Kitchen renovation might be the thing, the project, that you are working on right now. Please welcome Karen Sealy, our designer, is going to walk us through some of the tips that you need to think about for kitchen renovations Adelaide. You know what, it's not stuff that is necessarily that obvious, but it is very important.
It's so important. Because as you're planning your kitchen ... People live in their kitchen so it's really important to get it right. If you don't, and you spent all that money, it's heartbreaking.
It's Important
I'm just going to walk you through five really simple tips just to kind of keep in mind as you're starting to plan your kitchen. Some of them, as I say them, you'd be like, "Oh, my gosh, of course." So we'll start really simple. We're going to look at this picture. This is quite a lovely kitchen. It's not huge. But what you can see right here is the doorway, and therefore the traffic actually walks away outside of the working triangle. I'm going to show you a floor plan so you can see what I mean.
Okay.
So if you look, what they've done well in this kitchen is they redirected ... We're upside down. We've redirected the traffic so that when you walk in the kitchen and you want to go to the backyard, you can see you're not walking through the working triangle, which is wonderful.
So the working triangle is all of this, where you're doing all the cooking and the putting away of the dishes and all of that stuff.
Right. In the ideal world, we're trying to redirect. Well, you can imagine if the doorway outside was over here. People would be tempted to walk behind the island, which we don't want them to do. So in the ideal world, we want that space clear. A lot of people ask me if they can get seating at their island. If you want seating there, in the ideal world, if you've got kind of a hallway, or in our case this kind of traffic, and you want stools, minimum clearance is about five feet. A little more is even better. If you want two cooks in your kitchen, it's nice to have at least four feet because then you can actually walk by each other. And you could-
Okay. Not at my house. We only need one, and it's not going to be me.
Then make it three feet.
Yeah, there you go. Tiny, we're good.
Honey, I can't even get in there. Another important tip is that when you're thinking about placement of your appliances, it's important to think about some working space around your appliances. For example, you don't want to stick your stove against a wall. Because then how would you ever turn your handles away to they're not in the hallway, here? Or you might have a fire hazard if you have the stove right against the wall. So make sure you have landing space on either side.
Placing Your Fridge
In the example of our fridge, if you have a beautiful ... The French-door fridges are really popular right now, which means both doors open. The great thing about that is that the door swing doesn't take up as much of this kind of hallway area, so people can walk by more easily. The thing that does happen, though, you can imagine that when you open both doors, you don't necessarily want to put something down beside the fridge. At this point, you might want to turn around and put it on another surface, like an island. So this is a wonderful situation here, where you'd open up the French-doors and you can put something on the island.
If you don't have a surface to put things on, you're in trouble. Because you-
Yeah, because then you're holding it and you're trying to close it with your elbow.
Yeah. You're walking all the way over to the counter to put it down, and then coming back. It's just function.
Exactly. Sometimes people, for example, might have a really deep fridge, which is great if you're in a small space, for example, and you don't have a lot of room for cabinetry. So you might have things that are buried in the back of your fridge, so that you might have to pull something out to get to the next item. So it is nice to be able to put something down. Of course, counter-depth fridges are really popular right now, and then they get a little bit wider. So there's lots of options.
If this door of the fridge swung this way, then you could actually put some items down right beside it. But a lot of times, we see pantries on either side of our fridges to make them look more built-in. In which case, again, that landing space behind the fridge, like an island surface or a peninsula, is a perfect spot.
Okay. Good. Yeah.
Another tip is we want to make our appliances feel built-in, and particularly fridges. So if you think about it, a lot of times when you walk into somebody's kitchen, and I'm going to flip back to the photo now. We walk into the kitchen, you can see that people who have those older kitchens may not have their fridge built-in properly. So what is happening is a separate cabinet is only 12 inches deep so they can't actually use it. And then they don't have the gables building-in the kitchen here, building-in the fridge here. So if you build this a little bit deeper and put some gables, the fridge will look much more built-in.
Okay. So we've got a fridge that looks built-in. A lot of folks are doing that and it really does look absolutely beautiful, like you planned everything-
Everything around it.
... when everything looks built-in.
Exactly.
Now, let's talk a little bit more specifically about the fridge. These are the French doors you were talking about, right?
Yes. This is the French doors. You can imagine, it's nice, again, to have that island right behind you when you have a French door. The freezer at the bottom is really popular as well.
Yeah, more and more people getting that.
And there's so many sizes in fridges. This one's considered kind of a mid-size but large for a mid-size. So be thinking about your family and thinking about your needs and how much space you need. Do you need water? Do you need an ice maker? The smudge-free stainless finish is really handy when you have a family. And then, of course, the function of the fridge and how you store things away. This one's really fun because it's got so many ways to organize. Everybody knows I love to organize.
Look at that.
One of the things I love about this fridge is we can actually do stackable crispers. Normally, you have your crisper over here, which if you want to, you can configure your crisper over here. But you can put it up here instead. So there's lots of options. The fridge can actually be a little bit more universal in design, meaning it can grow as your needs change.
Right. This is a Frigidaire fridge that we're looking at right now. But what's great about this as well is I bet these go up and down, don't they?
You can actually slide these out. These actually can move. This is a really fun feature. Say, for example, I came home with a big bottle of pop or a pineapple because it's date night. Then I can slide this underneath.
See, that's important.
Or-
And you get the big containers.
Then you can have something really tall sitting here but you don't have to give up that space all the time. Or, for example, say you're coming home, you're having a party and you have a bunch of Prosecco, as Jeanette showed earlier. Then you can actually flip this open and you can put all of your bottles there. When you're having parties you have different requirements -
... then when it's everyday living. And this fridge can change with all of your requirements.
Yeah. No, that's very cool and they really thought ahead, there, when it comes to all of that stuff. Because you find that you get stuck when you get a whole bunch of things that are a certain size. Then they're all stuck on one shelf and that shelf gets packed and then you don't know where to put them.
Yeah. And I love the counter-depth fridge because we aren't stacking stuff all the way to the back of a fridge and having to pull them out. So this is a really nice configuration. The French door looks great. [inaudible 00:06:02] I was talking about, you can imagine when we get to a 36-inch fridge, if this was a single door, that's taking up a lot of this traffic zone.
That's right.
So the nice thing about the French door is you only have these half-size doors-
