Designing a Small but Functional Kitchen: Tips and Ideas

The kitchen. The heart of the home, where memories are made. The problem when we moved into our house, though, is that the memories were of trying to find a place to put our cutlery and not, like, baking Christmas cookies. Bottom line: we needed a functional kitchen.

It was tiny, dark and non-functional. There was an entire wall that only had the fridge – no cabinets or storage of any kind – and the oven was enormous. Like, this must’ve been the Ratatoullie rat’s personal kitchen because the oven/stove situation was clearly made for a foodie with a double oven and a griddle on the top, but there was hardly any room left over to prep or move around comfortably.

There weren’t any drawers of any kind to store utensils and silverware, and it was totally closed off from the rest of the house.

We lived with the culinary cave for almost four months before we started the renovation process. This wasn’t a DIY job at all – we ended up pretty much having the whole thing gutted – but we did design the whole room to be more functional and we learned a lot about how to analyze the way we use a space that will help with DIY in the future.

I think maybe the most important part of it all is finding the right contractor that understands you’re ballin’ on a budget. We had three different contractors come to the house for quotes before we decided, and ended up choosing our contractor because he was open to our ideas and having us save money by doing things like buying our own tile and appliances to have installed rather than buying some kind of kitchen package. He also offers to come back and touch anything up within a year of doing the work, which is handy.

So, before we talk about how we designed our small but functional kitchen, let’s check out the boring before pictures.

Now, onto the functional kitchen glow-up.

The budget

So many times we’ll see blog posts and makeovers and they’re so impressive, but then whoever’s done it will be like ‘we transformed this kitchen for only $50,000’ and our eyes glaze over. Like, obviously we don’t have an extra $50,000 laying around and that’s not an amount you can throw around all nonchalant as if it was a budget undertaking.

Our kitchen budget was $15,000, which is on the very low end, but since our space was small and we live in the south, it helped keep everything low-cost.

Now, $15,000 isn’t nothing either, and we went back and forth about whether we should put that money into our home loan or use it on the kitchen.

In the end our reasoning was that if we put the money into the loan then, great, we’ve paid off more on our loan, but if we put it into renovating the kitchen, now we’ve added value that would help in resale.

Obviously as we’re about to move out we have no way of quantifying how much that new kitchen helped, but the internet tells us kitchens and bathrooms sell houses and who are we to argue with Google?

Creating function

We knew first and foremost we wanted to open up the wall into the dining room to let more light into the space, even though it would take some of our cabinet space.

Alex was initially gung-ho about an island and we argued about it for a long time before he finally conceded that it just wouldn’t be feasible in the small space unless it was one of those tiny bar cart kinds of islands (and don’t worry, we’re planning for him to get his kitchen island in the next house!).

So, we settled on a peninsula so it’s island-esque and we could have stools on the other side, basically functioning like an island.

Relocating appliances

Next, we had to think about how we use the space.

Generally when you design a kitchen, the classic idea is to make a ‘work triangle’, which means you can easily move back and forth between the fridge, the sink and the stove. This post from Architectural Digest explains it well.

So, to make this area workable we knew we needed to relocate the appliances. We were originally concerned about the cost of doing that, but being that our home is on a pier and beam foundation, there’s easy attic access and even moving something across the room is not actually that far of a move, it helped keep costs down.

The oven, which was originally on the wall that was being removed, was moved over to the blank wall that only had the fridge on it. We also got rid of the old, enormous oven and replaced it with one that’s more reasonable for a small family and a small house.

We had the fridge moved into what was originally the pantry so it was counter-depth and mostly out of the way, and we installed shelves in the little trash room off the kitchen to make that into our pantry instead.

The sink and dishwasher stayed in their original place.

Designing the cabinet configuration

This one took a lot of thinking of specific scenarios. You don’t want to walk across the room to grab your egg flip when you’re cooking at the stove, and you don’t want your cutting boards too far from the counterspace where you’ll prep.

We ended up installing drawers on either side of the oven so we have our silverware and cooking utensils closest to the fridge and the oven, then in the peninsula we had regular cabinets for pots, pans and appliances.

We had the microwave installed under an upper cabinet to preserve our new and valuable counter space, and kept the upper to the right side of the sink. Instead of adding another upper cabinet to the left of the sink between the now-open kitchen and dining room, we did two open shelves.

I didn’t want to close off any light by adding cabinets in that space, and thought the wood elements would warm up the stark white a bit. We also bought the brackets for this from Amazon and cut and stained the wood ourselves.

Choosing cabinets + finishes

We went with a standard white shaker for the cabinets, knowing they were budget-friendly and widely loved for resale purposes. Our contractor had us go to a couple of countertop outlets to pick what we liked, which is totally worth it for the savings in not needing to buy per foot from a more expensive store. It took us a few places to find a style we liked – we both personally hate the speckled look where it’s like you’ve just fed your goldfish on the countertop, and we didn’t want anything too dark because the whole idea was to brighten up the space and make it feel bigger.

In the end I took a risk and let Alex go to one of the places solo and make a choice, and he did so well with a basic white quartz with some subtle grey veining.

We ordered all the appliances ourselves and had them delivered for our contractor to install, and I ordered all the black cabinet hardware myself from Amazon, which also helped keep costs down.

We also had the contractor add thick molding and filler above the cabinets so they go all the way to the ceiling and appear taller, which is a decision we’re so happy we made.

Lighting

Because the original room was so dark and dingy, lighting was super important in our design. We installed two big pendant lights over the peninsula (but honestly they were more for aesthetics than function), and had can lights installed across the room. Usually I’m not a fan of can lights, but having the space be well-lit was more important in this case. Oh, and the room originally had a regular light fixture with a fan that we had removed.

Choosing the tile

This was an ordeal in itself. I wanted something with a pattern that was a little more interesting and Alex wanted white subway tile. I thought the white subway would be too plain with the all-white-everything look we already had going on, and Alex thought something with a pattern would be too jarring for the resale.

We compromised on this white picket-shaped tile that we had installed vertically with a dark grey grout. It was around the same price as subway tile (read: very budget-friendly) but was different enough that it stands out and we now get comments all the time on how much people love it!

A look back now we’ve lived with it

We’re about to move out of this house, but have lived with our new, beautiful kitchen for about 10 months. The function is so much better, it’s so much more open and inviting being able to see right to it from the living room, and it’s just nice to look at.

We did have the contractor come back once because there was a weird stain on the ceiling by the pendant lights that we worried could be a leak from when they moved the air conditioning vent, but it turns out it was an old stain and we painted over it.

In all, though, we’re so happy with how it turned out and we’re amazed at the difference reconfiguration can make in how big a space feels. We didn’t change the square footage at all, but it seems much more spacious.

If you liked these tips for designing a functional kitchen, be sure to check out the DIY giant chalkboard we added to the space after renovation and sign up for our newsletter!