Small Kitchen Remodeling

A small kitchen is not a bad kitchen. Most of the housing stock in Essex and Union County was built when kitchens were work rooms rather than gathering spaces, and a well-planned galley can be genuinely pleasant to cook in. The problem is almost never the square footage. It is that the existing layout wastes a third of it.

Where small kitchens lose space

Before adding anything, it is worth finding what the current room is giving away:

• The soffit. A foot of ceiling height above the uppers, doing nothing, in a room that needs storage.
• Blind corners. A corner base cabinet without a pull-out mechanism is roughly nine cubic feet you cannot reach.
• Doors that swing into the room. A basement or pantry door swinging inward can sterilize four square feet of floor permanently.
• A full-depth refrigerator protruding six inches past the counter, narrowing the aisle at the worst possible point.
• Base cabinets with doors instead of drawers, where the back half is functionally inaccessible.
• A radiator occupying a wall that could otherwise carry counter or storage.
• Interrupted counter runs, three separate two-foot sections instead of one continuous six-foot working surface.

Fixing three or four of those often gets a homeowner more usable kitchen than knocking out a wall would, at a fraction of the cost and disruption.

Layouts that work in a tight room

The single-wall kitchen is the most compact and the least efficient to work in, because everything happens along one line. It suits an apartment or a small two-family unit where the alternative is losing living space.

The galley, two parallel runs with an aisle between, is genuinely efficient and is what a lot of older houses in Newark, Irvington and East Orange already have. Everything is within a step, the sink and range can face each other, and there are no wasted corners at all. The requirement is aisle width, and the failure mode is two people trying to use it simultaneously.

The L-shape frees up one corner for a small table and works well when the room is roughly square. The corner needs a proper pull-out or lazy Susan or you have given away the space you just gained.

The U-shape gives the most counter and storage per square foot but needs a room wide enough that the two facing runs are not eighteen inches apart. In a small room, dropping one leg of the U to a peninsula with seating usually produces a better result.

Storage decisions that pay off

In a small kitchen, every cabinet has to earn its place.

Take the uppers to the ceiling. Standard 30-inch uppers with a soffit above them leave a foot of unusable height. Removing the soffit and running 42-inch cabinets adds a full shelf across the whole run, the best storage-per-dollar change available in most small kitchens.

Drawers in the base cabinets. Three deep drawers hold more accessible pots than a base cabinet with a door and a shelf, because nothing disappears behind anything else.

A tall pantry cabinet with roll-outs where a house has no pantry closet, which is most houses built in this area after 1950.

Solve the corner. A blind-corner pull-out or a rotating shelf recovers space you already paid for.

Use the toe kick for flat storage if you are truly short on space. It is unusual and it works.

Vertical dividers above the fridge for trays and sheet pans, which otherwise stack into an avalanche.

Appliances in a compact kitchen

Appliance choice is a layout decision in a small room. A counter-depth refrigerator gives back six inches of aisle. An 18-inch dishwasher returns six inches of base cabinet, and for a household of one or two it is enough. A slide-in range sits flush with the counter and eliminates the gap that collects crumbs behind a freestanding one. A combination microwave-hood over the range saves the counter space that a countertop microwave eats, though a separate ducted hood ventilates better.

Whatever you choose, specify it before cabinets are ordered. Cabinet openings are built to appliance dimensions, and a late model change means modifying a box on site.

Making the room look larger

Some of this is genuinely functional and some is perceptual, and both matter in a room you stand in every day.

A continuous counter surface without interruptions reads as more space than the same square footage broken into segments. Running the backsplash from counter to ceiling on one wall removes a horizontal break. Lighter cabinet finishes and reflective surfaces bounce what light there is. Undercabinet lighting eliminates the dark band at the back of the counter, which is where a small kitchen feels smallest.

Running the floor continuously into the adjoining room, with no threshold strip, is a small change that makes both rooms feel bigger.

When the walls do need to move

Sometimes the room is genuinely too small for what you want, and no amount of clever cabinetry fixes it. The two usual moves are annexing an adjacent pantry, closet or back hall, or opening the wall to the dining room.

Both are real construction. If the wall is load-bearing, and in most older houses in this area the wall between kitchen and dining room is, the opening needs a properly sized beam with posts carrying down to something adequate below. That is a different scale of project, and it is worth being clear about the difference before you start.

Small kitchens across our service area

Compact kitchens are the norm in Irvington, Newark, East Orange and Orange, and common in the older sections of Maplewood and Bloomfield. See all service areas or return to kitchen remodeling.

Every town has its own kitchen remodeling page covering the housing there and what it means for a project. See the full service area.