The MN lessons learnt kitchen thread.

[jollydiane]

I have read loads of kitchen threads so here is my conclusions.

1. Plan for where you bin is going to go.
2. Handless kitchens look lovely but can wind you up.
3. Floor Tiles look stunning but can be a bugger to keep clean.
4. Splash-backs are very practical for cleaning and can look stunning although some of you think they look naff.

What else should I add to the list before I make my purchase?

The one area I'm really stuck on is flooring. I want something that I can use my lakeland steam mop on (another MN suggestion) which I love.

spoon fork knife here too - household of left handers.

Bin planning, I hate my bin.

Oh I like open shelving and I hate deep drawers for saucepans - I just hang them up on hooks. I would keep tea towels in a deep drawer but nothing else as you can never get to the stuff at the bottom.

Our cutlery stays in the dish drainer till it gets used, we never set a table, it's all a bit casual here.

Drawers are the best. For everything. Fact.

Do not put a sink or hob in an island. The floor on the other side ALWAYS ends up either wet or greasy. I speak from bitter experience.

I hated having tiles. They were freezing cold. It also meant that anything you dropped was bound to smash. This might not matter if you're a less clumsy family than us.

Our new kitchen is going in at the moment. I have been heavily influenced by MN.

Rangemaster with induction hob.

Deep drawers and also 3 500mm drawers.

No open shelves - made that mistake before. Looked lovely, but was always cleaning them and the stuff on them.

Sockets inside cupboards, including one cupboard just for charging phones etc as I got sick of chargers/phones/ipads out on counters.

Cupboard for cookery books - another thing I don't like on show.

Oak worktops (hope we don't regret this) ditto butler sink.

Special shelf built into peninsular bit for KitchenAid!

have a fused switch, 200mm above the worktop, at every point where you have, or one day might want to have, an appliance beneath. The fused switch to feed a single unswitched socket below the worktop.

Have a double socket at least every metre along the wall, 200mm above the worktop.

Get a proper electrician who is a member of a self certification scheme. Kitchen fitters are not proper electricians or proper plumbers and are notorious for shoddy and non-compliant work hidden behind the cabinets.

YYY to putting the flooring down before the cabs, it will protect against spillage and wildlife

YYY to cabs going right up to the ceiling. If you are too short to reach them, they will still fill up with your sandwich toaster, granny's best china, disused slow-cooker etc but will look neater and easier to clean

For your wall cabinets, have hanging rail fitted all along the wall. Cabs can then be lifted up and hung on it. You can reposition them at whim; it is very strong; and there is never a problem (as with individual brackets) of having a crumbly bit of wall or an electrical cable where you need to drill a hole.

Be sure to get a cooker hood that actually extracts the steam and greasy fumes through the wall instead of just blowing them round the kitchen.

But wouldn't it be best to just chuck out give away the sandwich toaster and granny's best china. I hate having cupboards full of crap I never use.

My mum's kitchen has far too many cupboards in it. It just facilitates her urge to hoard crap she never uses/will never use again. She does not need 6 or 7 full sets of crockery (complete with matching milk jugs and gravy boats, none of which have ever been used in my lifetime) or 3 sets of glasses of various kinds (i.e. 3 whole sets including red wine glasses, white wine glasses, sherry glasses, brandy glasses - often 12 of each type). She never bakes, yet needs to store enough cake tins to run a large bakery and also to fill a cupboard with flour and other baking products that are all many years old. She has tins in her cupboards with use by dates in the 1990s on them.

She's always complaining that she doesn't have enough room in her cupboards but that's because they're stuffed with utter nonsense.

Having grown up with this kind of kitchen hoarding, I try to keep the stuff I store to a minimum. If I'm unlikely to use it, or I can do just as good a job with the oven/grill/frying pan (I'm definitely thinking of sandwich toasters here!) then it's getting no house room here.

Filling shelves I can't reach with stuff I don't really want fills me with despair.

you will appreciate the extra cupboards when you get old and barmy.

