Building an Outdoor Kitchen - Part 1 The Dimensions

We recently moved into our "retirement" home which is just a smaller house, smaller yard, no stairs, no pool. Our house is on a very quiet street, located just outside the city limits and just a perfection location for us. We're still surrounded by plenty of trees.....and we live right down the street from our daughter and her family)) A back porch with an outdoor kitchen was one feature that we wanted with the new house. I won't be providing measurements or technical advice for an outdoor kitchen, but thought it might be helpful to share what we did to get ours built. There is a lot to cover about the back porch and outdoor kitchen so I'll do it in segments. We'll start first with the back porch dimensions, floor and ceiling. The first thing we did was to enlarge the size of the back porch to about double what the plans called for. So right now it's about a 20' x 22' space, something like that. Our initial plans were to screen in the porch, but right now we're holding off on that just to see how much smoke is generated from the grill. The back porch is only open across the back, two sides are brick and one side is windows from the living room. There are two doors that open into the house, one into the kitchen area and one into the bedroom area. Another door opens into the garage and there are steps off the back porch to the yard. The ceiling is stained ship lap and about 11" in ht. The boards are 5" tongue and groove. There are several recessed can lights which are LED. The lighting is great, you could sit on the porch and read at night with these lights and that's great for cooking too. The lights are on two switches so you can turn half on, half off. Either way, it is still a LOT of light. We bought a couple of lamps for alternative lighting for ambient light. It's too dark without any light and too bright for just relaxing on the porch at night. The ceiling stain is the same as the kitchen and office ceiling inside. The stain color was chosen to match the porcelain plan flooring inside the house. The ceiling fans were picked up at Home Depot. The can lighting all came from the TrueValue hardware store. We picked up a floor lamp and table lamp to provide ambient lighting. This lighting turned out to be perfect for watching ballgames in the evening or TV by the fire. This floor lamp is an Allen Roth 66" bronze multi head floor lamp with glass shades. The glass shades concerned me a little since the lamp could be easy to knock over. We positioned it in a corner and so far so good. It can be purchased at Amazon and here's an affiliate link: Allen Roth Latchbury 66" Floor Lamp. We chose a matching Allen Roth Latchbury table lamp to complete the extra ambient lighting. The table lamp measured about 30" and also had glass globes. We positioned it on the countertop. Sometimes we turn just one or both lamps on depending on what we are doing. They have been very hand. Here's the affiliate link for the Allen Roth Latchbury 30" Lamp. We used Edison bulbs in the lamps also which gives a nice soft warm glow as compared to extra bright LED bulbs. The floor surface is porcelain tile.We picked out an Italian porcelain tile that is made for indoor outdoor use. The name is New York Broadway and tiles are 4" x 8" We chose a dark grey color grout. The surface of the porch was concrete. The concrete floor was built to have a slight drop off the back of the porch to allow for water drainage. We thought no more about this, but when the brick mason started on the outdoor kitchen, he had to make adjustments in the height of the outdoor kitchen so the "drop" would not be noticeable at the countertop level. The allowance was made at the bottom of the counter area so it wouldn't be noticeable. In the next article we will cover the layout of the outdoor kitchen. More About our Outdoor Kitchen: Building an Outdoor Kitchen - Part 2 The Primo Kamado Ceramic Grill Building an Outdoor Kitchen - Part 3 The Napolean Built In Natural Gas Grill Building an Outdoor Kitchen - Part 4 Bull Natural Gas Burners #This post contains affiliate links which means I may earn a small commission if the links are clicked on.