How to Upgrade Your Kitchen

About once every 10 years or so most of us look at our kitchens and think, “There has to be a better way”. Kitchens often look cluttered, a bit too dirty, and too small, and are usually emitting some sort of unidentifiable smell. Our first instinct on as to how we could fix this is to tear the entire thing out and start over from scratch. Most of the time that’s totally unnecessary and could be resolved by a variety of smaller, and much cheaper upgrades.

Indoor Herb Garden

Why herbs? Besides being vast improvement over the dried stuff sitting in your spice drawer growing fresh herbs (or any other plants) can help to pull bad smells and a variety of other pollutants out of the air. They also add a splash of color to an otherwise stark environment. Besides, growing herbs is easy and makes you look like you know what you’re doing.

Cookware

The biggest problem in most kitchens is the amount of clutter that you need to deal with and the filth that seems to permeate every crevice of your kitchen. After years of use your kitchen probably sports a large and varied collection of mismatched pots and pans liberally encrusted with burnt oil residue that is virtually impossible to remove without a jackhammer. Every time that you cook with these you’ll release a bit more of the stuff into the air and contribute to the unidentifiable kitchen odor. Getting a new cookware set can help you deal with this because it’ll easily stack inside itself and let you start fresh on your dishwashing habits (this time I’ll keep them clean for real!... yea…).

Counter Space

Another major issue with kitchens everywhere is the lack of usable counter space. An easy way to remedy this is to add work-space  Of course this is limited by the size and layout of your kitchen. If you have the necessary floor space you can simply put a table inside your kitchen to act as extra counter space. I have a conveniently narrow table that now serves as a kitchen island in my house, however a small round table could already be enough to reduce the strain on the rest of your kitchen.

Storage Spaces

A good way to clear counter space that is being used for storage instead of work is to build more storage space. If you have any unused wall space, go ahead and add more cabinets. To make your existing storage space more efficient, add extra shelves so that you have more surfaces to put things on.

Heat Sources

Is your cooking range out of date or damaged? Cooking on open coils is extremely inefficient and a major fire hazard. The ovens that typically go with this style typically don’t have any form of convection and may be prone to burning the top of your turkey while leaving the bottom raw. Besides being more efficient and cooking food more evenly, a range with a flat glass surface will be much easier to keep clean, and will be less prone to setting things on fire.

Felix Laurent has been cooking since the age of 4 when he burnt his first piece of toast. He currently blogs for the cookware distributor shopworldkitchen.com.