My mother did this kind of hoarding in her early 30s (and continues to this day)! So reasonably young, but bonkers.

I agree if you have too many cupbaords you will fill them with crap. I have very few cupboards because I didn't want a crowded kitchen and am ruthless about throwing crud away. It also helps when keeping it clean.

Make sure you are there when they install the xtractor hood. Nine is too low and I bang my head on it.

If you have the chance, a walk in larder is a wonderful thing. I had one in an old house and I loved it - a lovely cool cupboard with marble shelves, so much better than cupboards.

Don't have wooden floors - they are a sod to keep clean and you will cry if you drop a pan of tomato soup all over it.

I agree if you have too many cupbaords you will fill them with crap. I have very few cupboards because I didn't want a crowded kitchen and am ruthless about throwing crud away. It also helps when keeping it clean.

Make sure you are there when they install the xtractor hood. Nine is too low and I bang my head on it.

If you have the chance, a walk in larder is a wonderful thing. I had one in an old house and I loved it - a lovely cool cupboard with marble shelves, so much better than cupboards.

Don't have wooden floors - they are a sod to keep clean and you will cry if you drop a pan of tomato soup all over it.

And induction hobs are wonderful, after years of cleaning gas hobs I would never go back. Induction all the way.

Unless your kitchen has walls of glass on 3 sides and skylights above, get pale kitchen cabinets so the room stays nice and light!!! (Currently getting kitchen cabinets painted white after living in cave-like gloom for 3 years).

Unless you intend to polish your worktop daily - and esp if you have hard water - consider honed granite rather than polished granite. Shop around for it - the company we went to had no honed granite on offer and I didn't realise at the time that it even existed . Looks more chic and understated than the shiny stuff too.

Puts sockets EVERYWHERE.

Work out what you are going to put in each cupboard/drawer before you confirm layout. Right down to things like the annoyingly long rolls of tin foil and the really large packs of cereal and the slightly-taller than average bottles of cleaning fluid etc etc.

YY to planning for bin and teatowels.

The twirly carousel things in corner cupboards are of dubious usefulness. Expensive, tend to break and hugely reduce amount of usable shelf space in said cupboard.

Pan drawers are the best thing in the world ever.

Fridges/freezers of the same size outside vary hugely in terms of usable internal volume. Check carefully.

Don't buy a tap that doesn't have a little diffuser thingy of metal mesh just inside the spout. It will spurt out a horrible jet of water that will splash violently off the ink and soak you and your entire kitchen every time you use it. Certainly do not spend £250 on such a tap . Most taps are sensible. Some aren't. I didn't think anyone would design a tap so stupid, and you don't see them working until they're installed!

Reluctanttownie: The previous owners of our new house clearly enjoyed dark, cave-like kitchens. They bricked up a window to minimise the amount of natural light, then installed a nice dark wood-effect kitchen with black granite worktops and black tiles on the walls and floor. To ensure maximum dinginess, they went for a single light in the middle of the ceiling too. They also had plans to stick a big extension on the back to make the entire room internal (because clearly they resented any light getting in through the French doors) but decided they would move instead.

We are, of course, ripping it out and putting in some a nice light kitchen and a big window. And not building the horrible extension that they got planning permission for. Funnily enough, the EA didn't mention this planning permission at all as it would not be a selling point for anyone. It just came up in the searches.

Tiled floors are much easier to keep clean and good looking esp if you have dogs (whose claws scratch the wood). Tile right up to walls before installing any appliances/cupboards, and also use the same tiles for skirting (cut to size if necessary) - my plumber suggested this and it looks great and is really practical for cleaning.

I know it's utterly unfashionable but I hate brushed steel appliances. It'll be white enamel all the way next time - brushed steel looks great but only the instant you clean it. After that it shows every smear.

