No matter what kind of house you live in right now, the kitchen is almost certainly one of your most important rooms. Your kitchen is where you prepare your meals and, more often than not, it also functions as a gathering space for your family and guests.
Updating your kitchen is one of the easiest ways to add extra value to both new and older homes. Not surprisingly, some contractors recommend updating your kitchen every 10 or 15 years. This helps ensure that your appliances are fully up to date and that your kitchen remains as aesthetically appealing as possible.
Kitchen design it can be an incredibly exciting process. However, if you have never completed a renovation before, it can be difficult to know where to start the process. Before you focus on the specifics involved in the kitchen remodeling process, you need to identify your main goals and objectives that you hope to achieve.
One of the most common purposes of a kitchen remodel is to make the kitchen feel bigger. Even if your kitchen has a higher than average amount of square footage, your appliances and furniture may be causing the kitchen itself to feel quite cramped. Fortunately, there are quite a few things you can do to help make your kitchen feel larger than life. In this article, we’ll discuss ten strategies that can help make your kitchen look a little bigger.
1. White cabinets
In general, lighter colors tend to make rooms appear larger while darker colors tend to make rooms appear more intimate. One of the easiest—and cheapest—things you can do to make your kitchen feel bigger is to paint the cabinets white. Replacing your counters, finishes and appliances with lighter alternatives will also have a similar effect.
2. Open floor plans
Open floor plans cause rooms to feel less congested and also increase the amount of square footage you can feasibly use. If you are building a kitchen from scratch, you should incorporate an open floor plan. While the separation of breakfast and food preparation areas were popular, recent decades of design have reversed this general practice.
3. Built-in appliances
The appliances in your kitchen are either detachable (and can be placed anywhere) or built-in. As you can imagine, a detachable appliance almost always takes up more space than a built-in appliance and also causes the room to feel smaller. Using built-in fixtures makes it much easier to control the overall flow of the room and also increases your use of floor space.
4. Eliminate the walls
As suggested, distinctive spaces were once very popular among architects, but after the mid-century modern movement, the lines between these spaces have been somewhat blurred. Many older kitchens have excessive walls, hanging cabinets in unwanted spaces, and unnecessary doors that can cause a space to feel quite cramped. While the demolition of a wall can be relatively expensive, it is also one of the best ways to open up an otherwise cramped living space.
5. Creative limits
If you want people to feel as if the room is spacious, you should do everything you can to divert their attention away from their ordinary line of sight and towards the ceiling. A room with 10-foot ceilings, for example, will feel much larger than a room with 8-foot ceilings, even if the square footage of the room remains the same. While you may not be able to feasibly raise your ceilings, glass ceilings, geometric patterns, and possibly skylights will help make the overhead space a bit more open.
6. Open shelving
Cabinets are useful for storing things out of sight, but they are also unnecessarily bulky. To reduce the amount of space being taken up by cabinets, consider investing in an open shelving scheme that allows you to display your dishes and cookware in the open. Replacing just a few cabinets with open shelves will increase the visual volume of the room without eliminating any of your storage space.
7. Thinner equipment
In the United States, appliances tend to be much larger than they are in Europe, but the recent resurgence of minimalism in design has seen this trend begin to reverse. Ovens, dishwashers, fridges, and microwaves are just a few of the appliances that have many thin and thin alternatives readily available. While switching to a slim may not be practical for some larger families, this is an efficient decision that makes a lot of sense for smaller families.
8. Abundant light
Just as bright colors cause a room to feel larger, lighting also has a very similar effect. Given a choice, you should try to increase the level of light available in your kitchen as much as is feasible. When possible, try to add some additional windows. If new windows are not an option, adding some additional lights under the cabinets or near the ceiling will also help to enlarge your current space.
9. Mirrors/reflective surfaces
Using mirrors to make rooms look bigger is an old design strategy that has stood the test of time. A single mirror can cause a room to be potentially twice as big and, when strategically positioned, using multiple mirrors can cause a space to feel as if it is ‘infinite’. While you don’t want your kitchen to feel like a carnival funhouse, a few small mirrors can really go a long way. Additionally, consider using other surfaces that are well polished or exceptionally reflective.
10. Clean lines
The use of clean and straight lines around the kitchen will make your space feel much simpler and, consequently, relatively larger. Horizontal lines are excellent for making a room feel wider while vertical lines are useful for making the space appear taller. Curved or abstract lines, on the other hand, will cause the space to feel quite cramped.
Conclusion – 10 ways to make your kitchen look bigger
Your kitchen is a part of your home that you will probably spend a lot of time and, of course, this is a space that you want to be sure is completely comfortable. While the tips in this article may only be part of a much more comprehensive renovation project, making these adjustments can certainly make your space appear larger.
