Kitchen Planning: What is in your kitchen cabinets?
One great exercise when you are considering a new kitchen is taking a good hard look at what you have in your kitchen cabinets. It will help you prioritize your storage needs, find workarounds for lousy storage solutions, uncover potential hidden costs and make your next kitchen a real improvement on your current one.
Here’s how to do this design exercise (be forewarned, this a project but it will pay off!):
- Cupboard by cupboard and drawer by drawer, take everything out and lay it on a towel in front of the cabinet. You can do one cabinet at a time.
- Photograph the stuff laid out on the towel or counter. This will be useful later when you’re determining your storage requirements.
- Go through the stuff and separate out anything you have not used in the last 18 months (this saves those things you only use on once-a-year occasions like holidays). Set these things aside.
- Note the storage things that bug you- having to remove stacks of bowls to get a particular one, digging in the back for hard to reach items, heavy items down low that they painful require bending and lifting, etc. Keep notes. This is where you start to plan your ideal storage requirements like using big drawers for bowels, vertical tray cabinets for baking trays and cutting boards, hanging storage for pots and pans and utensils, etc.
- Do the same for food storage. Organize the dry goods you remove by type (starches like rice and pasta, herbs and spices, canned goods, baking materials, etc.). You’ll want to plan storage that consolidates these items in logical work groups. Then you can specify pantry cabinets for these groups, in locations where you work with them.
- Untangle junk drawers. Everyone has at least one and they are a functional part of any kitchen- a catch-all for odd items or rarely used tools and gadgets. Clean them out and look for patterns in what you actually use and what is simply stuffed in there ‘just in case you need it’.
- Think about cookbooks, knives, visibility, wines and liquors, small appliance storage, etc., and apply this approach to determining how you will store them.
This will be a full weekend project depending on how much stuff you have. The end result should be a wishlist of storage needs that your kitchen designer can use when specifying cabinets and locations for various items. It is also a great time to get rid of stuff that is no longer useful to you, old, out of date, etc. Throw out and donate now.
Finally, this inventory may alert you to things you’re going to want that you were not planning on. Getting a nice high end range? You can’t use those old Revere pans on a big flame- better budget for an upgrade. You may also discover that your lifestyle has changed, a critical thing to know when designing a new kitchen. Maybe you entertain more- or less, cook different foods, go out more, have kids or the kids are gone, etc. This is going to mean a different approach to your new kitchen, one that will help you get everything you need without breaking the budget.
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