How to Make Your MA Outdoor Kitchen Addition Kid-Friendly
If you are planning to design your own home in Scituate, congratulations on choosing an outstanding place to put down roots and for opting to build your dream home. If you want to maximize the enjoyment you’ll get from your new home, make sure your southeastern MA home improvement plans include an outdoor kitchen. You’ll use it more than you realize! If you have children or plan to host friends, neighbors or relatives with children for backyard barbecues, do yourself and your guests a huge favor: Design your outdoor kitchen to be kid-friendly. Here are some things to think about during the design phase.
Flooring
Every kid is different but most of them love to roughhouse and run. With the wrong type of flooring, kids, an outdoor kitchen and a pool or hot tub (or rain or sprinkler water) is a recipe for disaster. You may love the look of tile or stained, polished concrete. You will not love the look of skinned knees, chipped teeth or worse when kids slip and slide across it. Texturized flooring like pavers and flagstone is a much safer alternative.
Countertops
Not only do running and roughhousing kids risk slipping and falling on a slick floor, they also risk running straight into the edge of your countertop. That can lead to a nasty gash on the forehead. Rounded countertop edges will do less damages than angular ones. Additionally, expect kids to spill on your countertops. Opt for a low-porosity, easy-to-clean material.
When you design your own home, consider an outdoor kitchen.
Placement of Appliances and Accessories
One of the biggest risks of having young children around an outdoor kitchen is accidental burns. Typically, kids don’t incur these burns by looking for trouble and mischief. They are injured when they go to grab a juice box from the outdoor fridge or wash their hands in the outdoor sink and accidentally brush up against a hot surface. When you’re designing your outdoor kitchen, think about the things kids will want to access most, such as the fridge, bathroom, sink and seating. Separate the grill, outdoor fireplace, pizza oven and fire pit from kid-magnet appliances and accessories.
Seating
You can easily keep an eye on the kids and have a degree of blissful separation if you design a kids’ seating area. Depending on the age of the kids, that could be an outdoor island with bar stool seating or a cute kid-sized table and bench situated away from anything hot or fragile (and away from the big-screen TV, unless you plan to use that to distract them rather than watch the Red Sox or Celtics.) Actually, it might be a great idea to incorporate two TVs (one for kids and one for adults) into your MA outdoor kitchen addition!
Whether you are in need of a room addition in Scituate or plans for a new kid-friendly outdoor kitchen, Colony Home Improvement will deliver. We have more than 40 years of experience and thousands of happy clients, and we would love to add you to that list. Contact us for a free consultation!