My first thought was "What doesn't work in my current kitchen?" For me, the biggest stumbling block is housing the dishes directly above the dishwasher. So, in my new kitchen, dishes will be more easily accessible. As we are getting older, I notice that lifting heavy dishes above my shoulders creates pain. So, my thought was why not put them in pull-out shelves at chest or waist height.
Another thought to consider is where shall I store all of my small appliances and pantry items? In my current home, I have a 5-ft wide pantry and many items spill over into the laundry room where I have a 10-ft wall of floor to ceiling shelves for storing small appliances and extra canned goods.
In our new house, space will be at a premium. My kitchen pantry is only 30-in. wide and I have no laundry room for storing excess items. Because the garage is next to the kitchen, I can use cabinets in the garage to store less-often used small appliances and extra supplies of canned and paper goods.
In addition, in this new house, counterspace is at a premium. So, many items that I currently keep on the counter, such as my toaster, coffee maker, mixer, and food processor must find a home on the available counters.
With all the considerations to the space I needed, here's the floorplan of the kitchen with as much counterspace and as many cabinets as I could squeeze into the available space. The countertop bar will be cabinet height as this space is designed as workspace and not necessarily as "eating" space.
All these considerations required me to redesign the layout of the kitchen on numerous occasions. In our current home, Dave has installed pull-out shelves for all the cabinets below the countertop. I cannot get on my knees to get items that seem to hibernate at the back of the shelves. The pull-outs have been a huge help to making items accessible.
At one of the planning meetings with Tomorrow's Homes, LaVonne suggested that instead of paying extra money for pull-out shelves, we install drawers instead of cabinets. This is just one of the many suggestions that LaVonne gave to us to make our home work for our needs.
Before I share with you the kitchen layout, let me share with you the color scheme and decor design of our new house. The general decor will be Arts & Crafts style. If you have seen any designs by Frank Lloyd Wright, you know that design concept. Arts & Crafts is created with "natural" elements, like wood and stone. The colors are muted earth tones with splashes of warm colors. The lines are geometric. Here are a few examples of designs by Frank Lloyd Wright.
What we like is the simplicity of his lines. Of course, we don't want all lines with no softness, but the Arts & Crafts style sets the tone for our design choices.
So, here are the choices of kitchen elements. As you can see, the backsplash stone fits well into the Arts & Crafts style.
The following drawings show the cabinet layout of each side of the kitchen.
Next step, decide what items to put in each cabinet or drawer. I went through my current kitchen noting what I store in each cabinet. This gave me a list of what I needed to include in the new kitchen. As of now, here's the group of items I assume I will need to store in the new kitchen. Any spill-over items (too much of a good thing) will go into the closed shelving units I will have in the garage.
Again, many thanks to LaVonne, Dorothy, Amy, and Dave for their patience with me and their numerous suggestions and confirmations. I couldn't have done it without all of you!
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