Learn to Maximise Your Kitchen Renovation
Are you looking to renovate and improve your kitchen, but are unsure what to do or how to make the best of your limited budget?
This article contains some expert tips on how to do both.
As you might imagine, redesigning your kitchen is a mammoth investment of time, energy, and money. It also means going without a functioning kitchen until it’s finished. You’ll need to make many decisions before starting the process, but retain some flexibility, as with many things in life, once you get going the original plans may need tweaking or new opportunities may arise.
Keep it Real
Preparation and research are key. First, be realistic about your budget. Work out the sum total of the funds you have available for the renovation then hold a substantial portion back as a contingency fund – there are always additional costs and last minute decisions and having a contingency fund prevents you from overspending.
Once you have an overall budget in mind you can begin to look at magazines, do online searches, look at Pinterest, Instagram, various design blogs and so on. Save pictures and links to the ones you like and begin to narrow them down. You should also measure your kitchen and plot the immovables on a map – the location of the oven and sink for example.
Invest Wisely and Stretch Your Pennies
Appliances can be expensive, as can changes to the physical layout of the kitchen whether it be demolishing or building walls, or moving the plumbing or wiring around. These will suck up most of your budget and should only be done if necessary. If your appliances are new and in a good condition, work around them. Same goes for your cabinets. It is possible to change small elements or to enhance them with a new colour (the cabinets not your appliances) or by adding on pro-style design features.
Make Your Kitchen More Personal
How do you express yourselves in style and design? This may be the cause of a few arguments if you don’t agree with one another, but having a uniform, planned style rather than an ad hoc mess can really make a kitchen. This can be wood and pottery, earthy, farmhouse basics or it could be shiny, metal, plastic, modern and postmodern design. Or something totally different. The main element of a basic background design if coherence.
However, that being said, you don’t want it to be an impersonal showroom. Even on Grand Designs, it is the personal touch which really makes a kitchen or any other part of the home. Once you have your basics down, include highly personal objects from your lives, your past, your travels, hopes and aspirations.
Think Long-Term
Finally, after all this and making the best of your kitchen’s small spaces or zoning it into different uses, plan for the long-term. Renovating a kitchen every few years is too much of an expense for the vast majority of homeowners and is too much of a disruption. Good, bespoke wooden cabinets can last for decades, and a good, timeless design, can do likewise. Plan a kitchen where the basics are built to last and then you can enjoy changing around the smaller, more personal things.
