How To Measure Your Kitchen

So you would like to remodel your kitchen and you are ready to start shopping. The first thing you should do before heading out is to draw a diagram of your current kitchen layout, it doesn’t need to be very detailed, but there are certain things that should be included and we will cover that along the way.

Step 1 - Determining What You Want: Do you want a whole new kitchen or just replace the cabinetry and move some appliances around? if you choose the latter then you should only draw the area that is covered by the cabinets and This is the type of diagram we will cover in this tutorial (see picture).

Step 2 - The Walls: To do the diagram first determine which type of kitchen you have, there are a few basic kitchen layouts such as the L-shaped and U-shaped kitchens, then draw on a piece of paper the longest wall (let us assume you have the L-shaped). After drawing the longest wall measure from the beginning of the wall to the end of the cabinetry and write it down along the long line you drew, repeat the previous step for the next wall. For this tutorial let us assume wall A is 96 inches and wall B is 120 inches.

Step 3 - Constraints: Constraints are things that you cannot change or do not want to change on you kitchen, for instance the location of the sink or refrigerator, this constraints will determine how the cabinets are distributed on the kitchen. There are two ways to measure the constraints to put on your diagram; the first is to measure from the beginning of the wall to the center of the “item”, we use this style mostly to measure the location of the sink. The second is to measure from the beginning of the wall to the side of the “item” used for refrigerators, windows, stoves, etc.

So lets start with the sink, measure from the wall to the center of the sink (use the gap between cabinet doors as reference for center), in our particular kitchen it ends up being 60 inches. Now lets measure the refrigerator’s position, measure from wall to side of refrigerator and sketch in on paper, let us assume the refrigerator is at the end of wall B(120 inches) and that it measures 36 inches. Finally measure from wall to side of stove and sketch it; a stove’s standard size is 30 inches, however you can purchase other stoves that have different sizes.

Step 4 - Appliance Dimensions: Measure the width of each of the appliances an write it down on your diagram inside your appliance sketch. If there is an appliance that goes inside a cabinet, such as a wall oven, measure its width and write it on a corner on your diagram. On this step if you have any windows you also put the dimension down on the diagram.

Step 5 - Finishing Up: draw lines to finish up the diagram, this step is optional but gives your sketch a better view. Write down a list with the dimensions of all the items we covered and you are done.

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