Planning for a Kitchen to Cook In
As you might recall of your childhood days, a kitchen was where your mother spent most of her time preparing meals for you and your family. The kitchen was a place for food, for appliances like the oven and rice cooker, for the refrigerator, and for kettles and the stove.
As your mother cooked, she needed to move around the kitchen to get plates from the cabinets, food from the refrigerator, and pots, pans, and knives from the drawers. She also needed her salt, pepper, and seasonings. She kept the most often used items near the stove to reduce unnecessary footsteps and thus reduce travel time between tasks.
Planning the storage for a kitchen you will be cooking in, and the places where you intend to do different tasks around the kitchen, is all about maximising time efficiency and task effectiveness.
You can use the classic work triangle to your advantage: put sink, refrigerator, and stove in a triangular pattern. The same pattern works for different workflows around the kitchen. For example, you may put cutting, the garbage, and the oven in a triangle as well.
To plan for your next kitchen, first make a list of the storage areas you need for what you have in the kitchen: cutlery, cutting boards, knives, dishware, spices, etc. Decide how these will revolve around the stove, the oven, the refrigerator, the rice cooker, the sink, and the garbage bin.
For your cooking workflows to be as efficient as possible, it is important your common tasks share a similar space where what you need is kept within close reach within that space.
Key questions to ask yourself when planning for a kitchen to cook in are:
- How many people usually work in the kitchen at the same time?
- What appliances do you plan to have in the kitchen?
- How do you usually cook in the kitchen? What is your workflow?
- What persistent problems have you faced when using your current kitchen?
- Do you experience having too little space to cook effectively, or too little space to store food and dishware?
- Do you find the design and colours of your current kitchen uninspiring? A refreshing design can make you feel more motivated in the kitchen.
The key point to note in this is that you have to emphasize convenience and ease of movement in planning for a kitchen to cook in. After answering the above questions, take the time to write out a list of what is important to you. It is important that you rank these concerns in a prioritised list, to separate between your needs and desires, so that you can plan your budget properly.
