Preparing for the renovations (part 2)

House Renovations

Preparation!

Preparing for the Renovations (Part 2)

As we get ready for our house renovations, we read articles on what to do to make the best out of the difficult situation of living inside a house during a major remodel.  Basically, we were going to be  living without a kitchen, laundry room, and powder room for at least eight weeks.  WOW.

Many people suggested that living without a kitchen works best if you can set up a temporary kitchenette so that you can continue to make coffee, breakfast, and light meals during the renovations.  

I agreed with these folks, and we set about making this temporary kitchenette a reality.

After moving all our downstairs furniture and decorations to the garage (see Preparing for the renovations part 1), we set up a mini studio apartment in our room, formerly known as the office.  Inside, we placed our couch, 2 chairs, the tv, some side tables and lamps, a large desk to be used as the kitchen table, and two large bookshelves to store the pantry items.  We also set up a table to be used as a desk for homework, printing, bills, etc.

It looks like this now:

   

We brought in the coffee pot and toaster oven, microwave, and had the workers bring the fridge in here too.  Unfortunately, after running the microwave AND the fridge on the same unprepared circuit,  I blew the entire fuse system out in the house, and had to flip all the circuit breakers back.  I then moved the microwave to the laundry room, and things worked much smoother.  We also have the pancake skillet, and, although slow, seems to work great for heating up sausages and grilling sandwiches as well as pancake making!

 

We're using the utility room sink for now as our water source and to wash our dishes.  I bought a small plastic tub for washing dishes and a small dish drainer and set those up in the laundry room as well.

So far we've been able to eat all of our breakfasts here at home except on the weekends (when hubby prefers a big, hot breakfast), and the kids have been able to pack their lunches for school.  It's not been great for the environment switching over to paper plates and plastic forks for the next few weeks, but we're recycling everything we can and reusing whenever possible, and that helps.

Things will change next week when they pull everything out of the laundry room and they remove the toilet from the powder room making them both unusable until after the new hardwood floors get installed.  But hopefully we'll only be without for three or four days.  We'll have to head upstairs for water.  But honestly, it feels like luxury camping!  Every time I come in here, I feel a bit like I'm living in Hermione and Harry's magical, extendible tent from when they go watch the Quidditch World Cup in Book 4!

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