Small Spaces Don’t Have To Feel That Way
The kitchen is going to, generally, be one of the most used rooms of any space in the home. Food preparation, recreation, lounging around with a good book and a snack, school projects—all these things take place in the kitchen. Here’s the problem people come against: not all kitchens are large enough to make such activities comfortable.Especially for families, small kitchens can do much to stifle activity in the home. But there are things you can do which make your kitchen easier to use. In this writing, we’ll briefly cover four ideas to help you get the most out of your kitchen even if it’s not that large. A little imagination helps you get more use out of your kitchen than you may have thought possible.
1. Flowers, Vines, And Other Plants Make Spaces Feel Larger
A blank wall with a painting on it seems more “full” somehow. It’s like the difference between a wall with a window, and one without a window. Pictures, paintings, and posters act sort of like “metaphysical” windows—like ideological windows. Art in general is a “window” into something else. So an otherwise claustrophobic room with one painting feels larger.
A small kitchen would benefit from a painting, picture, or other pieces of art. But even more effective is the addition of foliage. Plants make spaces feel bigger. Vines can be strung up and attached at the corners of your kitchen’s roof. You can water a vine from its roots, which may be potted out of the kitchen once the vines have gotten long enough.
Small potted plants can be put in counter corners or hung beneath cabinets. Have you ever seen a mint-tin garden? This is where you grow some plants— flowers, grass, small succulents — in a tin designed to contain candy mints. You can easily find succulents for sale online and put a bunch of these together and have a compartmentalized garden which can be reconfigured decoratively as necessary.Foliage is a good addition to any kitchen, small or large. The thing is, just as a painting makes a small room feel larger, plants make a small space seem a lot more “big”. It’s like the mystery of the outdoors reduced and consolidated within your home. The brain has more to process, so though the space is small, it seems larger.
2. Add Cabinets Specifically Designed For Your Premises
Cabinets take up a certain area of your kitchen but store things better. This allows you to free up space. Get the balance right, and the space you lose from the cabinets is more than doubled in terms of better storage.
There are options you can order which allow you to directly design cabinets to fit the available area. These are called RTA, or Ready To Assemble, cabinets—here’s a link to some of the best RTA cabinets available presently. Such cabinets can be outlined online in terms of dimensions, then they’re sent to your home, and you install them yourself.This allows you to get cabinets that precisely match what you’ve got available, allowing you to maximize that space. You can build high or low as it fits you. Also, it’s worth considering that if RTA options don’t quite fit your needs, a traditional remodel can provide what you’re looking for.
3. A Chandelier Made Of Pots And Pans
Pots and pans are fundamental to cooking and utterly awkward in terms of storage. They stick out in all manner of inconvenient angles, and it’s real easy to get in a habit of just throwing them in a cubby under the sink or something like that. Well, there’s an easy solution. Even the smallest kitchens tend to have a lot of headspaces; think vertical.You can actually make a conglomeration of “hooks” that hang down from the ceiling in the center of the kitchen, or a corner if putting such an apparatus up in the kitchen’s center isn’t aesthetically pleasing. The hooks hang the pans, and you can free up the space of whatever cabinet or cubbies they were in before. Plus, clean-up ends up being a lot easier this way.
4. A “Backsplash” Made Of Mirrors
The “backsplash” area in your kitchen is generally understood to be that portion of the wall or window directly behind the sink. Specifically, a backsplash is going to generally be some sort of decorative tile, granite, or other substance that won’t be harmed by water. The idea is to make this area of the kitchen pleasing to the eye even as it fulfills a specific purpose.
While many small kitchens have backsplash options that favor some sort of trendy design, if you want to maximize the space, you want to think about mirrors. Mirrors double the amount of light in a given space, and make that space feel way larger than it is even if your mind knows better. Have you ever been to a tiny bar that seemed huge owing to mirrors?
Well, you can get the same sort of effect in your kitchen through a mirrored backsplash. Essentially, instead of tiles that are about half a square foot in size, you put pieces of a mirror behind the sink and tile them across the walls. This doubles the amount of light that is felt in the kitchen. Suddenly everything feels “big”, even when it’s tiny.You don’t have to stop at the backsplash, either. You can hang small mirrors on each of the cabinet doors with relative ease, and these will have the same effect as the backsplash. When you’ve got cabinets and cubbies covered in mirrors, as well as the backsplash, that will make your kitchen feel larger than it is. Plus, you can have a lot of fun bouncing light around.
Getting More Utility Out Of A Tiny Kitchen
You’re going to use your kitchen regularly, regardless of how big it is. Even if you’ve only got fifty square feet to work with, you can get a lot out of that space if you’re clever and think outside the box a little. Mirrors can be used to bounce coherent light like lasers around, and normal light will be reflected in a way that makes even tiny spaces feel large.
Installing a mirrored backsplash will look good in your kitchen, give your property more valuable, and impart a feeling of greater space. Something else that can expand the space of your kitchen is a chandelier made of pots and pans—a hanging apparatus for pots and pans that allows you to utilize vertical space.
Adding foliage in the right areas of the kitchen and cabinets of an RTA variety can additionally help you get more use out of even the tiniest kitchen spaces; it all depends on what best fits your abilities.
So think outside the box a little, and perhaps look at these ideas as an imagination stimulant to help you find the solution which best reflects your kitchen. Just because it’s small doesn’t mean you have to lose any utility. Be creative enough, and you can make any tiny kitchen feel spacious.
