If you’re planning to renovate your kitchen, as I am, then reading Gale Steves’ new book, Right-Sizing Your Home (Northwest Arm Press), is a great place to start. Most of the book is divided into chapters that analyze, room by room, the public and private areas in a home and offer essential advice on crafting spaces to suit the scale of your home—and your lifestyle. One of the most intriguing components of each chapter is a Style Audit that helps you define your lifestyle approach toward any given room and provides design ideas that will support how you actually live in each of the spaces.
In the Cooking Style Audit in the chapter called Where You Cook, for example, Steves identifies five types of home cooks, a Specialized Cook, a Great Entertainer, a Co-Chef, an Everyday Feeder, and a Fast-Foodie. She then goes on to offer specific advice for storage, appliances, and design approaches most suitable to each type. She also includes a kitchen redesign plan, trade-off information between specific materials and appliance choices, and recommended dimensions for different kinds of layouts.
I found out that I’m a cross between an Everyday Feeder and a Co-Chef (my husband isn’t sharing the kitchen to do his own cooking so much as collaborating with me on whatever we’re preparing and pulling together snacks and drinks). So it’s now clearer to me that my compact, corridor-style kitchen can benefit from more efficient storage and smaller-scale appliances to make room for some extra workspace. Closing chapters in the book also offer additional advice on cleaning and storage issues as well as an action plan with tips on budgeting, timetables, and legal matters that accompany the renovation process. This thorough guide offers a terrific foundation for upgrading any space in the house in line with what you really need—and your budget.
Awesome — too many people go overboard adding onto their homes without thinking through their needs. Gale Steve’s book offers both wisdom and inspiration. We’re working on keeping the same footprint, but making our home work better for our own specific needs. We live in a 1950’s garrison Colonial. We’re selecting smaller appliances so that we can squeeze in direct access to a patio and eliminating the kitchen-dining room wall to create space for casual dining and entertaining.
Hi Dick,
Thanks for your comment. Please check back into my blog in a few days, when its new design should be complete. It will have a share function that allows people like you to send me photos of their projects so I can post the efforts of other people’s home improvement projects, too. Would love to see how your project turns out.
Best,
Jean
This is a perfect article for people who spend a lot of time in kitchen.