Some of you have been curious about how we are making out without a kitchen five weeks into our project.
A few days before the demolition was scheduled to begin, we started boxing up all the things in our cupboards and drawers. We normally drain the hot tub about this time of year so we did that and put as many of the boxes as we could fit, inside the tub. That only amounted to about half of them. We put the cover back on the tub and got a 4’x8′ sheet of plywood from my shop to put over the cover and protect it. Lastly, we got a plastic table cloth out and covered the plywood. So far so good. The last of the boxes were put on the back of the cover and anywhere else they could fit.
We were still packing the last of the things when the demolition crew arrived but we got our part done in short order and didn’t cause them any inconvenience. The first thing we had them do was move the refrigerator into the tub room. While we were content to get rid of all the other appliances, the fridge was going to be necessary for us to prepare food during the time that things were disrupted. We are debating if we will move it to the basement once the project is complete but the jury is still out on that yet.
We thought there would be a few ways that we could still cook conveniently. We have a nice propane camp stove, a couple of crock pots, a toaster oven, and a microwave. The sink would be a problem, but we have a small one in the adjoining powder room so as long as we keep at the washing and drying, the dishwashing shouldn’t be too bad.
The basic configuration looked like this…
Here is what our “new” range looked like…
And here is the toaster oven…
The last is the food preparation area, just to the left of the propane stove. As time has gone on, we have had more and more encroachments on this space and it is getting harder and harder to use.
If we really wanted to make this work, we could do it of course. But sometimes we haven’t remembered to get something out of the freezer or as suppertime arrives and we realize that we haven’t had the meal cooking in the crockpot all day. We often knuckle under and go out and get something to eat. One week we went to two different Indian restaurants. The House of India was more of a formal restaurant than we had expected but their Korma was excellent. The other one was the Taj Mahal. It serves a buffet on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday nights. We like that because they have about 15 or 20 different things to try and we like most of them. If you have to order off the menu, you either lose out on variety or you spend a fortune to get several selections.
Oftentimes we try to cook more than a couple of servings. That way we can put the extras away for a future meal. We measure out individual portions and put them into baggies. Then we pop them into the freezer. If you want a quick lunch, you just get one out, break it up, put it in a bowl, and 3 minutes later you are having your meal. Easy peasy!
All in all we are starting to suck at this and are more than ready to have the whole thing over with.
When we had our kitchen remodeled everything we could cook with was in our dining room.
We left our fridge in the kitchen at the consternation of our contractor and the dry wallers. (Sorry, no room) Curt was coming to dinner every night because (even though we planned on having him be at Dan’s brothers house) he was in Bloomington during the remodel. I remember cooking everything out on our grill. We didn’t do a crock pot (where did we put it?) There were some interesting meals. Eating out got tedious. We could hardly wait for the whole thing to be over. Everything turns out great. Your kitchen will be beautiful!
Just like camping for 5 weeks. It was inspired to keep your fridge. That would have been really bad. I remember when we were building our first house. We put everything in a storage garage. We kept what we thought we would need, but it seemed like once a week we had to go get something and it was always in the bottom box at the back of the garage.
but back to the NEW kitchen. Surely you have progress to report since the completion of the floor…