Creating a Temporary Kitchen For a Remodel

Our kitchen was due for a remodel. One of the biggest reasons was no dishwasher and no room in the layout to add a dishwasher. Now we are in the middle of the remodel with a temporary kitchen in our dining room. I hated doing dishes by hand, but doing dishes in a tiny bathroom sink by hand is even worse.

We use some disposable products, but we are trying to use the most regular dishes we can. It’s easier to wash metal silverware and glass cups in the bathroom sink than big dinner plates. We mostly use our water bottles for water out of our new water dispenser. Since we already went through this challenge, I wanted to share how we made it work best.

STEP ONE: CHOOSING A NEW TEMPORARY KITCHEN LOCATION

We decided to use the dining room because that’s the only room our fridge could fit through a doorway to get through. We already had a dining room table in there, but not much else, so there was room to bring our plastic shelving in from the garage. We put all our food on these shelves and pots and pans on the bottom shelf.

STEP TWO: MOVE THE NECESSITIES

Move everything you will use on a regular basis to the temporary kitchen. For us, this included the fridge, microwave, canned food, carb drawer (breads, chips, tortillas), and select dishes.

STEP THREE: MOVE THE EXTRA STUFF

Everything remaining in your kitchen is stuff you use sparingly and could do without for a few weeks or months. Move all of this stuff wherever you have room. We have a spare bedroom, so it is piled with kitchen and dining room items we didn’t need. Our dining room had a bookshelf in it, which has now been removed, so all those books are in the spare bedroom too. We also put small boxes of stuff in our basement and larger items like dining room chairs in our garage.

STEP FOUR: SET UP THE KITCHEN

Now that you moved the necessities to the dining room and cleaned out the whole kitchen, it’s time to arrange your temporary kitchen space. We placed the fridge in front of the closest outlet to the kitchen so it will be easier to move. We pushed the dining room table against the China hutch so we have more room to maneuver in the small space.

As I mentioned, We put all our food on the top garage shelves and pots and pans on the bottom shelf. The table has our microwave, crock pot, dishes, silverware, dish rack, knives, paper plates, and fruit bowl. Naturally, this also accumulates random crap (at least naturally in our house).

An extra plastic rolling cart with drawers served as our coffee station. We put gadgets we would be using, such as a cork screw and a can opener, in the second drawer. The top drawer holds our coffee filters. The other side of the coffee station is our recycle and garbage bins. Unfortunately, we create a lot more waste without a kitchen.

We use plastic crock pot liners to cut down on having to scrub our crock pot in a tiny sink. See this post where I made pork shoulder roast and used the liners.

Since our bathroom water is not very drinkable and hard to fill a water bottle with, we purchased a water dispenser. This will be nice to have even when the kitchen is finished.

We hung plastic sheeting to protect some of the food and kitchen items while a cement pad was jackhammered out of the living room (see this post). We didn’t realize when setting up the temporary kitchen that we would have to remove a slab of cement.

Something not technically part of the temporary kitchen area, but is a huge help, is our grill. We use it to cook almost everything during this remodeling phase!

As you know, eating out is really expensive and it is easy to want to order take out when you don’t have a kitchen. With proper planning and a good temporary set up you will be able to eat at home more and not go broke remodeling your kitchen. That’s not to say we haven’t been eating out. I think we eat out too much, but this does help us stay on track!