precious limited floor space, by installing some ornamental molding. Another option is going vertical is to install narrower but taller appliances like refrigerators and stacked range-microwave combos.
Go Easy on the Colors
Another way to maximize a small kitchen space is to make the kitchen appear larger with a limited color palette. Keeping the color scheme to one or two predominant light colors will make your limited space appear and feel larger. You can use different shades of the same color to create visual texture, but you do want to avoid large areas of contrasting colors. The effect you’re trying to achieve is that of the space being a continuous unit without anything seeming to break it up into smaller pieces.
Plan the Lighting Carefully
It’s often overlooked in kitchens, but careful, meticulous planning of the lighting can go a long way toward helping you maximize a small kitchen space in your Essex County house. Not only will it make the kitchen seem roomier and more open, showing off your kitchen’s best features, but better lighting will make it a safer place to do kitchen work.
At a minimum, you need overall ambient lighting and task lighting at every primary work area. Then you can move on to decorative and spotlighting to enhance the open, well-planned feel. Keep in mind, too, that the darker the surfaces in your kitchen – walls, countertops, cabinets – the more wattage you’ll need in your lighting scheme.
Ask Your Agent
It’s not all that difficult to maximize a small kitchen space in your Essex County house if you use the tips laid out here – using all available storage space, going vertical, limiting the color palette, and planning the lighting. And there are still other tactics to help you maximize that valuable kitchen space.