We had a sort of hanging shelf thing like a minature butchers' rack for all the utensils - spatulas, tongs, etc. Marvellous - you could see everything and weren't forever rooting through a drawer for a draining spoon, etc with a hot pan in the other hand.

You cannot have too many electric sockets, but this is true anywhere these days.

Keep the fridge and the cooker a long way apart or the fridge will waste a lot of electric fighting the heat from the oven.

Have the sink by the window - unless you like staring at a wall when you're doing the washing up.

Haha, that sounds SO like ours - oak cabinets (DH insisted on the blasted things, he is now fully repentent), black granite, slate floor (which I love, but doesn't help!). We also have a conservatory on the other side (couldn't afford to knock through and do open plan and solid extension when we put kitchen in). Also had to brick up a door to half height and turn it into window (tiny house, needed to to get usable sized kitchen in there. We still have french doors and one window in a fairly small room, but natural light is not its strong point...

We literally didn't consider any of this when we chose kitchen!

YYY to deciding what you are going to put where before installing. I was advised to change my layout because people just didn't get that I wanted certain things in certain places for convenience, not just symmetry.

Not sure I agree about the few cupboards thing. I was persuaded against getting the side with wall cupboards going right up the ceiling and I regret it. Even though I'd have nothing to put in them now really, it would be a great place for Christmas decorations, multipacks of crisps that I don't want to binge on when the kids drive me potty and just be there for when the family grows and might need it. AND not get scummy, greasy, dusty layers that are really hard to reach and clean up. In fact, I might just get them put in one day!

Interesting that at the time we installed our kitchen (about 2yrs ago), the mumsnet wisdom was that cupboards to the ceiling would be oppressive!

Don't get a hard tiled floor. It will smash everything, incl. DC and toys, and quite soon bits of it will smash too.

Get your floor done wall to wall and then have the furniture put on top of it.

The standard height for an extractor fan is far too low - get yours raised or people will be banging their heads on it.

Do not use a pendant lamp - it'll mean you can't move the furniture around at a later date without being restricted.

I like a laundry basket worked into a kitchen. YY to thinking about where your tea towels and towels will go.

Formica/Lino surfaces are underrated.

Get a pop up socket with usb for the island!

We rejected pop-up sockets - the kitchen designer was quite taken aback at our vehemence - but we both have experience of them in an office environment and they just don't last - plus we wanted no grease/gunk traps at all on the surfaces (there are a couple of unavoidable joins in the granite, but that is all).

We have oak cabinets and granite worktops - but white walls, pale tiles, and lots of lights. A sloping extractor was the only way we could get one in under our low ceiling and prevents head vs. extractor incidents.

I hate wall tiles, a nightmare to keep the grout clean.

I had glass and granite as splashbacks, lovely and I miss them.

Granite worktops, expensive but easy to keep clean, will tolerate hot pots and pans unlike laminate.

Floor tiles are great, easy to clean and long lasting. I had everything as floor covering, from carpet to wood to laminate to cork. Nothing works as good as tiles.

Drawers are better than cupboards.

Forget wine shelves. Just take up space unless you have a lot of it.

sundae ... my tiled floor fractured dd wrist when she simply fell ... but then again, so did the sponge surface at a play park! ... I still prefer tiled floor, so easy to clean ...

hmm kitchen envy, I rent :)

I am in a quandary about worktops for my refit as currently have one of those grey speckly laminates that hides crumbs unnervingly and is simply too dark and cheap looking. Laminate looks cheap unless you go for a zingy colour but then you're going to more niche suppliers so it gets pricey so why not go for something else.

I've been drawn to zinc as it will get a natural patina and is pretty hardwearing. Anyone installed zinc already?

For the rest of it:

• cupboards to ceiling
• some sort of larder/pantry
• deep drawers
• lots of sockets
• bin cupboard (waste and recycling)
• dishwasher (no room in current layout!!!)
• tiled floor or this rose des vents vinyl flooring if we were doing a makeover (most likely budget-wise. Sigh)