Kitchen Design Plans to Really Fit Your Space

by James Mahoney

Because your kitchen is the heart of your home, it is necessary to have a good floor plan for a kitchen, one that has a good flow between the refrigerator, the sink and the stove or oven.

Your kitchen serves as a meeting room for the family, a place for dining, a work area for a chef and a place for entertaining friends and family.

With so many variations of kitchen plans, you need to think about how you intend to use your kitchen and select a kitchen design that will provide you with the needed amount of work space.

A floor plan for a kitchen is the most important part of any good kitchen design. The plans for a kitchen not only determine the layout of the kitchen, but the effectiveness of a kitchen depends on the choice of floor plan.

If you feel it is too much trouble to draw up kitchen designs, there are many types of kitchen designer software to help you.

Having a good kitchen design means being able to plan for function; this includes taking into account the cooking styles and the special requirements of the cooks in your home.

More and more kitchen designs include open kitchen floor plans that join the living and family rooms with the kitchen. This kind of kitchen design is family friendly and perfect for entertaining.

Since today's kitchen has gone from being in the back of the home to becoming the exciting focal point in the house, it is more important to design a good kitchen floor plan. You need a kitchen design that will provide a way for the kitchen to be part of a dining area and the family room, therefore becoming a great room.

To prevent the feeling of too much uniformity and sameness, it is important to select the right materials and colors and use cabinets and kitchen floor ideas to create a lively interior in your kitchen plans. The kitchen must fit into the spaces around it, while still being set apart from other areas of the house.

A good kitchen design must provide a good work triangle that will provide for a working relationship between the cooktop, the sink and the refrigerator. You should have a good flow between these three areas. The best work triangle will have a total of 26 or less, with no single leg shorter than four feet or longer than nine feet. However, if you are remodeling an existing kitchen, it may not be possible to live up to this standard.

Whether you are designing kitchen plans in a new home or redesigning an existing kitchen, you may want to consider including an island or peninsula. These can help connect the kitchen to an nearby dining room, living room or family room and create a bridge connecting all these rooms.

You can create a kitchen canopy to provide visible but subtle borders that do not obstruct views of the other rooms. What islands and peninsulas do below, a kitchen canopy can do above. Having a canopy can create the feeling of openness.

Kitchen cabinets can be a problem with the type of open kitchen floor plan since you will have just one or two walls. Therefore, having enough space for storage can be a challenge. You might think about putting the china in a china cabinet in the dining area. Consider staggering the height, length and the depth of wall cabinets, and do the same with the base cabinets and the counters. This will make the kitchen look less rigid, and the styles of the cabinet doors will be varied. For example, use solid doors on some cabinets and glass doors on others. You can have one style of cabinet doors for the perimeter of the kitchen and another style for the island. You can also use different colors, wood stains or finishes for the perimeter areas and the island.

The style of the cabinetry must, however, be in accordance with the existing design elements of the home.

Try to plan on having ample countertop work areas as possible near the sink, the cooking areas and the refrigerator.

Plan for adequate storage needs. What about cabinet accessories, such as roll out shelves, a spice drawer, etc?

You may feel that drawing up kitchen plans might be a job better left to a professional kitchen designer. However, there are several types of kitchen design software programs available to draw up kitchen plans so you can create your own dream kitchen. Or you could just use it to look up some designs, ideas, and kitchen plans before you go to a professional. Kitchen design software programs help with designing kitchen plans and enable you to create a virtual kitchen, showing countertops, cabinetry, appliances and sinks.

You can also find kitchen design plans by looking at stock house plans at Houseplans.com

In planning your kitchen, you might want to think about the use of your kitchen and choose a kitchen floor plan that will meet your requirements for work space.

Besides having a kitchen as part of a great room, there are other kitchen floor plans to consider:

U-shape - This kitchen floor plan consists of having cabinet storage on three walls along with work stations on each wall.

L-shape - This kitchen floor plan is more space efficient, but of course, it works best in a large kitchen.

Island kitchens - This type of kitchen floor plan also works best in large kitchens, and features a free standing island in the middle of the kitchen.

Galleys - The galley kitchen floor plan can be used in small kitchens. It features parallel walls with the workspaces on each wall.

Before you begin a major kitchen remodeling job, you need to know what you want in your new kitchen floor plan. You also need to know how much to budget and how to find the right kitchen design professionals.

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