Kitchen Extensions – 5 Top Tips

Brightspace specialise in extending kitchens using either conservatories or sunrooms. With hundreds of Kitchen extensions completed here are the five things to remember when planning your new kitchen

1. Ventilation is key: Your existing kitchen will have a window to the back garden, if you are covering this you need to be careful that you allow for natural ventilation. Kitchens create a lot of moisture through cooking steam, boiling kettles, drying clothes etc, if you dont provide for natural ventilation then there is a risk or mold building up on the window frames of your new room. Try to leave a vent on an external wall if possible, better still make sure that your kitchen extractor is vented to an external wall. If neither is possible position an opening window in your new kitchen extension, close and easy to reach to the main kitchen area. This will allow for easy access for allow fresh air in and stale air out
2. Decide whether to leave your new sunroom or conservatory open-plan to the kitchen or separated by doors. Every family is at a different stage, you may want to create a kitchen extension which will allow a separate space for your teenagers but where you can keep an eye on them or you may have an empty nest and welcome back the family at weekends where you need a large open plan space. It is important to decide this at the planning stage as open plan will allow the floor to continue to the kitchen extension while a door frame may interrupt the flooring and also may create a different floor level depending on whether you leave the existing doors there or fit new doors to suit.
3. Decide where to position the dining table, will it be in the existing kitchen or in the new kitchen extension. The position of the dining table is important as the new kitchen extension will more than likely have doors to the garden. Where there are doors there is traffic, you need to be careful that you can fit your dining table and still allow space to walk in and out to the garden.
4. Keep it bright: the kitchen is the most used room in the house so you need to be sure that it does not become the darkest room in the house, when adding a kitchen extension your design should ensure that at the very least the kitchen will be as bright as it is before starting, if using a conservatory to extend your kitchen there will be no problem with light but if building a sunroom with a solid roof you should consider adding as many roof windows as is possible and also positioning these as close to the kitchen door and window to maximise the natural light back into the kitchen
5. Look out for the pipes. All kitchens have waste pipes for the sink, washing machine, dishwasher etc, so all these may have to be moved when adding a kitchen extension. More importantly if you are also remodeling your kitchen you may be moving the machines and sink and may require new piping for water and waste pipes, this needs to be thought through before any new concrete floor is added outside

The Brightspace team have been adding kitchen extensions to homes across Leinster since 1989, our showrooms are open 7 days a week at Johnstown Garden Centre.