The best way to know what your new kitchen will need is to ask the people who use it. Download your questionnaire and find out.

If you’ve decided that your church kitchen needs renovation, you might feel a little stuck as to where to start. If you need inspiration, why not ask the people who are going to use it? They’ll have first-hand knowledge of what’s right and what’s wrong in the current kitchen, and what they might like in a new one.

We’ve prepared a questionnaire to share with your team, so that you can easily gather opinions on how to approach your church kitchen project.

Here are a few ideas for what to ask.

What do you use the kitchen for?

A clear idea of what your team use the current kitchen for will guide you in choosing equipment and specifications for the new one.

You might feel like you already know how the kitchen is used, and who does what with it, but the answers could always surprise you. Whether the responses aren’t what you expect, or if they confirm what you suspected, they’ll be very valuable. Since a new kitchen is a significant investment, you’ll want confirmation that you’re spending your money on the right things.

How often do you use the kitchen?

This could be a multiple-choice question to help you standardise the responses, e.g. ‘daily, weekly or more, fortnightly or more, monthly’.

This question serves a dual purpose. First, and most obviously, you build a much better picture of how heavily your kitchen is used. If you match that to how people use the kitchen, you get to see what it’s most used for. You’ll then know what to prioritise in terms of equipment and design.

Secondly, you can get a sense of how to weight the importance of the answers. Those who use the kitchen a lot should have a more thorough sense of its advantages and shortcomings, so if you need to choose which feedback to prioritise, that will serve as a handy guide.

How easy is the kitchen to use?

Making your kitchen easy to use should be one of your top priorities. After all, the whole point is to use it, and if it’s difficult or intimidating, people won’t want to.

You’ll probably have a range of ages and abilities in your congregation, so you need to understand their limitations and their needs.

As a starting point, you could ask using a scale of 1 to 10, or with tick boxes of ‘very difficult, ‘somewhat difficult’, ‘neither difficult nor easy’, ‘easy’, ‘very easy’.

However, the most valuable information you’ll get will be through a comment box. A free-form answer will garner details about the team’s experience of the current kitchen, and therefore what specific challenges the new kitchen needs to address.

What would you like to use the kitchen for?

Your renovation doesn’t only have to be in aid of what you’ve always done. It could be an opportunity to branch out and do more. Someone may have ambitions to do bigger and better things for the church and community, and you might not know if you don’t ask. Find out if there’s any appetite to do more, and if so, consider incorporating that into your plans.

Any other comments?

Here’s another open-ended question, and one to end your questionnaire with. It’s an easy way to make sure you don’t miss any important facts or opinions. Invite general comment and extra detail, and you’ll see what’s on people’s minds.

Next steps

When you’ve decided what you need, Steelplan can help you make it a reality. We can take what you learn from your team, and help to design a kitchen that will be a pleasure for everyone to use.

Our semi-commercial kitchens are the best of both worlds when it comes to use at scale and user-friendliness. They combine the familiar aesthetic you’d find at home, with the hygiene and equipment of a professional kitchen.

Dwonload the form below, discover what you need for your kitchen, then get in touch to discuss your project.

Call us on 0844 809 9186 or email [email protected].

Click here to download the questionnaire