Moving to a smaller kitchen - help!

[bambinobambino]

We are thinking of offering on a house.

It's the right size but different layout than we are used to. It has a seperate kitchen and then big open dining/family room.

We are used to a big open plan kitchen.

It's been recently modernised so no excuse to knock it about a bit.

So we will have about a third of the cupboard space we currently have.

Help!

I have no idea where they keep their food for instance.

Any ideas for ingenious shelving? We could replace one of the single wall units with a top to ceiling one maybe?

Does this mean it's the wrong house?

Arrgghh

I second everything that Sooz says. All our nice crockery, dinner party sets, massive platters, alcohol, place mats, etc lives in the dining room in a big display cabinet. An overflow of nice crockery lives in a box in a spare bedroom to be got out once a year.

It's also very helpful to chuck out all your crap, and all the stuff which is lovely but that you don't use. You can get surprisingly good prices on Ebay for kitchen things in good condition, especially if you make them look posh in the photos.

Oooh, kickboard drawers - I like the sound of those.

I bet DS2 will love those even more

A dresser could be the way forward!

I have a small kitchen and it's really good for cooking in because the space is so efficient. I would try living with the kitchen as it is for a few weeks and, if it doesn't work for you, consider reconfiguring it: I find I need at least a metre length of worksurface (quite often in small kitchens the worksurface is chopped about between the sink and hob) and I also have two tall cupboards that really are fantastic for storing away all the gubbins. If you find it difficult to use your kitchen as it is, then I would consider paying a joiner and plumber to come and rearrange the units or just redoing it all completely - as the units are new, you may be able to sell them - because it is really difficult to work in a badly laid-out kitchen.

I wouldn't put in lots of extra wall units and so on because in a small kitchen it can just become very claustrophobic.

We moved to a house with a smaller kitchen and it works well.We had to have a new one as ours was 46 years old and badly planned and we'd struggle to fit more than one person in it.One it was replanned and replaced it is so much more efficient that it is unbelievable.It is still the same size,but a totally different room-the dds can help me cook now.