Is your kitchen looking a little worse for wear at the moment? Even if it’s not all that old, the amount of time we spend using the kitchen means it breaks down quite quickly! And seeing as kitchens take a lot of cleaning and maintenance work day by day too, it won’t be long before something needs repairing, cleaning up, or replacing.
All in all, that means you probably have a kitchen project in mind right now. If that’s the case, there are a few tasks you’ll want to get out of the way before you clear things out and get to work.
Whether you’re just repainting the wall behind the cupboards or you’re doing an oven upgrade – or you’re thinking of putting up wallpaper, relaying the floor, and replacing everything – doing these jobs before you go any further will take a lot of trouble out of the process.
Plus, none of them will take all that long to complete either! You could get them all done within the weekend, if not in a single day.
Double Check Your Appliance Placement
If you’re going to be pulling out a few appliances, swapping some counters round, or making space for a kitchen island or worktop, it’s always best to give your new proposed layout a once over.
This ensures you have the chance to fix any appliance placement issues that may crop up when the time comes to actually fit them.
Check where you want something like a dish washer to go; is there a place where it can be plumbed into the piping in the layout you’ve drawn up? If not, you’ll either need to focus on increasing your pipe connections or find a different home for it.
Aside from this, you’ll want to take stock of how close your oven and refrigerator will be in your new kitchen design. The closer they sit, the harder they have to work to both cool and heat.
Being right next door to each other is never a good idea, as the fridge in particular can suffer from regularly being blasted with 150 degree plus temperatures from the box beside it!
Check Your Refrigerator is Working Properly
When the refrigerator is broken, functioning poorly, or seemingly freezing anything that’s put too far to the back, you need to investigate and see what’s going on. It could be that you just need to adjust the temperature dial or clean out the filters.
But it could also be that the fridge is genuinely in poor condition and you need to get a refrigerator repair service out ASAP. And that’s not the kind of job you only want to take care of once you’ve spent all that money on redoing the rest of the kitchen.
Let’s face it, it’ll be hard to prepare substantial meals of any kind without a working fridge. Take the chance now to double check that the appliance is working without any problems and get it fixed up before you have to throw everything out.
You’ve probably had to pull the fridge out from its place to get your project done anyway, so you’ll easily be able to give it the full once over.
Clean Behind and on Top of Cupboards
If you pull something out and it leaves a big gap in your cupboards, get in there with a vacuum and a bit of floor scrub. Give it a good cleaning out, and then double check that the flooring below isn’t damaged any further.
For example, are there any scratches, cuts, or holes? Because no matter if you’re working with tiles or something like lino, that’s going to need to be patched over before anything else is fitted on top.
If you’re instead just cleaning out cupboards and not moving anything else, this is your chance to check for holes in the wood and scratches in the paintwork. You can also keep an eye out for pest droppings, as kitchen cupboards tend to be a pretty common place for these to go unnoticed!
Check for Grease
Grease can very easily splatter around a kitchen, leaving marks and stains, a lot of slippery surfaces, and can even bake into the walls. If the backsplash doesn’t protect enough of the kitchen, this is another thing to think about doing before you go any further!
Take a few minutes to go around your kitchen and check for signs of grease. It might just be that you need to give the tiles a wipe down and the wall a wash, but this is something to do before any new paint or wallpaper goes up.
Otherwise these grease spots will just soak into the new material and start to show through it.
Consider Cable Management
Finally, you’ll want to think about how you’re going to manage the smaller appliances and handheld devices. Items like an air fryer or your toaster, for example, that need to be plugged in the majority of the time.
After all, the cable and plugs can be strewn all over the countertops. They can take up a lot of usable space because of it too!
So, is there any space in your current upgrade plan for putting in cable tidies? Or a dedicated worktop, where these appliances are not in the way?
Get to Work on Your Kitchen
When you’re planning a kitchen re-dec, or you want to upgrade a few things round the room, cleaning out and double checking a few areas will really help.
Really, the list of the five tasks above are key to getting your kitchen into the new and shiny state you want it to be. And seeing as you’ll be doing a bit of DIY work anyway, why not get them out of the way at the same time?
Knock these tasks off the to-do list in a couple hours, save yourself a potential headache in the future, and redecorate and upgrade your kitchen in a way you can be proud of!
