Your kitchen is a palace. Whether it looks like one or not, it’s an integral part of your home. You might cook in there, and eat and relax at the dining table with your family. It’s an important part of the home for anybody, no matter their specific tastes in house design or general home improvements. However, that doesn’t mean your kitchen doesn’t need some improvements. You might not think it needs any changes, but there are some pieces of advice of which you might want to note; in fact, you might even find that they apply to you and your kitchen.
A kitchen overhaul can seem like a daunting task. The amount of fixtures, furnishings and huge, bulky appliances seem so fixed in place that the prospect of changing anything does not seem to be entirely worth it. However, if you have big ideas and dreams about what your kitchen could be, and how you’d transform it into your personal paradise, then let’s consider some cheap ways of doing so – whether you’ll be doing this yourself, or enlisting a little help.
1. Let there be light
Design is updating constantly. You may have made other changes around your house to meet with current trends already, but your kitchen should really be no different. An outdated kitchen can stick out like a sore thumb, because the amount of appliances and furnishings of which this huge, important room comprises is quite overwhelming. The best place to start, however, is with the lighting. Let’s keep things simple.
Dim lighting may seem like a trivial flaw of a kitchen in comparison to sleek new surfaces or a brand new oven, but lighting is everything to a room. When it comes to how you perceive your kitchen, brand new fixtures can add a real presence to the room. Bright white lighting, though not blindly bright, accentuates the colour scheme, surfaces and other key elements of the kitchen. It provides the practicality of well-lit working kitchens, when cooking at night, whilst ensuring your kitchen doesn’t end up looking dark and dingy.
2. Don’t be boring
Perhaps the main thing holding your kitchen back at the moment is a lack of variety. You’ve had the same wooden cabinets for years and maybe a few of the handles have started to wear, or even fall off. The dining table is made from the same wood, as are the chairs. It might be a lovely texture, and perhaps, when brand new, it looked beautiful, but all things age and every kitchen can do with a makeover at some point.
A varied makeover is my suggestion, because it adds a lot of complementary colours, themes and patterns to the mix, rather than creating a dull and uniform look across the entire kitchen space. You should blend not only numerous, varying materials and textures, such as a combination of sleek, polished wood and metallic surfaces, but also vary the colours used across surfaces and even cupboard doors. Of course, ensure the colours work together. They can contrast, but they shouldn’t conflict; green doors with blue handles, for example, might be a little eccentric.
Though, it is your kitchen at the end of the day, and this is about the makeover you want on the budget you want. Whether you do it yourself, or with the help of others, the fact is that you can do it, if you want. Your ideas can be implemented, and they no longer have to be a fantasy floating around in your head.
3. Don’t spend a fortune, but allow yourself a treat
If you’ve ever been of two minds about redecorating or completely remodelling your kitchen, perhaps cost was the thing which held you back. Of course, there’s no reason that you can’t find a nice point somewhere in the middle. Whilst saving money by renewing your surfaces through DIY, you could always allow yourself one expensive replacement in your kitchen, whether that might be a brand new, sleek, shiny oven to match your brand new kitchen surfaces and cupboards, or perhaps beautiful tiled flooring. Combining natural and manmade textures is, once again, a great way to transform your kitchen.
You don’t have to splash out cash on the entire kitchen, but there’s no harm in investing a little bit of your savings into it. This is a real investment, after all, as it’s a room with facilities that you want to use and enjoy using every day. For many, the kitchen is a place to relax at the end of the day after cooking a nice meal, so make it a nice place to relax. This takes us on to my next point…
4. Make your kitchen feel like… your kitchen
Your kitchen should be comfortable, most importantly. Design and beauty is one thing, but it’s quite another to achieve an incredible design whilst also creating a comfortable, homely living space. Most designers choose one or the other, making some sort of compromise. You, on the other hand, don’t have to. You have entire creative reign over your kitchen, so you can make it as wonderfully modern, sleek and eccentric as possible, or you can implement a few homely elements to bring it back down to earth. Maybe modern design and technology is enough to make you feel at home, of course.
There are other ways to make the kitchen a more relaxing place to cook, especially if you’re doing so for an entire family and not just yourself. There are black mats for kitchen spaces that could work a treat for you. Feet and legs start to ache over time, especially with age, so a mat designed with technology to alleviate pain in your feet could really help to ease the stress and strain of cooking, whilst standing for long periods of time.
You should be creating a kitchen which you not only enjoy observing, but in which you can cook peacefully and comfortably. Practicality and modern, beautiful designs can work hand in hand.
5. Make your kitchen airy, not scary
As with any room in a house, clutter is something which can transform your kitchen from a well-designed, well-lit paradise into a dusty, old storage cabinet. Your kitchen shouldn’t just be a plate to shove all your stuff; it should be a place in which you enjoy sitting, standing, or generally chilling. The moment it simply becomes ‘the place for cooking’ is the moment that you stop caring about the way it looks.
Making your kitchen more open can solve the clutter problem. Fewer cabinets, and perhaps concealed storage areas, or plate racks built into the wall, are all things which can reduce the number of furnishings needed in your kitchen and make the whole room, or at least the air, look a little more breathable. You may have a lot of excess cutlery and crockery, so it doesn’t hurt to have a little clear out and see which things you actually need or even want any more.
6. Turn it into a living area
There’s a reason that so many new flats and houses combine the kitchen and living room into one liveable area, without a wall separating the two spaces. The kitchen can be a cozy, warm and welcoming living space too, if you simply allow it to be one. Investing in a nice rug for the kitchen floor could transform cold tiles, or a standard, uninteresting wooden floor, into something homely, warm and soft.
7. A fresh coat of paint and it’s all brand new again
All of life’s problems can be solved with a fresh coat of paint. Well, at least, that’s often the case within a home. Perhaps you’ve done a paint job on walls or doors around the house before, and you’ve been amazed to see how this transformed something so simple and, often, unnoticeable. A fresh paint job does seem to instantly make a surface appear brand new and untouched, which is why it might be perfect for your kitchen.
Paint is inexpensive, so this won’t be an expensive investment, but a fresh layer of white over all your surfaces could almost trick you into believing you’ve just fitted a brand new kitchen. Honestly, don’t underestimate the power of paint.
8. Renew all the boring, practical things
I mentioned earlier that you should allow yourself the treat of splashing out on one big thing for your kitchen, whether it’s a new surface, new oven, or even a brand new fridge. Of course, depending on your disposable budget, it might also be wise to put aside a small amount of money for other practical things which might need to be renewed, such as cupboard handles and the faucets for your sink, if it looks as if they might need it. It’s your call.
Your kitchen should look exactly the way you want it to look. I’m not telling you what to do; I’m simply giving you suggestions for improvements that your kitchen most likely needs, if you’ve reached the bottom of this article. Perhaps you’ve been holding back, but if there’s something you want to do to improve your kitchen, then follow these little tips for guidance and get cracking. Nothing should be holding you back from making your home look the way you want it to look.
