How to Survive a Kitchen RemodelCreate a temporary kitchen. If we had done this kitchen remodel during the summer, we might have managed with the Instant Pot or the hotplate, and we would have relied more on a grill. But with cold temperatures and snow most of the winter, I am thankful that I had a second indoor cooking surface. Maybe you can get away without one if your family orders food or cooks exact proportions every night, but in our family we love leftovers.
And heating leftovers is much easier if you have a microwave. The children's art desk, formerly in the corner of the dining room, provides a stable base. The most difficult part of remodeling a kitchen is the lack of access to water and a drain. You don't realize how much water you use (water for drinking, water for cooking, water for rinsing your hands) until you have it easily accessible.
We solved this problem by always keeping two 1-gallon glass jugs filled with water. They were light enough to be easily stowed upstairs for refilling in the tub, as needed. A large bathtub that we kept under the microwave table served as an exclusive delivery area for food dishes. For the first week, we were diligent and picked up the dishes to wash after each meal.
For the second week, we were doing them once at the end of the day. You guys have given me SO MANY great tips and suggestions for surviving my kitchen renovation, that I thought I would share some of my favorites here on the blog. Cooking and cleaning are difficult for floors and furniture, so relocate or cover anything of value in your temporary kitchen, Chavez recommends. We order takeout once a week during the kitchen remodel because a break from cooking on Friday or Saturday night is wonderful.
We've been cleaning everything in the bathroom sink, which is beautiful as a bathroom sink, but it's not the same as a deep sink in the kitchen. We recommend doing a little more to offer the person who was kind enough to leave their kitchen and invite them to eat once their new kitchen is complete. To turn back, before I demolished the kitchen, months before that, I began to prepare for the day when we were going to cook in the dining room. Being without a working kitchen is no time to spend days making sourdough bread or complicated recipes that use a lot of pots and pans for a meal.
Over the past few months, I've learned some invaluable tricks that help Emmett and I survive the day to day without cooking. So instead, we found a way to minimize the headaches associated with a remodel by turning our dining room into a makeshift, temporary kitchen. During the demonstration, it was not safe to continually enter the kitchen to put dirty dishes in the dishwasher due to dirt on the floor. Five months of crouching over the bathtub to wash dishes during her kitchen remodel wasn't fun for homeowner and chef Christina Chavez.
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