According to many professionals , an excellent way to begin with planning your dream kitchen or bathroom is to purchase an interior design magazine or two.

Naturally, you can get a lot of great ideas from the internet too, and at zero cost.

Try and ignore colour schemes at this point: you should be looking for styles and features of your dream bathroom or kitchen, the equipment and accessories.

Cut out pictures of kitchens or bathrooms that you like as well as pictures that you don?t. Separate these pictures in to like and don?t like piles. Do the same for the accessories and equipment. Make up a collage of pictures so that you end up with two boards full of ideas. When you then meet with a kitchen planner or bathroom designer you now have a great way of summarising what you like and what you don?t like.

A great way of keeping the family occupied for a while, certainly a quality time together thing, is to get all the family to take part in making your ideas boards.

Functionality should play a major part in your design. For example If you are chopping up vegetables, you won?t want to have to walk backwards and forwards across your kitchen space to place said legumes into the cooking pot and put the peelings in the garbage. Think about how you will move about your new room and what you ? and others - will be doing in it.

Now, when you show your ideas boards to your kitchen designer or bathroom planner, they will very quickly grasp what you are looking for and so can quickly come up with layouts and styles for you to consider.

Bear in mind that what looks good in an advertisement may not be practical for your home due to the space and existing lighting and electrical points. Want to save money? then try and make as few major changes as possible to the physical positioning of electrical points, taps and drainage.

Colour schemes and tiling choices will of course need to be decided upon; again leave this until the final stage.

In most instances your kitchen designer or bathroom planner will have a range of styles to show you once you have indicated your wishes. Ask them to bring at least two or three themes back to you ? most of them have CAD programs so that you can see how it will look in 3D. Then it?s just down to making your choice and paying the money!