Outdoor Kitchens: Bring the Trend to Your Clients With These Ideas

Outdoor kitchens, which used to be more common with larger homes for the wealthy, have now become more popular among middle-class homeowners with a yard and garden on their property. These innovative amenities for serious outdoor dining can vary enormously in size, appliance complexity and layout, but they don't need to be extremely pricey or complicated.

 With the right kinds of professional pneumatic tools and other equipment, you can deliver a finely finished outdoor kitchen for your clients in no time. Knowing about doing this is especially important as the chances of being asked about them increase. Here are some selling points and tips to keep in mind if a client requests an outdoor kitchen plan.

Planning the Kitchen Layout and Location

To begin, you need to assess the homeowner’s existing layout before you do anything else. This will help you and your client work out exactly what can be included and where without aiming for too much. If you can plan an efficient layout with the available space, this will also let you establish a clear budget for materials, appliances, and reconstruction of the existing space.

 Planning the layout and location will also give you a chance to see how utility lines—like gas lines, water pipes and electrical lines—can be redirected most efficiently towards their future outdoor kitchen endpoints. This too is going to be crucial for effective design and budget considerations.

Safety and Longevity Considerations

To elaborate a bit more on kitchen location, safety factors figure into it enormously. A complex outdoor cooking space is a potential fire and accident disaster if not placed or built correctly. To avoid problems, you need to keep in mind safety factors for how gas lines will run, how the kitchen will be kept protected from the weather and how kitchen cooking amenities can be kept safely away from anything they could burn or damage.

 For example, if the kitchen is going to have an outdoor grill too, you might need to ensure that it's well surrounded by fireproof brickwork and that the grill is at least 10 feet away from the sides of the home itself. This kind of planning will help you avoid situations in which the kitchen either causes an accident or gets damaged by excessive sun, rain, or snow.

Elegant Outdoor Kitchen Shapes

An exterior kitchen to some extent must conform to its space limitations, but this doesn't mean you can't make it as elegant as possible. Try to create a cooking space that's as cozily tied into the surrounding patio space or deck and doesn't block free passage for people or pets.

 Depending on the design of the surrounding patio, garden, or deck space, you might want to aim for an L-shaped kitchen, a simple linear design or a large U-shaped layout that surrounds a central platform for food preparation. These are just a few possible concepts to consider.

Crucial Choices for Materials

Similar to bathrooms, kitchens need to be built to handle the specific tasks they're for. In the case of an outdoor kitchen, this means building it with a robust wood or metal frame structure covered by materials that can handle humidity, exposure to direct sunlight, and lots of heat, especially if you plan on installing a grill.

 The kitchen should also have as simple a finish as possible for easy cleaning against outdoor elements. In the case of a grill or oven addition, you can surround both with fireproof brickwork or cinderblock, and incorporate these parts into the rest of the kitchen's layout.

Having and Using the Right Tools

Like any part of home renovation and construction contracting, outdoor kitchen installation flows smoothest if you have reliable, professional tools that can easily handle the job at hand. BECK's selection of robustly powerful pneumatic tools for installation and fastening work blows traditional methods out of the water in terms of speed and precision. Have a look at our free white paper on pneumatic tools vs. traditional tool sets to understand why.