We bought our first house in 2016 and it was built in the 1940s. It was a great first house and had a lot of character! The previous owners kept it up and was nice but the kitchen was very outdated. We fell in love with the master dormer and they transformed. We ended up redoing the master bathroom in there but that will be a later post.

The kitchen hadn’t been updated since it was built and still had the same cabinets and counters. The cabinets had a few years’ worth of paint that was peeling in spots and sticking if it was too humid out.

Thankfully the appliances weren’t from the 40s. We ended up getting new appliances so they would all match.

The lighting was dark and it made it hard to see what you were doing on the counter if it was dark out, therefore, we knew we needed more light.

So we finally decided to update!

So, we knew we wanted to update it. We saved for it and finally, in 2021 we knew it was time to do it.

We hired a company that did the work but my husband LOVES demo- I mean what guy wouldn’t love smashing things apart??  He did the demo work and there we were with no kitchen.

Thankfully, I knew that I needed to plan before he did the actual demo for us to still eat at home. We did not want to eat out constantly. We moved the fridge to our backroom and our kitchen table there as well and kept some appliances on it like, an air fryer, microwave, griddle, and borrowed an electric skillet from my in-laws.

I boxed up the kitchen and placed it all in the spare bedroom. The contents of the pantry were put in a big box and we had that under the dining table. The dining room was going to now be our makeshift kitchen.

Now how do i cook?

Here was the difficult part…I love to food prep, cook, and bake and I couldn’t do it.  We had food that could be cooked in the air fryer—nuggets, mini bagel pizzas, chicken breasts, fries, etc.  The skillet helped with eggs or French toast for breakfast and frozen dinner bags.  It seemed easy at the beginning to continue to eat.

Now we did get takeout to help, but we still tried to eat at home.

As the weeks went by, I felt so unsettled because my house was covered in dust.  I had no kitchen and trying to keep our 2.5-year-old out of the way of workers, along with a dog. Thankfully, the workers were awesome with answering a toddler’s unintelligible questions and always gave pets to our dog over the baby gate.  I was ready for it to be over.  It was exciting to watch it come together but it was frustrating at the same time.

Our kitchen and dining tables were a mess, but it was doable.  We used mostly paper plates to help with cleanup, however, trying to clean an electric skillet or air fryer and cutting boards with no kitchen sink was difficult. 

Plan How You’ll Eat at Home

This is where it comes in handy to have some small appliances at home that you are able to cook in without a full kitchen. Listed below are some ideas of appliances that will help you to cook at home still.

• Air Fryer
• Griddle
• Microwave
• Electric Skillet
• Toaster
• Toaster Oven

Create a List of Foods or Meals

I made a list of what meals we could have that was easy.  Here are some of the meals we made:

Birds Eye Skillet Meal on the electric skillet

French toast on the griddle

Scrambled eggs in the skillet

Cold sandwiches

Chicken breasts in the air fryer

Chicken nuggets in the air fryer

BLTs with bacon cooked on the griddle

Access to a Sink

Do you still have access to a sink? We used our first floor bathroom sink and sometimes the tub if we were trying to clean bigger items. It was difficult to use the sink but we made it work.

I would recommend making sure you plan for the clean up part!

Plan How Often You Will Shop

Now as long as you still have access to your fridge, you can make it work.  Just plan out your meals for the week or however long you shop for.  It will prevent you from overspending, so only get what you need. We plan out weekly trips to the grocery store.

If something is on sale then I will stock up on a few items to have on hand, depending on the season. It was difficult to not do my normal shopping when I would have no place to store the extra items.

Create You Meal Plan

Now is the fun part. Think of all the foods that are easy to make and plan your days. I pack my lunch so I wanted to be able to make something that didn’t use many dishes. I would make salads that I could take the ingredients then mix it at the office or a one pan meal to make in the electric skillet over a bed of ready made rice.

Easy and little dishes needed. I loved Frozen French Bread Pizza in the air fryer.

The results are in!

My biggest recommendation is to remember it is temporary. The dust will get cleaned, it will get painted and everything will get put away.

It took almost 5 weeks for our reno to be completed.  I was extremely ready to get my kitchen back and working again.

The new kitchen turned out amazing and it was 100% worth it. It was light and spacious!

In conclusion, you should make a plan that will work for you and your lifestyle while going through this. It may be frustrating during it but will be amazing in the end. I loved how it turned out and was very sad that I couldn’t take the kitchen with us when we moved a year and half later. Leave a comment and subscribe to check out other renovations and projects.