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10 Common Kitchen Design Issues and How to Fix Them

March 31, 2022/0 Comments/in Home Design, Home Remodeling, Kitchen/by Riverside Construction

Designing a new kitchen before a remodel is an exciting process. So much so that it can be all too easy to skip ahead and miss some important design decisions. From fixtures and fittings to layouts and storage, there are many different kitchen design issues to fix before remodeling work begins.

In this article, we look at the most common design dilemmas to consider when designing your new dream kitchen. With some careful planning, you can enjoy a kitchen space perfect for all the family, which will, in the long term, add significant value to your property.

10 Common Kitchen Design Issues and Solutions

1. Think About the Flow

The key to any successful kitchen design is the flow of the layout. In other words, how people typically move about in space. The traditional flow in 20th Century home kitchens was triangular, where we moved primarily between the sink, range, and fridge. Nowadays, kitchens have expanded in both size and function.

During the design stage, it’s essential to consider how you, your family, and guests will use the kitchen. For example, certain foods and utensils may need to be positioned closer to particular fixtures than others. If you’re a family of enthusiastic bakers, then your kitchen’s layout and flow might be somewhat different than if you’re not.

2. Envision Your Kitchen with More Than One Cook

Related to flow is how many people are involved in food preparation at any one time. If you love to cook or bake together, then your kitchen will need more space so people can move about without injury or obstacles. Consider also whether you often have guests to join you as you cook. Will you need an area for guests or family to be comfortably seated so you can chat and entertain at the same time?

Another design consideration is accessibility for disabled or elderly family members who might join you in food prep. In this case, a second sink placed at a lower level might be a requirement, as will wider access to specific appliances and surfaces.

3. Consider Cabinet Clearance

A common kitchen design mistake is failing to leave enough room to open cabinet doors and drawers. Misplacing cabinets is an easy error to make without careful measuring. For optimal usage and the most fulfilling kitchen experience, it’s crucial to ensure cabinets have plenty of clearance.

Consider how far out a door needs to swing and whether this movement will impact other doors, cabinets, appliances, and fixtures. You don’t want to have to force people to wait before being able to get past you.

4. Maximize Vertical Wall Space

Walls are an often underutilized space, especially in smaller kitchens. And that’s a shame because they offer valuable storage real estate that can improve both the function and the aesthetics of a kitchen interior. You can mix and match cabinets and open shelving to create a beautiful look perfect for your desired kitchen style.

Kitchen walls make excellent showcase spaces as well where you can highlight your unique tastes and personalities. You can present anything from cookbooks, photographs, and decorative art to cookware collections, lamps, dried food canisters, and more, to enhance the aesthetics of your cooking and dining areas.

5. Accommodate Needed Storage

Another mistake many homeowners make when designing a new kitchen is underestimating just how much storage space they’ll need. It’s important to plan ahead in great detail and determine what exactly will be stored in your kitchen and where. Doing so will ensure you have enough space for everything that can be stored away to avoid too much surface clutter.

There are countless easily-accessible storage options for kitchens that allow for the storage of more items in a single space. In addition, the floor space can also be included as a storage feature with the inclusion of a multifunctional trolley, for example.

6. Measure Appliances

You may have your eye on some fantastic new appliances, but will they fit in your dream kitchen? The dimensions of all kitchen appliances need to be carefully measured and considered. For example, you might select a large, deep refrigerator in your kitchen only to find out that it grates on your nerves because it curtails your movement and looks oversized compared to its surroundings.

Choose your appliances in conjunction with your design so you and your professional designer can incorporate them seamlessly into the final design. As well as refrigerators, think about the dimensions of dishwashers, microwaves, food processors, toaster ovens, espresso machines, and any other appliances you need.

7. Room for an Island

Kitchen islands make lovely visual and functional additions to the center of a kitchen. But they don’t suit all kitchens, especially smaller ones. Simply adding an island for the sake of it can lead to circulation difficulties and an aesthetic mismatch. The same applies to placing an island in the wrong location or at the wrong angle.

It’s important to measure out the space where you potentially want an island to go. Consider how the structure might influence how you move about your kitchen and access cupboards and drawers. An excellent alternative to an island is a peninsula, depending on your kitchen shape. A peninsula is very similar to an island, except one end is attached to the wall.

