Let's talk about how we went about deciding on the communal kitchen in our house share project. It's not just a kitchen and you chuck a dining table in! There are some details where we have to take in consideration which we will be sharing in this post.
If you want to see behind the scenes of renovating such a kitchen, here's the video:
SUPPLIERS
Dining Table, Utensils
BEFORE AND AFTER
This started off with a master bedroom on the front first floor in this big house. A big four-bed family house over 3 storeys, with the kitchen at the rear of the ground floor. Because we are creating 6 separate large bedrooms with their own en-suites, we picked this largest room to be the communal kitchen diner.
In each council with shared accommodations, there are always space standards that we have to adhere to. Our idea is to provide an open-plan kitchen diner for our tenants, that's why our rooms for single occupancy needs to be at least 10.21 sqm. For a total of 6 tenants, our kitchen diner needs to be at least 13 sqm. We think this is a bit small for 6 people sharing a house in a practical sense, hence we picked this room, 19 sqm, to be our kitchen diner. Large enough for us to put a large dining table for 6 people.
The interior design idea was inspired by Studio McGee and put together by our interior designer Revive Spaces.
This project involved a building control inspector and an architect. We had architect plans drawn to visualise how the different room layouts would look like. For the kitchen, we played around with some layouts as well, options like an island in the middle of the room, a peninsula countertop, etc. In the end, we settled with what we have today, just simple cabinets along the walls, space for a dining set, and TV on a feature wall.
We had to take away a little bit of space from the kitchen for an en-suite to be built for the adjacent bedroom. Even though we did that, the kitchen diner was still big enough, at 19 sqm. You can see it here.
We are always aiming to provide beautiful homes for our tenants, being the best house on the street, raising the values of the houses around our investment area. In fact, one of our neighbours recently sold their house for top price!
Designing our properties around how we would want to live and be treated there has always been on the top of our minds. We put ourselves into the shoes of our tenants and imagine how they would want to be live there. On our YouTube channel, you'll be able to watch and hear our thoughts about this project.
ELSIE AND MARKUS
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