Your guide to a summer-friendly kitchen reno

Summer is the best time of year to renovate your kitchen and it’s coming up fast. During these balmy months the weather’s more predictable, perfect for tradies (and for barbecues while your kitchen is out of order). 

To help you get started we’ve come up with an easy guide to making your kitchen renovation summer friendly. 

Shade your windows from the outside

When cooking or doing dishes you’ll inevitably have to stand in the same place for several minutes. This can quickly become a pain if you’ve got glare and heat from the summer sun coming in through your window – making cooking uncomfortable. The solution is simple. You may be able to retrofit eaves or install exterior blinds on your windows to keep your workspace cool and glare-free. 

Maximise natural light

While you want to keep glare and heat out on the hottest of summer days you still want to maximise light. If your kitchen is dark and dinghy, consider adding a window or a skylight to get light flowing in (this is important during summer but even more so when the weather cools down in winter). 

Bring the outside in

An Australian summer should be enjoyed outside as much as possible. Your kitchen renovation is the perfect opportunity to bring the outside into your home and make every night feel like a barbecue. The trick is to maximise indoor-outdoor flow with French or sliding doors that open the kitchen up – perhaps a serving window from the kitchen directly to the outdoor area, or at least workspaces that face a window looking outward. 

It’s also a good idea to position your outdoor dining and living next to your kitchen so that food and drink can be prepared and passed out with ease (and to make dining outside a more obvious option when the weather’s nice). 

Consider an outdoor kitchen

If it’s not easy to open your kitchen up then why not build a new one outside? An outdoor kitchen can be a relatively inexpensive way to improve your property’s outdoor living and summer spaces, turning every night into a barbeque (with a little luxury). Just make sure you use fittings and fixtures that are built to withstand the harsh Aussie summer conditions, like the Abey Alfresco range. 

Maximise the entertainment (and togetherness) factor

A kitchen built for hot summer days and long nights should be perfect for entertaining friends and family. So take a moment when designing yours to ensure it’s built to be a social space and that whoever’s good enough to cook isn’t cut off from the rest of the home. Consider having key prep or cooking areas facing living areas so they are naturally involved, or installing a large kitchen island which guests or family members can congregate around while someone’s in the kitchen. Most importantly, make the kitchen feel like part of the home so the chef does too. 

Get inspired

It’s not easy to visualise what’s going to look good in your kitchen without seeing it in person. To get inspired, view hundreds of quality fittings and fixtures, and speak to a design expert, drop in to your nearest Abey showroom.