The kitchen is where you prepare food. Since you need to eat food to stay alive, selecting a good kitchen could be viewed as starkly as life or death. For this reason, when you remodel it, you have to get it right. To help you out, here are some kitchen makeover ideas for your renovation.
Minimise and hide the appliances
Minimalism is home design’s biggest trend. There are many ways to go minimal with your kitchen, but one of the best is to cut down on the number of appliances you have in the room, and better camouflage the ones you keep.
Many houses will come with washing machines and/or tumble dryers built into their kitchens. As Apartment Therapy points out, this combination is very common in Europe, but quite rare in the United States. While doing your laundry and your cooking in one room can seem convenient, moving your washing machine out of your kitchen frees up space for more storage, space to add design features, or simply more room to spread things out in true minimalist fashion.
Professional movers have detailed how moving a washing machine from one room to another can be a complicated process: it involves removing the machine from the room’s plumbing, draining any excess water, and tying it to a trolley in order to move it around the house without scratching the floor, or even straining your back. Your washing machine can find its new home in a dedicated utility room, a shed (which you can now christen a “utility shed”), or garage without causing any disruption to your routine.
Other appliances it is worth thinking hard about removing include microwaves, which nearly always detract from the look of a kitchen, and may lead to bad eating habits. Disposing of a microwave altogether is the only option if you want to get rid of it, as there are no other rooms it could fit into. Perhaps a better plan is to integrate your microwave into the kitchen a little better. Houzz has some ideas on how to do this. Most of them involve putting the appliance inside a cabinet, and therefore out of the way, again minimising the layout of your kitchen and creating valuable space.
Lighten your colour palette for a more modern feel
You can make all the space you like in your kitchen, but a bad colour scheme could still make it feel cluttered and claustrophobic.
There are several good options you can make when it comes to kitchen colour schemes. Ideal Home’s number one recommendation is to “make a splash” with an accent colour. Keeping all cabinets and surfaces white against a bright blue back wall, for example, will bring light into your kitchen without completely sacrificing colour and character. Red and lime green are more popular accent colours. Instead of a colour, one exposed brick wall can achieve a similar effect in a more rustic, authentic way.
Feature wall or not, the most important thing to do with your kitchen colour scheme is to pick paler, lighter shades. Like removing unnecessary appliances, this will make the room feel more spacious, and more modern.
Change your kitchen’s flooring
Replacing your flooring is a simple way to make a big difference to your kitchen. Most homeowners stick to lino, wood or tiles, but replacing these materials with something more unique will help keep your kitchen fresh.
Bamboo, cork, and rubber tiles, as recommended by Freshome, have become popular alternative floorings in recent years. Bamboo is eco-friendly and very attractive, but it can sometimes dent easily. Cork is similar, and it can come in many different textures, making your kitchen floor even more unique. Rubber feels soft, is naturally resistant to water and fire, and is very easy to clean.
Switch to any of these flooring materials and you will find your kitchen completely transformed.