8. Proper Lighting and Lighting Placement

It’s not a lot of fun cooking or baking in a dark environment. As one of the most practical rooms in the home, it’s crucial your kitchen lighting supports your food preparation and cooking activities.

Your food prepping area will require brighter and stronger lighting when compared to the dining space, while more localized lighting can help you quickly identify items in cupboards and drawers. Dimmable ceiling lights will also influence your home’s ambiance.

9. Install Enough Outlets in the Proper Places

It’s easy to forget just how many electrical appliances the typical home kitchen features. During the design stage, think about the appliances you have – or will purchase – and how these will influence your workflow within the kitchen.

For example, consider where you will make coffee, where the toaster will go, and even whether your laptop or tablet will be a regular feature on a particular countertop. If in doubt, it’s better to install too many electrical outlets than too few. There are also several clever ways to hide outlets these days, including in drawers for charging smartphones and other electronic devices.

10. Choose the Right Paint Finish for Your Cabinets

The common dilemma homeowners face when designing a kitchen is whether to choose natural wood or a painted finish for the cabinets. As the cabinet doors collectively take up a large surface area, they make quite a visual impact on the overall design scheme.

There are pros and cons to both choices, but the decision usually comes down to how much you like natural wood features and how messy the surfaces of your kitchen might get, especially if you have children.

Painted surfaces allow for a clean and powerful color feature. On the other hand, natural stained wood finishes allow the beauty of the natural wood grains to show through and tend to hide dirt and grime better than a painted wood surface.

Work With a Qualified Design-Build Firm

With so many kitchen design dilemmas to figure out, it’s always important to work with a qualified design-build firm to ensure your new kitchen meets its full potential.

Riverside Construction, founded in 2008, is the go-to professional design-build team that has earned the respect and confidence of discerning homeowners in the Lafayette and West Lafayette areas.

With an award-winning team of highly skilled and experienced professionals in various fields, we excel at listening to client ideas and then translating those dreams into reality. We can help you decide on a direction, guide you on pandemic-related remodeling issues, and be with you every step of the way to ensure your dream home is achieved.

Contact us now to schedule an initial conversation about your upcoming home remodel. We’ll be happy to answer your questions, listen to your ideas, soothe your worries, and work with you to finalize your plans.

Why It’s Important to Create a Healthy Home Lighting Plan for Your Lafayette or West Lafayette Home Remodel

January 28, 2022/0 Comments/in Home Design, Home Remodeling/by Riverside Construction

When designing a home lighting plan, designers will often focus first on the important functional and aesthetic qualities of light. While these are vital considerations, another often neglected factor is how light affects our health. The interchange of bright daytime light and night-time darkness influences the quality of our sleep and, thereby, our physical health and mood.

This interchange is known as the circadian rhythm, the body’s internal clock that regulates when to be alert and when it’s time to sleep. So before your next home remodels, consider some of the ways your lighting choices might have an impact on your daily sleep-wake cycle.

The Science Behind the Need for Proper Lighting

Our circadian rhythm is set by the light we see via specialized light sensors within the eye. The rhythm is adjusted according to the light and dark cycle in our environment, both natural and artificial. These circadian cycles influence our sleep but also a lot more. The related physiological processes can affect our metabolism, body temperature, cardiac function, and even our hormones, as well as aging.

While our diet and level of exercise also influence our circadian rhythm, it’s light that has the most significant impact. Without exposure to the natural day-night cycle, our sleep patterns get disrupted, and we begin to feel tired, moody, and susceptible to physical ailments. Unfortunately, our modern technological lifestyles don’t help, especially when it comes to home lighting and screens.

The Benefits of Natural Light

The best way to positively influence our internal body clock is by accessing as much natural light as possible during the day and softening artificial light before sleep. This is because natural daylight regulates our circadian rhythm the most and also brings with it a number of its own direct benefits.

Studies of the workplace have shown natural light in an interior leads to higher productivity. We naturally feel more energized in a room bathed in daylight, which can be particularly beneficial if you work from home, like increasing numbers of people are doing.

Natural light is also beneficial for our eyesight, especially when viewing screens for extended periods. Daylight helps the eye produce dopamine that contributes to healthy eye development in children and young adults.

