#Best Kitchen Design Practices To Follow For Your Remodel

By Lee Wallender. Home Renovations Expert

As the ultimate know-nothing beginner, Lee Wallender's first experience with home renovation was remodeling a 100 year-old house.

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Unfortunately, it has come to the point where I cannot answer readers' individual questions about home remodeling. The backlog has become so great that I feel I cannot adequately serve readers. If you have emergency questions, write to the address below and I will try to answer.

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1. Make workflow your first priority. Everything else follows.

A kitchen is a functional environment. In recent years, kitchens have become places where we do everything--homework, TV-watching, snack-eating, and sometimes, yes, we even do a little cooking. So, it is easy to forget that workflow is the number one priority.

Prioritize your workflow by keeping the classic kitchen triangle in mind, clustering services as close together as possible without getting too cramped.

Give yourself enough counter space to spread out and do your cooking-- but not so much that it makes it difficult to get from place to place.

Owners of galley-style kitchens (an aisle with counters on both sides) or that good, old standby, the L-shaped kitchen design, can now rejoice:  the kitchen triangle is practically engineered in.

2.   Cheat by working from established ideas.  You only make things harder for yourself if you try to start from scratch.

There are no new ideas left on this earth; it s just a matter of mixing and re-mixing old ideas.

The same is true with kitchens.  Nobody will ever come up with a totally new kitchen design.  The design you come up for your kitchen has already been done.

Take heart, though.  Save yourself time by copying established kitchen design ideas.  Either copy the designs wholesale or do as creative people do and break it all up and remix.

3. Smaller really can be better.  With everything scaled down, costs are drastically reduced.

Even though insanely large kitchens have become trendy in recent years, they do not work as well as smaller kitchens.

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Smaller kitchens are less expensive to build or remodel, and they are better for the cook.

If you absolutely feel that you need a spacious entertainment kitchen, then by all means do so. But it’s a decision you need to ponder deeply, because the more space you take for the kitchen, the less space you have for other rooms in the house.

4. Rethink your desire to have a kitchen island.  Is it a space-wasting relic of the 1980s or something you really need?

Why do you want that kitchen island.  Since the 1980s, islands have proliferated in kitchens.  So too has clutter proliferated on islands (they re great for putting junk down until you can find a place to put it).

Does your kitchen have enough room for placement?  Good kitchen space practices demand that you have at least 42 aisle space between your island and perimeter counters.  That s a minimum for single-cook kitchens.  For busy lives with busy kitchens, 48 (yes, that s 4 feet) is the space recommended by the National Kitchen Bath Association.

5. Kitchen lighting should not be an afterthought.  Work lighting into the original design to avoid expensive makeups.

Incorporate lighting into your thought process before and during the design process--not after. Unfortunately, many homeowners take care of lighting as the last step in the process; it becomes an afterthought.

And there is no need to stick to the time-worn and mundane can (or recessed) lights that you see in every kitchen in the world! Try lights that focus more on the work areas, such as kitchen pendant lights .

6. Solid surface and quartz (engineered stone) countertops may be better for you than slab granite.

Lots of homeowners want granite counters but don’t like the idea of spending $60 or more (usually more) for granite. A cheaper granite alternative is to lay down granite tiles—but then you have the problem of seams. Laminate counters don’t cut it in most contemporary kitchens that aim for functionality!

But solid surface countertops have a real strong fan base because they are solid (no particle wood core), minor scratches can be sanded out, and they even have the appearance of seamless stone materials. Top solid surface brands include Corian, Formica, and Staron.

Costlier but more satisfying, in my opinion, are engineered stone counters --otherwise known as quartz counters.  Going under brand names such as Cambria, Zodiaq, and Silestone, these solid-feeling materials have the 3D visual depth that solid surface lacks.