Talking Kitchens, Bathrooms & Renovations: Why Should I Work With A Certified Kitchen Or Bathroom Designer?

A lot of people make mistakes when renovating a house, be it a kitchen, be it a bathroom, a laundry, or whatever. And one of the best ways to avoid, or at least reduce the risk of mistakes, is by using a fully qualified designer. 

When you talk to a designer about a kitchen or bathroom renovation, their training and their experience is at your service. And you’re gaining the benefit of the fact they’ve already made all those mistakes. So when you go to a qualified designer as opposed to a kitchen salesman, you are going to get a lot better information. 

What Does A Designer Actually Do?

When you engage a certified bathroom or kitchen designer, they are much more likely to give you specialised advice. For example, they might suggest to you that if a door was moved from here to there, or if you put a new door in there or whatever it might happen to be, you very often achieve a much, much better result. 

Most ordinary kitchen sales places will simply tell you to just put boxes around the walls. That’s not always the best way to improve your kitchen or bathroom. All you’re really doing there is simply giving a facelift to the kitchen or bathroom. 

When you renovate anything, what you’re trying to do is to improve your property, the amenity that you get from it and your lifestyle. You don’t necessarily achieve that by just using someone who comes along and is focused on the price, as if to say the price will somehow magically give you the result you want. It doesn’t. It never has, and never will. 

Common Mistakes To Avoid

There are a whole lot of layout mistakes that can be made when designing your kitchen or bathroom. For example, you might have an old floor, and you don’t really want to have to put a new floor down. So you build the kitchen around the old footprint and then you find that the kitchen layout was bad to start with. Now you find that you’ve spent a lot of money and you still have a bad kitchen. That’s one common mistake most people make. 

Another mistake that people make is they might think that the sink is in the wrong spot, but they are reluctant to move it because they think it will be expensive. However, when you move a sink, the plumbing cost is not all that expensive. It only becomes expensive when you move it from one end of the house to the other. This is where you need to try to think a bit laterally, try to think outside the box and ask yourself: what’s a better way to do this? 

Improving Workflow In The Kitchen

Another very common design mistake is people often put a dishwasher in between the sink and the hot plate. When you think about the fact that your kitchen is a little factory, and its product is food, our task as designers, and your task as the owner of the home, is to improve that little factory so it’s more efficient. 

So really, what we’re doing when we design a kitchen for you is we’re undertaking pretty much a work-study exercise to see how labour efficient we can make the area. One of the fundamental things to consider is the direction and flow of work, be it clockwise or anti-clockwise. 

So logically speaking for example, the workflow goes from hot plate, to sink, to dishwasher. It may seem silly, but simple things like that can make a big difference to the house, to the way the kitchen gets designed, and the way the kitchen works. 

Final Thoughts

I think one of the biggest cost errors that people make is not getting a good, certified designer. A good designer will save you a lot of money even though sometimes they might cause you to spend more in total. However, the outcome is usually going to be a lot better because their focus is on getting it right, not just the budget. 

The budget is very important for all of us, but the budget’s no good if it won’t allow us to get  things correctly specified, correctly configured, and correctly installed at the end of the day. So a budget has to be an intelligent assessment of the outcome we’re trying to achieve and what’s a reasonable budget to achieve that goal. 

If you are looking for some expert advice and some design inspiration for your kitchen or bathroom renovation, then speak to our qualified designers at Let’s Talk Kitchens & Interiors.

Let’s Talk Kitchens & Interiors have been designing and building bespoke bathrooms in Melbourne and greater Victoria since 1972. Over those 48 years, we’ve made every mistake known to man, so why not take advantage of our hard-won, learning experiences and call us today!

If you would like further help designing your new kitchen call Let’s Talk Kitchens & Interiors today on (03) 9068 5496 to speak with one of our qualified Interior Designers or book a consultation.