Plus, perhaps the most well-known benefit of natural light is its mood-enhancing qualities. In daylight, especially when sunny, we tend to feel increased levels of wellbeing. The more we allow natural light into our homes, the better we feel.

Renovations That Add More Natural Light

Increase the size of windows
The most obvious way to add light is to increase the size of your existing windows wherever possible. In older homes, windows tend to be smaller to conserve heat. But these can be enlarged thanks to modern advances in window technology, without any negative repercussions on your energy bills.

Window location
Consider also where you can add windows. Even creating a small window at the side of the house can bring in a sizeable amount of much-needed daylight to a too-dark space.

Skylights
Skylights and sun tubes bring natural light from above, allowing you to increase the daylight in an interior even if you can’t further modify the windows. A sun tube channels natural light via a highly reflective tube and can look light artificial ceiling lighting when you first see them – except they are healthier and cost nothing to run.

Doors
Doors are another feature that you can modify to allow more natural light into a dark hallway or kitchen. Choose a door with a window or with sidelights. Modern windows are highly energy-efficient, and windowed doors come in a wide variety of styles.

What Are the Healthiest Types of In-Home Lighting?

Artificial lighting considerations are every bit as important as those of natural lighting. The two need to work together through the day-night cycle. In the evenings, at night, and during the winter months, we rely on good indoor lighting to safely navigate our homes, prepare food, host guests, take a bath, socialize with our families, work, and relax.

Indoor lighting is essential for our daily functional requirements and emotional wellbeing, with light influencing how we feel within our environment. But it’s all too easy to choose the wrong type of lighting, especially when it comes to the bulb.

The best indoor lighting mimics the light we find in the natural environment – from the sun. Incandescent and halogen light bulbs are the closest thing to sunlight and are a healthy bulb choice. That said, they are losing appeal in the United States because they use too much energy to produce the light they emit. Government restrictions will likely be further tightened in the years to come.

LED lights are increasingly the bulb of choice and for good reason. They are more energy-efficient, longer-lasting, emission-free, durable, and diverse in scope and design. Because of this last reason, it’s essential to choose your LED bulbs carefully. Not all are created equal, especially when it comes to health.

Select LED lights that come close to resembling daylight. Healthy LED bulbs have a warm color temperature of about 2700 kelvins (k) or less and a Color Rendering Index (CRI) of 95 or more, indicating color accuracy.

Create a Healthy Home Lighting Plan

Developing a healthy lighting plan for your Lafayette or West Lafayette home is more than simply adding a few suitable bulbs and nice lamps. In order to help the human body and mind transition from day to night, it’s important to consider how lighting needs to change over the hours and the localized tasks for which light is required.

As noted, adding as much daylight as possible during the daytime helps our mood. Adding daylight-like bulbs also brings health benefits when indoor lighting is required. Plus, there are the transition stages, especially in the hours before bed when too many bright lights can reduce our ability to wind down.

A healthy lighting plan developed in conjunction with your trusted remodeling partner can help you determine the best lighting options for different stages of the day and for each room and area.

A good lighting design plan includes consideration of three distinct layers: Ambient, Task, and Accent Lighting.

Ambient lighting is the light cast across the entire room, usually located on our ceilings, in some form or another.
Task lighting, as the name suggests, is a more concentrated beam of light used to illuminate a small surface used for tasks, such as a food preparation surface in a kitchen.
Accent lighting lies somewhere in the middle. It highlights features within a space such as artwork, a cabinet, or even simply a room corner.

The different layers of indoor lighting allow you to modify the amount of light in a room at different times of the day. As bedtime approaches, some lights can be turned off as other forms of lighting gently guide you into a frame of mind conducive to sleep.

And this is what we can help you achieve.

Your Home Remodeling Team in Lafayette, Indiana

Riverside Construction, founded in 2008, is the go-to professional design-build team that has earned the respect and confidence of discerning homeowners in the Lafayette and West Lafayette areas.

