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Tiny house kitchens are my new obsession. They are huge right now – sheesh, there’s even a Netflix show about them.
What I love about tiny houses is the tiny kitchen that is typically included – whether it’s an actual house or trailer or van or cabin. I love small, efficient kitchens.
We know, it’s a contradiction in terms but money’s tight and everybody needs to get a little more out of their lives, while spending less and the solution for many people is to live smaller. Frugal minimalism is increasingly popular.
But, if you live in a tiny home, there’s a big challenge waiting for you, how do you make sure that your kitchen is functional and useful? Because, well, the kitchen is the most important room/space in any home. Trust us. We know kitchens.
It needs to be fit for preparing meals, cooking them and ideally even eating them too. So getting a small or compact kitchen that is both functional that adds joy to your life as well can be a challenge.
Before you start designing a tiny kitchen for a tiny house; you need to ask yourself some questions.
The more questions you can come up with before you begin the design process, and the more of them that you answer. The easier it will be for you to articulate what’s important to you and cater to it.
Space constraints can be worked with, to a very large extent, when you know what you need to do in that space, but it can be very expensive and time consuming to put things right, if you don’t plan properly in the first place.
A kitchen in a tiny house can be just as cozy, warm, welcoming and comforting as one in a bigger home but it does take more planning.
Once you’ve had a good brainstorm and answered a ton of your own questions (and ours) then it’s time to consider a few other things before you start shopping for your tiny house kitchen.
In a big kitchen, you can keep on adding appliances nearly forever, but in a tiny home – you need to get the question of appliances sorted first.
They will take up the most floor space and dictate, to a large extent, how the layout of the rest of the tiny house kitchen will be.
We’ve found that most tiny house owners when designing their tiny house kitchens want:
Fortunately, the manufacturers of appliances are on your side when it comes to building your tiny house kitchen, there are some lovely compact models of all these appliances (and, in fact, nearly appliance that you might desire in addition to these basics).
When purchasing compact appliances – you want to utilize some simple tricks to make the most of them in your tiny house:
We love to bake here at Kitchen Authority, and we recognize that some tiny house owners will too. But baking takes a certain amount of counter space.
If you want to get the most out of your countertop space we suggest that you go with something a little “old-fashioned” for the modern age and use pull-out cutting board surfaces. Done right, this sneaky little trick will allow you to add 30% or more to your actual work surface space in your tiny home. You need to get a professional to help with this though as if you get it wrong, it may interfere with the ability to open doors or drawers in other parts of the kitchen.
If you have limited workspace, we strongly suggest that you learn to bring all your ingredients and tools together before you start your meal prep – and that means you won’t need to open drawers, doors, etc. while you work – giving you the most space to work in.
A dishwasher may feel like an essential component of a kitchen today, but it wasn’t all that long ago that we all did our own dishes by hand. Plus, it takes up an insane amount of space in a tiny house kitchen.
Buy a drying rack instead which you can fit over the sink (so, it doesn’t take away from your counter space), it’s very efficient and makes the place look great.
You want to ensure that you get the most bang for buck out of your storage areas too.
We’re sure that you know how quickly you can accumulate “stuff” in your kitchen and that it’s hard to throw any of it away when it could, potentially, be useful in the near future.
So, we suggest:
There’s often space above a cabinet, even in a tiny kitchen, and that means you’ve got some extra ledge space to sue as storage.
We’d dump all the things you use really infrequently up in that space. We’d also buy a small stool to climb up on to get things up there and bring them down again. Don’t hurt yourself trying to conserve space, that would be a very bad idea, indeed.
Make sure to get some use from the side panels on your cabinets too, they’re the perfect place to sink a few hooks and expand on your space.
You can really get creative if you want to add more storage space to your tiny house kitchen.
Some of the best ideas we’ve seen so far include:
Everyone has a different list of essential small appliances and you may find that you need to make some trade-offs if you want to fit them all in.
We recommend that you consider a combination microwave oven with convection oven or grilling capacity. That can cut out on the need for a second appliance easily.
Then we’d want:
We think if you have those 5 things, you could live pretty much anywhere and not worry about it.
The instant pot, in particular, gives you a huge amount of flexibility in the way you cook in a small space. It’s a rice cooker, a streamer, a pressure cooker, a slow cooker, etc. all in one. That’s a ton of gadgets that you don’t need to buy but still get the utility of.
Check out our review of the Instant Pot DUO80: The Best Instant Pot That A Family Could Have.
Again, your list may vary but you want to think about how you will get all of the things you need in your tiny home kitchen space:
This can be the hardest part of getting a tiny home kitchen right. You really need to visualize the space carefully in order to create a space in which you (and ideally someone else too) can eat comfortably.
We like the idea of using a fold-down table that can fill the walk space when you’re ready to serve and which can be broken down when you need that space.
This is always easiest if you’ve built the kitchen to accommodate two people from the beginning.
Alternatively, you may just want to build an eating space somewhere else in your tiny home.
We love tiny homes and tiny kitchens. We think they’re good for the environment and good for your pocket too.
Getting a tiny kitchen right means planning your kitchen carefully.
Look at what you need, look at the space you have and then get really creative to build a tiny home kitchen that is not just for cooking but which you will be proud to be in every day without sacrificing any culinary necessities.
We hope that you’ll find our guide useful when you build the tiny kitchen of your dreams. For additional information regarding choosing kitchen appliances for a tiny house kitchen we highly recommend Tiny House Build.