Accessorise
Home decoration, refurbishment, renovation: they all sound expensive, don't they? Well there's a lot you can do to transform a room in your house without spending much money at all - especially if you recycle existing parts of your property or belongings. Adding simple accessories to your kitchen will give the room a different experiential feel. The whole point of the kitchen, after all, is purpose - it's what you do inside the kitchen that truly defines it. Ordering a Kitchen Aid mixer will undoubtedly mean that you spend the next few months baking cakes, bread and all manner of other goods. Buying a juicer could mean a healthier approach to your diet, and is a fun, messy way to spend time in your kitchen.Accessories are one thing, but spending some money and replacing some of your main appliances can bring a longer lasting change. Changing your existing inset sink for one of the sleeker undermount sinks will give your kitchen a more contemporary look. A change such as this can make the kitchen look brand new, even if you've only changed one main appliance.
Reinvigorate With Colour
Changing the colour of something is perhaps the easiest way to change your experience of it, especially if it has been a certain colour for most of its time in your house. Think about how bright or dark your kitchen area is in natural light. Would it benefit from more use of whites or lighter colours tor brighten the space up? Or are there parts that a better combination of greens could give a more soothing feel to?It's not just paint colour that can make a difference - using coloured lighting can also bring a room to life and placing lighting in different areas can make whole parts of rooms feel usable again.
Break Down The Walls
Literally creating more space can truly change how you enjoy your kitchen. Breaking through to another room and turning the rooms into an open-plan environment can breathe new life into more than just the kitchen area. It can also encourage better use of each space, perhaps making you think twice about the sort of furniture you want to have and how you keep things clean and organised.Open-plan offices are so popular because they provide a better arena for communication between staff quickly, making it quicker and easier to reach others. There's no reason this can't work in your family home (well, depending on your family), which would really change your home experience for the better.
Of course, you don't have to break down whole walls - you could just knock through smaller pieces of wall to create interior windows into adjacent rooms. These might be useful for serving food and drinks, and can also create a good amount of extra storage space.
Theme-ify
So here's a fun idea: re-do your kitchen in a thematic way. Simply pick a theme, then apply various aesthetic attributes of that theme to different areas of the kitchen. For example, a Star Ways-themed kitchen could feature these changes:- Add some white and blue paint to your bin to turn it into R2-D2
- The fridge is arguably the tallest item in the room, so a coat of brown hair and an ammunition belt quickly transforms it into a Wookie fridge
- Redesign the whole oven area as the interior of an Imperial Star Destroyer: make everything "military grey" and super-clean
- Make the kettle a droid - okay so we've done Artoo, but really any electronic item can be turned into a droid (think toaster, mixer, juicer)
- Change the sink into the Rancor's pit - simply change it to a sandy coloured sink and add the occasional (waterproof) monster
- Got strip lighting? Get some new coloured bulbs - either in "dark side red"" or "post-hand loss Luke green" to enjoy preparing food in the comforting glow of a lightsaber
- Bonus points are awarded for those that make use of Imperial and Rebel symbols!
Do you have any great tips for changing a kitchen's appearance and purpose? Feel free to add them in the comments below, and let's get a discussion going!
