Kitchen

Ever since Lucy Ricardo accidentally baked the world’s biggest loaf of bread on a 1952 episode of I Love Lucy, kitchens have been at the center of virtually every TV family’s story. In honor of TV’s love affair with the kitchen, HomeAdvisor, the marketplace that connects homeowners to home improvement pros, has carefully rendered the floor plans of some of your favorite TV hearts of the home.

Bye bye, bad track lighting.

Kitchen islands are not really polarizing—if you have the room, you probably want one. But bathroom islands? Now there's something new to covet.

If you live in a small space, chances are that your kitchen is also equally diminutive. As you can see, my particular kind of tiny rental kitchen is of the single wall variety, with a paltry two cabinets width of counter to speak of. While that (and the single outlet) mean I have to cull the clutter and keep appliances elsewhere when not in use, even when the counter is cleared, that’s not a ton of space to work with if you’re trying to cook a meal.

Fun fact: You don’t need to be a professional chef to take advantage of some of the smart tools used in restaurant kitchens. And no, we’re not talking about $200 knives or fancy sous vide machines. We’re talking about the inexpensive, everyday sort of stuff that’ll make your time in the kitchen neater, easier, and just a tad bit better. See, many of the gadgets and tools that professional chefs use in restaurant kitchens can be just as useful to us casual home cooks.

If you’ve been to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in midtown Manhattan, you’ve probably marveled at its permanent collection, which includes some of the most iconic and immediately recognizable works, ever — there’s the melting clocks of Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, the soft-focus pastels of Claude Monet’s massive Water Lilies triptych, and everyone’s go-to poster from their freshman year, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

Upper cabinets are starting to disappear from kitchens, and I’m not sure how to feel about it. It all started with the open-shelving phenomenon, and now, in some cases, it has morphed into this total lack of anything structural above the countertops. On the one hand, it is visually beautiful. You can really go to town with tile—think an uninterrupted, ceiling-high wall of subways or a bold geometric backsplash. But on the other hand, where exactly are you supposed to put your stuff?

I have a small kitchen. And most days, it’s cool. I have accepted the fact that I’m not going to have a proper place to make meals (or eat them frankly) until I move out of New York City. That hasn’t stopped me from dreaming about the future—and looking at oodles of kitchen porn to serve as inspiration for my someday reno.

For all the talk around wood versus plastic, there’s very little talk about the SIZE of cutting boards. And this is one case where size really does matter. One of the biggest mistakes we see time and time again? People opting for cutting boards that are too small. A too-small cutting board is not only awkward to use, but it can also be unsafe! We’ve all done it before: You’ve pulled out a little guy, thinking you just have to mince some garlic.

#Ihavethisthingwithtiles, and it’s sort of unfortunate because I’ve never actually picked any of my own. I fell in love with subway tiles nearly a decade ago, and I was crushing hard on those matte patterned cement tiles that popped up a couple years ago. I’m even into faux “wood” larger scale ceramic tiles and teeny tiny, mesh-backed penny tiles. And I’m not mad at a fish scale or arabesque shape either.