Kitchens ' How Important They Really Are In Your Household.

By Amy Stevens

Kitchens are not only places where food is prepared. They are much more than that. To tell the truth, the kitchen is probably the center around which the whole house revolves.

Of course it is in the first place where the food is prepared. It should therefore be equipped and planned in such a way that it makes the process of food preparation easy, logical and fun. There should in the first place be enough storage space to make sure your kitchen counter can always remain clean and uncluttered.

A kitchen should also be large enough to allow for enough space to easily move around. It has become the custom in modern developments to make the kitchens smaller and smaller. This is in the end a source of huge frustration for the person who has to prepare the meals and who has to operate in an area that is simply too small for the purpose.

When it comes to the floor of the kitchen, the rule is that it should never be covered with a material that is difficult to clean. There is simply no way you can prevent those horrible spills from happening, and when they happen you don't want to spend two hours to clean the floor or much worse be stuck with a terrible stain on the floor. The material that's used should be tough and heavy detergents should not be able to damage it.

Another often overlooked aspect is that of lighting. Do you still remember the dark kitchen grandma used to have with a single small window and one electric bulb providing barely enough light for you to see her wrinkled old face? That is not the way things should be in the kitchen. When you prepare food, you are often working with small quantities of spices and herbs and it can be disastrous if you can't properly see what you are doing.

The counter is another very important part of any kitchen. The principles here are the same as with the kitchen floor ' the counter top should be easy to clean and it should be chip and scratch resistant. Marble is of course an excellent choice, but it's too expensive for many people to consider.

A roomy kitchen fitted with a breakfast nook in one corner can be an excellent way to give the family a place to spend some quality time with each other. One only has to think of the huge kitchens of days gone by where the whole family regularly gathered around the table to eat, joke and exchange stories to realize the truth of this.

The kitchen is indeed the heart of the home. One can easily see how true this is by trying to imagine your house without a kitchen....

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