Size Doesn’t Matter: Making The Most Of Your Small Kitchen

If like so many other women and mothers across the world, health is a priority of yours; you will know just how important the kitchen is. For want of a better phrase, the kitchen is ‘where the magic happens’ – where you create your home-cooked meals, and where you instill a love of fresh ingredients into your children. However, as much as many of us crave that reality, there is one thing that is stopping us: the size of our kitchen. It will come as no surprise to many people that homes are getting smaller, as overpopulation means more and more houses have to be built. One of the knock-on effects of this is that rooms that used to be considered the very hub of the home are now being scaled down. For the kitchen – a place where a lot of space is typically needed – this can be particularly difficult. But despite all this, a small kitchen is not an excuse for you to give up on your dream of fresh home cooking. The secret is to make your kitchen work for you, not the other way around. Sure, you may be tight on space, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t use your kitchen to the best of its abilities. The secret is all to do with what you put in there, and thankfully, there are a lot of space-saving gadgets and innovative hacks that can make all the difference to your compact area. Read on for some inspiration.

Drawers everywhere

Think that you’re stuck with the drawers your existing kitchen came with? Wrong! In the average kitchen, there is plenty of unused, wasted space practically begging to be made into something useful. Take the area between your oven and the floor, for example. It will take a bit of DIY practice, but take off the front of it, hollow it out (if it isn’t hollow already) and turn it into a new drawer! Perfect for extra cutlery, chopping boards or utensils.

Magnetic knife rack

If there’s one thing you’re going to be lacking in a small kitchen, it’s worktop space. As their names suggest, worktops are meant to be food prep areas – but many people end up prepping food on, say, their table instead because all their utensils are piled high on their surfaces. Take a look at the items you have laid out and think about what you could put elsewhere. Your knives, whisks, and ladles, for example, could all easily be hung up on the wall instead of accommodating space on the worktop. A magnetic knife rack is a great option here, and in a similar vein, you could even hang your pots and pans from a rack attached to the ceiling.

Gadgets that do it all

If you’re something of a pro in the kitchen, you will know that various gadgets all have their unique uses. You can’t expect to make juice without a juicer, beat an egg without a whisk or blend a sauce without a processor. That is where a multi-purpose item such as the Cuisinart 14 cup comes into play, like a gadget that provides an array of different functions. Multi-purpose items don’t just relate to blending and food processing either. There are now plenty of innovative creations on the market, such as a pasta serving tool that doubles up as a cheese grater, and utensils that claim to have five uses in one.

Utilize your cabinets

Stacking pots, pans, tins and spices in cabinets can be a bit of an art form. If you do it haphazardly, you could unknowingly be wasting a lot of room, and then inevitably, more items will start spilling out onto your work surfaces once more. It will be a big job, but take everything (yes, everything!) out of your kitchen cabinets and come up with a better way to organize them. This could mean rating the items regarding what you use the most versus what you use least, and moving the latter to the back of the cabinets (or simply throwing away if you know they will just gather dust!). You may also want to use storage baskets to group certain items together in your cabinets so that they are easier to access. Finally, consider installing hooks on the inside of your cabinet doors, so you can hang extra utensils, spices or whatever takes your fancy in there. It might not be the norm, but if a small kitchen is all you’ve got to work with, some of these measures can be worth taking!