The busiest room in your home, more often than not, is the kitchen and so finding ways to design your new kitchen remodeling project around ideas of efficiency, ease of use, and comfort is highly encouraged by just about every kitchen remodeling contractor as well as the National Kitchen and Bath Association. Luckily if you’re getting started on a kitchen remodeling project there’s one simple layout trick which can help increase your new room in a number of different ways including it’s efficiency, beauty, and property value!
The Kitchen Work Triangle
For the past hundred years, kitchen remodeling contractors and interior designers have identified the most efficient and attractive kitchen layout which can be designed and labelled it the Kitchen Work Triangle. This layout is based off the idea that the three most used areas in your busy kitchen are the sink, the stove, and the refrigerator and that, therefore, these points should be the first placed components of your new kitchen so that they’re not too close, too far, or too difficult to access when the remodeling is complete and dinner is almost finished. For this reason, homeowners should be sure to speak with their kitchen remodeling contractor about these key kitchen features early in their kitchen remodeling planning stage.
Making the Most of Your Space
To best optimize the flow of your kitchen there are a few tips that the majority of professional kitchen remodeling contractors agree will provide the most beauty and convenience to your home’s new room.
- To keep movement around your kitchen quick and efficient ensure that the distance between any two points is no shorter than 4 feet and no longer than 9 feet.
- Obstacles like kitchen islands shouldn't intersect the travel between any two points by more than a foot so that quick movement doesn't lead to injuries or accidents.
- Traffic through the kitchen should interfere with the triangle as little as possible to ensure that the cooking and cleaning process runs as smoothly as it can.
- Keep clean up as central a feature as prep or cooking. Ideally place your sink across from a major feature point of the room like the refrigerator or main cooking area.
Limitations of the Design
Through the years the function of the home’s kitchen has changed significantly and so sticking too strictly to the Kitchen Work Triangle formula may not be the best idea for modern homeowners. It’s important to be aware of some of these limitations when you first begin speaking with kitchen remodeling contractors.
- The Triangle assumes that your newly designed kitchen will be worked by one person at only three major preparation areas. Today cooking is often a more communal experience and more space is therefore required leading some contractors to overlay multiple Triangles in one room.
- Room layout plays a major role. Whether your room is too big, too small, or too linear in shape to allow for the dimensions of the Triangle, on some occasions the convenience and efficiency the layout lends will not be worth the cost to create it.
- Consider the other functions of your kitchen. Today everything from dining to gathering to relax can take place in the kitchen which means that efficiency may have to take a backseat to comfort.
When you begin planning your kitchen remodeling services it’s important to think of the Kitchen Work Triangle as a helpful guide for design and efficiency, rather than an interior design scheme set in stone. Ultimately your kitchen is your own and the decision of its layout should be based around your own specifications. But if you’d like some inspiration for a kitchen remodel that will really get your home cooking it can be an excellent starting point.