Kitchen Lighting 101: 4 Essentials to Consider in Your Next Kitchen Remodel

January 25, 2019/0 Comments/in Remodeling Design/by Riverside Construction

Homeowners choose, as priority number one, to remodel their kitchens every year, and it’s no surprise why. Every member of the family spends significant time in this room. It’s where we prepare meals, gather for games, congregate for chats, get work done, discuss family plans, snack, laugh, talk and make all kinds of daily decisions. And yet, as popular and as often-used as this room is, it’s surprising that lighting becomes an afterthought in the remodeling process. Instead, kitchen lighting should be an integral part of the entire design process, right from the start. It needs to be layered and carefully planned to effectively illuminate all the various activities your family enjoys in this space. As you plan your next kitchen remodeling project, keep these four lighting design essentials in mind:

1. Know Your Lighting Types

There are four basic types of lighting that can be used in any room. The utility and high-traffic areas of the kitchen demand using all four of them in various ways. These lighting layers include:

Ambient Lighting—This is broad, general lighting that should illuminate most of your living space. It’s not too bright, but it provides enough light to enable you to perform tasks and move safely about the room—a necessity for any space, and especially the kitchen. You can choose from a host of different light fixtures to include recessed lighting, track lighting, chandeliers or other ceiling-mounted fixtures.

Task Lighting—While ambient lighting provides general illumination of a large space, task lighting highlights specific areas where work needs to be performed. It illuminates focused beams on specific areas, removing unwanted shadows, making slicing, mixing, kneading and reading ingredients on food packages or a recipe a breeze. For example, puck or strip lighting placed under cabinets are used to illuminate countertops for food preparation. You can also consider adding task lighting inside of cabinets to make it easier to locate rare spices (or essentials) hiding in the back.

Accent Lighting—These bright beams are used to throw flattering light on a specific design element in a room. While they are par for the course in living rooms and dining rooms, they can also be used to highlight some lovely aspect of your kitchen design. For example, a shelf in a cabinet or island can be highlighted by accent lighting to spotlight a unique heirloom or art piece. Highlighting an accent fixture that is 4 to 5 times brighter than ambient lighting can really set off the space.

Decorative Lighting—While accent lighting focuses your eyes on a particular design element or piece of art in your kitchen, decorative lighting is the design element itself. A dramatic pendant or chandelier can really complete the look of your kitchen and make visitors take notice.

As you work with your design/build team on a kitchen remodel, make sure to discuss these kitchen lighting essentials from the outset and not as a last-minute decision.

2. Understand the Sources of Illumination: Think LEDs

In addition to the four different lighting types above, you’ll want to consider the ways in which lighting works and how much it might cost you. In the past, homeowners had to choose between fluorescent, incandescent and halogen options. Recently, however, LED lighting has taken kitchen lighting by storm with its bright adaptability and its very low electricity draw. LED lights last longer and they don’t heat up like other light sources. This makes them a safe, stable source of illumination that comes in almost any form.

Important Note: Don’t count out natural light in your kitchen design. Explore ways that you can increase it and add to the ambient lighting in your living space.

3. Design with Light: Think Spacing and Proportion

It’s easy to get all excited about light fixtures, even adding more than your kitchen really needs. But going overboard on lighting is just as bad as leaving it to the last minute. Think balance and proportion to get the right look, along with the proper illumination. For instance, island task lighting has very specific space and proportion guidelines you should follow:

Above island pendants should have between 30 to 32 inches between them and hang approximately 30 to 36 inches over the island, with a 6-inch clearance from the edges. Depending on how long your island is, you may have room for 2 or 3 pendants.

If you have a higher kitchen ceiling, consider a linear suspension light fixture over the island. This should hang about 40 inches above the workspace.

Recessed lighting, puck lights, track lights, and chandeliers also have similar spacing and proportion rules, something you’ll want to consider as you plan your kitchen remodel.

4. Ask a Kitchen Design Expert about Your Kitchen Lighting

Lastly, don’t let decisions about kitchen lighting overwhelm you. If you’re struggling to choose between pendants and chandeliers, track lights or recessed lighting, or any other aspect of the lighting in your kitchen, take a look at our kitchen remodeling portfolio for some ideas. You can also sign up for one of our free kitchen design seminars where you can discuss your ideas and questions with other homeowners and our design experts. If you’re ready to dive in and get started now, schedule a personal consultation and begin the process of upgrading your kitchen with light: (765) 838-1644.