Common Kitchen Design Mistakes

Due to "celebrity chefs" and their huge cooking areas, many homeowners have built kitchens large enough to cook for a small army.

• Instead of designing a huge kitchen, it is more useful to have a layout that lets you move quickly and easily from the chicken in the oven to the salad in the fridge to the potatoes on the counter for a week night dinner.
• The trend toward oversize commercial grade appliances force the scale of everything in a kitchen to be ratcheted up. Kitchen counter tops and kitchen cabinets all have to increase in size to match the scale of the appliances. This is a very costly "upgrade."
  
• Countertops should never be more than four feet apart. Large kitchens often have huge amounts of space between counters. It makes the space look huge, but it is a pain when you actually try to cook something.
  

The perfect kitchen feels spacious but keeps everything close at hand. If you really want to have a sense of openness, consider a walk-in pantry. You can then eliminate some or all of the upper cabinets in your kitchen, which removes a lot of bulk at eye level and makes the room feel more airy. It's also important to create a sensible layout. You shouldn't have to take more than two steps between every counter-top and no more than three steps between the work triangle of sink, oven and refrigerator.