Opening Up a Small Kitchen

Our house, like many others, was built during the post-WW II building boom. And like most houses built in the 1940’s, it is plagued with a small kitchen. Many houses back then just didn’t have large kitchens. In addition, our kitchen was totally closed off from th living room by a door and the entrance to the dining room was through a swinging door. The only advantage to this kitchen design was when I burned dinner, I could close all the doors and open all the windows to let the smoke out!

Not that our family is growing, we needed a more functional kitchen and we also wanted to open it up a bit. We didn’t want to lose cabinet space however. And we had a tight budget that didn’t allow for a custom kitchen. What we wound up doing was going to Lowe’s and using their kitchen designer for our new kitchen. We came prepared with pictures from magazines of kitchens we liked, photos of our current kitchen, and detailed measurements. If you aren’t good at measuring, most kitchen design places will send someone out to your house to measure your kitchen you.

Our plan was to totally remove the one door that went from our kitchen to the dining room. We then removed a small section of wall to make the entrance larger from the kitchen to the dining room. This makes it easier to carry plates and meals back and for the between the two rooms. We then took out a four foot section of wall to create a large window between the dining room and kitchen. This instantly made our small kitchen feel twice as large. This allowed light from the large dining room windows to shine into the kitchen. Even though we didn’t increase the square footage of our kitchen, by opening the wall and allowing light in, the room appears much larger.

One concern we had was that by removing some wall space in our small kitchen, we would eliminate cabinet space. But by carefully managing the size of the wall opening, we were still able to put in some base cabinets and create a bar area, and we also added some small cabinets above the opening for storage. So we really didn’t lose that much in storage space.

Another trick we used to maximize the available storage space in our small kitchen was to run the wall cabinets all the way to the ceiling. The previous cabinets stopped about eighteen inches from the ceiling. By taking the cabinets all the way up to the ceiling, we added tremendous amounts of storage space. While the height of this top shelf isn’t practical for daily items, it makes perfect storage for all those items we only use at the holidays, or seasonal items like picnic items.

To add counter space in our small kitchen, we ran the countertop around the one corner and extended it eighteen inches along a previously unused wall. This allowed us to add not only one more base cabinet, but one more wall cabinet as well. Now we have a place to store all of our cookbooks in the kitchen where they are needed.

So when planning your small kitchen remodeling job, look for unused space that you can use. By running wall cabinets up higher, you gain valuable cabinet real estate for storage. And a simple task like extending a counter around a corner not only adds countertop space, but it can also add storage space above and below. The large home centers usually offer free kitchen planning and their services are well worth it. If there isn’t one nearby, look online for free small kitchen planning software.