Neal's Home Remodeling and Design Blog

This is an excerpt from our Homeowner's Guide to Outdoor Living. You can read the full outdoor living guide here.

If you do a lot of summer entertaining at home or just enjoy cooking family meals on the grill, an outdoor kitchen is likely high on your wishlist. Outside kitchens can be quite similar to their interior counterparts with the variety and practicality of modern outdoor appliances available to homeowners. To start deciding what you’d like in yours, you’ll need a specific list of the type of kitchen and entertaining activities you would like to be able to do outside. Think about how you like to work in a kitchen. How much food prep space do you need? Would you want your kitchen to include seating for family and friends and for conversation when you work? How would you prefer to manage clean up? How much storage will you need outdoors or would you prefer to do all the prep work indoors and use the grill area strictly for cooking?

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The features and design ideas that have been trending in our Cincinnati area remodels include a wide range of elements that can be adapted for many types of home projects, budgets, and styles. While trends can turn some homeowners off as too risky, certain trends occur as a progression of our collective concept of what makes a good design in the kitchen, bathroom, or other rooms of the home. Trends with lasting power, those we see over the course of years, ultimately are the design styles that will be remembered the most, will be those expected by home buyers, and will have more of a chance of becoming a classic design element that lasts for decades. Here are seven current trends we're keeping an eye on this year.

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Proper illumination is important in a kitchen to enable you to work efficiently and safely when you are cooking, eating or entertaining. Kitchen lighting should be planned by design. To create versatile lighting in the kitchen, it's important to include more than one type of fixture. Different types of lighting allows you to layer light in different configurations depending on your needs. For example, soft warm light from a pendant is great for the morning before coffee, while focused white task lights over the sink are ideal for when it's time to do the dishes. Luckily there are six types of light fixtures that can be mixed and matched in the kitchen to provide plenty of options for all your needs.

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