Are you planning on building a new kitchen or remodelling the outdated old one you’ve got in order to breathe some life into it? STOP! Hold on. Before contacting a professional, you’ll need to do a little ground work first.

Planning is the first phase of any project, and sometimes it’s the phase that’s most ignored, The more pre-planning that you can do, it’s the better off you are.{{more}} These are a few things you can do to get the planning process started. Look at your new or existing space, make a note of some of the things you do not have and what you have now that you like and start adding to the list from there.

Brain storm. Here are some ideas to jump start the process: Go online to www.exclusivekitchensvc.com and see ideas that are out there. Go to other websites as well. Read magazines.Visit kitchen stores. Talk with the family and check out your friends’ kitchens.

Collect samples. Some companies do not give out samples. They ask you to come in, instead. Look at kitchen stock photos, as well, that would start to develop in your mind the kind of kitchen that you would like. Put all of your findings together. You would have done 90 per cent of the work by the time you get to the kitchen contractors to put your project together!

ALWAYS take control of your kitchen project. It’s very important that you do so. This is your home. You are the one who would be living there, working in it, not us. We can only advise you from a professional level, but you need to know whether the advice you are getting is good or bad for you and your family’s needs. You can only know this if you’ve done some research and planning.

SET A GOAL

Try to define your needs and your wants. In fact, what I tell most of my clients is to sit down with the members of their family and have each person get a book or paper and divide it into 2 sections. On the left, write your “wants”, and on the right your “needs”. Have fun with it. While listing as many needs and wants, try to keep things in perspective at the same time. Your needs are styles, items, colours etc. that you must have. Your wants are your wishes. Then come together and priorities these two sections, starting with the MOST important item at the head of the list. There you would see a goal start emerging and it would also give you a sense of your family styles, which I’ll talk about a bit later. Try to begin your ideal kitchen goal something like this, “My Kitchen will be a place where___________(family/friends) can _____(cook/entertain) or relax etc and it must be __________Open/seperated/huge island etc.” You get the picture.

To be continued next week.