Enhance the Look of Your Home with Elegant Fitting Appliances

Home decoration is a big subject. You start with a bare room – you finish with somewhere you have designed for living, and appliances are no exception.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the rooms in the house where practical items are present. Appliances, for example, are designed to help you cook, clean and bathe. They must be incorporated into the design schema for the rooms in which they live, if the home decoration project is to become fully fledged.

The first elements of design, for rooms with appliances in them, should be the appliances themselves. Look at it this way. You can’t have a utility room without a washing machine. So you have to incorporate the washing machine at the beginning of the design stage to make sure you have enough room for it – otherwise the room lacks the appliance for which it is intended, and ceases to be a utility room.

Similarly, you can’t have a kitchen without a cooker and a sink. A dishwasher is optional, but the sink and cooker define what the room is. You need a fridge in there a well.

If you don’t have a utility or laundry room, you may also have to specify space for a washing machine. So the start of the kitchen design becomes a jigsaw puzzle, in which you fit the dimensions of the appliances you need into the space that you have.

The look of those appliances differs from make to make and model to model. If you are designing decoratively rather than just functionally, it becomes necessary for you to look at how the colour and shape of – for example – your washing machine or your dish washer fit into the whole decorative ethos of your kitchen.

Of course, once you have chosen your appliances and picked their spots in the design, the last thing you want is actually to have them. A kitchen, for example, needs to be fully prepared – floor levelled and covered with a waterproof compound; tiling done on the floor and the walls; and painting done everywhere else. You have to install lighting and choose and fit both carcases of cupboards and the cupboard doors that finish them off. Hint: you can pick more expensive cupboard doors at a later date if you need to, so concentrate on the carcases for now. Make sure they are solidly built and will last.

Once all the wiring has been done and the cupboards and work surfaces are in, you need to install and plumb in the sink. By now the floor should be tiled and the wall tiles should be on, so you can also install the cooker hood and introduce the oven and hobs to the room.

The lighting must be finished with fittings, the ceiling painted – and then you can introduce the washing machine, the dish washer (if you have ordered one and specified a space for it) and the fridge.

The only thing that remains is to specify the little touches – like what colour pots and pans you use, or what kind of toaster.

Remember to specify a storage space for the things you need to keep those appliances going – Whirlpool spares; spare bulbs; new gaskets for the dish washer door. A kitchen is a working room, and needs maintenance to retain its just-decorated look and feel. And finally, of course, enjoy.

Barbara Holmes is an interior designer. She uses Whirlpool spares where appropriate in her appliances.