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There are so many benefits to cooking at home. It saves you money and helps you keep in control of your health, as you know exactly what’s going into your food when you prepare it yourself. Unlike shop-bought and convenience meals, you can skip the excess salt, sugar and oil and flavor your food with herbs and spices instead- many of which have incredible health benefits. Cooking and baking at home helps you to improve your skills, and you might find it’s something you really enjoy doing. But there’s one thing that might be holding you back from getting in the kitchen more, and that’ the kitchen itself. If space is cramped, cluttered or impractical it doesn’t make for a very relaxing or productive cooking session, so making an investment here could be well worth the money. Here’s how you can go about it.

Consider an extension
If the space is simply too small to fit in everything that a modern kitchen needs, you might have to consider extending the space. This could mean getting an extension, a regular brick built kind or even one made of glass which would flood the kitchen with natural light. If that’s not an option, moving or removing an internal wall to take space from the living space could be the way to go. Open plan is very sought after in modern homes, it makes everywhere look and feel bigger and brighter and will more than likely add value too.

Don’t overlook the layout
The layout is everything in a kitchen, which is why it’s important to speak to a professional when it comes to the design. Even if you’re good at DIY and have the skills to install it yourself, it makes sense to get advice from someone that knows what they’re doing in the design stage. You have things like the ‘working triangle’ to bear in mind, this puts you in the middle of three points- the oven, the fridge, and the sink. A kitchen designer can help you fill in any awkward gaps with things like dish racks and wine holders and generally make the space look far better. Once you have the layout in mind, you can have electricians and plumbers come in and put everything in place for things like plumbed in fridges and appliances in islands. That way there’s no putting holes in walls or pulling up floors later on to make adjustments.

Find the right storage
If you have space to install a pantry or store cupboard in your kitchen, it’s always worth it. One thing that can make cooking stressful is having to dig through cupboards for ingredients, with a tall pantry with plenty of shelves you can easily see and grab what you need. If you organize things like dry ingredients into labeled jars and containers it looks good, makes things convenient and easy to use and also keeps them fresh. Pests are unable to get into things like glass jars so it can be worth decanting items like dried grains, flour, and cereals. Look on sites like Pinterest for inspiration, they have plenty of pantry pictures to give you ideas.