Kitchen Accessories

You can do your kitchen design online yourself. If you do, you will save the expense of hiring a decorator, and you just might have some fun. The process is easy. Simple interactive tools guide you through the process.

You start designing your kitchen by finding out what you can use from your existing kitchen. Look at all your appliances and try to determine if they will last for several more years. It helps if you know how old they are. If you can find receipts where they were bought, you will know exactly. Look, too, at light fixtures and flooring.



Start with a Rough Sketch of your Kitchen

Then, you continue your interactive kitchen design with a rough sketch of your room. You can make your own sketch and then fit it to the outline given. This is a graph of an empty room with squares marked off to show the scale. For instance, one square might equal six inches or one foot. You will print the outline off from the web page and use it to draw the dimensions of your room.

Measure and Measure to Scale

There are dozens of measurements you will need to make in your room to start your kitchen design. You, of course, need to measure the overall dimensions of the room. Whether it is 10 feet by 14 feet or it is a bigger room, like 30 feet by 25 feet, you need to know exactly how much space you can use. Convert all the measurements from feet into inches so that you can place them correctly on the graph paper.



Measure Open Sides Down as if There Were Walls

Besides measuring the length of the walls, you need to measure the heights. This would be the height to the ceiling, or the height of a half wall. If one or more sides of your kitchen are open, most kitchen design programs will work best if you write these open sides down as if there were walls. Put the heights for those imaginary walls very low, though.

The kitchen doors and windows are important, and you should measure their width and height. Also, make sure you have them set in the grid where they are located in your room. For windows, you need to know the height from the floor to the window sill. Mark all this on the grid and then the online design program will guide you through transferring the information onto the web version.

Playing with Kitchen Appliances as Icons in your Design

After your grid is set up for the program, you can choose the products you want. Most kitchen design websites are set up by one particular company, so the products used are their brand name products. To solve that, you can go to an independent site, or you can get the dimensions of your favorite brands and choose products for your layout that are equal in size.

Now comes the fun part of doing your kitchen design online. The products you chose are represented by icons. You get to play with the icons until they fit into the kitchen the way you like them. You can experiment as long as you like. You can print out several versions. When you are finished, you will be ready to begin your project.

By: Ernest Jarquio

About the Author:

Shabby Chic Kitchen