Preparing for a kitchen renovation

As soon as you have a date for when work will begin on your new kitchen renovation, there are a number of things you’ll need to think about doing do in preparation, e.g. empty the cupboards. As well as clearing the room – and deciding where to store what you’ve cleared – you’ll also need to plan how you’re going to fit your life around not having access to the kitchen for a while.

Create a temporary kitchen area

You’ll probably want to store most of the contents of your kitchen cupboards in the garage or shed, but you will still need to be using some of it – how will you make a cup of tea, for instance, if you’ve packed the kettle and the mugs and the tea bags away?! Designate another area of your home to keep out just enough of what you’ll need for a temporary kitchen and try to keep it all in one place.

If you have a freestanding fridge/freezer, move it to your temporary kitchen area – you won’t even need to worry about defrosting it first! If it’s integrated you can always check the local online marketplaces to see if someone’s selling or even giving away a second-hand standalone fridge/freezer which you can resell or regift once your new kitchen’s finished. Or do you have friends who have an extra one in their garage that you can borrow for a while? Or buy a small, cheap one that you can sell, give away or keep in your own garage once you’ve finished with it.

You can still cook at home

Just because the kitchen’s out of action, it doesn’t mean you can’t cook simple meals for yourself in the meantime. If you have a microwave, that’s the obvious solution, but you can also buy a camping stove or small electric cooking hob – they’re less than the cost of buying the family a takeaway dinner and will allow you to eat cheaply and healthily even when you don’t have access to your usual hob and oven.

However, you can’t make every type of meal this way so you should be prepared to eat out from time to time – at the very least, it’ll give you and the family a break from the chaos.

Washing up

Without access to the kitchen sink, washing up may be a problem, so you’ll have to be prepared to use the bathroom sink – just be careful not to damage the porcelain with heavy pans.

Laundry

If you don’t have a nearby friend who’ll let you borrow their washing machine, this is the time to find out where your nearest laundrette is. Most offer to do service washes, so you don’t necessarily have to sit there watching your smalls go round and round in the machine – just drop the dirty washing off and pick up your clean laundry later. And you can also make the most of their ironing services to give you even less to do at home.

Cleaning

With the house in turmoil, keeping on top of the cleaning will be difficult. If you have a regular cleaner, their time may be better spent concentrating on parts of the house that are unaffected by the work going on. Alternatively, they might like to save the hours in order to do a rigorous spring clean of the entire house once the installation is complete and everything is back in its rightful place.