Project Foodie - The remodeling experience

The remodeling experience

Written by foodie pam

Wednesday, 27 December 2006

As some of you may know, last year Husband and I completed an extensive remodel of our house and in particular our kitchen. I've had requests for various levels of information about the remodel so I thought I'd write about it a bit. First, let me describe the extent of the project. We had construction workers in our house for over 13 months with work happening most days. We went without any “kitchen” for eight months; for six of those months we used a temporarily displaced and constantly feature decreasing kitchen; and for the last two months we lived with our "kitchen" consisting of only a microwave and toaster oven located in our bedroom and our fridge on our front porch. In other words, this wasn't a small project and it had a large impact on our day-to-day life.

I could write on and on about the features, design, function and layout of the kitchen, but all of that is really very dependant on each individual and their kitchen. What I like or want, you may not like or want. So, I'm not going to go into any of that. Instead, I'm going to describe how we survived "The Remodel". And let me be clear, survived really is the right word. Of course we are happy with our new kitchen, but the process was in many senses horrible and even now I shudder at the thought of doing it again.... Did we know what we were getting into? Probably not. Would we do it again? Yes, but we would definitely change the way we did some things.

In planning for The Remodel we knew we'd be without our full kitchen for a long time. A temporary location for our stove, sink, fridge, storage and workspace was a must. But knowing all of those things and experiencing them are quite different.

Ugly but at least (mostly) functional

In fact, just to help us ease into this transition our oven decided to die on Thanksgiving day the year before we began the remodel. Yes, it died while we were cooking our Turkey but that's another story. In terms of the remodel, the dead oven gave us a hint of what was to come - some functionality and absolutely no frills. In its place, we bought a very cheap and very old oven with a stovetop. Being electric was the key feature when selecting this oven - as you can tell from the green color appearance was not. Why electric? We wanted to be able to move it (although not very easily) to various locations in the house during the remodel as different rooms became uninhabitable. Unfortunately, even though it had two ovens one large and one small only the small one worked. This meant that we were restricted to a rather small size for things to cook despite the fact we had a physically large (and heavy) stove. Sure we could have bought something else but we were only planning on using it for a short time. Or so we thought, it turns out we used it for over two years... Two years with an old, and only partially functioning, oven is a long time. If we had bought a new stove when the old one died, however, we may have gotten one that did not fit into our new kitchen. Or, even if it fit its hard to imagine it would have survived being moved around during construction without getting damaged. Overall, an old ugly stove that at least partially functioned was a good choice.

The sink is between the washer and dryer, it got a bit muddy when it rained...

With the stove under control other parts of the relocated kitchen were relatively easy. The fridge was moved from the kitchen to the dining room. After packing away the majority of our kitchen cookware, we used two old dressers to store dishes, pans, utensils and food. The kitchen table served as our prep area. The hardest part about the relocated kitchen was the sink. We knew a bathroom sink would not be sufficient because it is too shallow but due to the logistics of our remodel we didn't have any other plumbing available in the house. The ultimate “solution” was to use a plastic laundry sink, plumbed with hot and cold water, located on the side of the house. Yup the sink was outside. It sat between the clothes washer and dryer which we used to pile the dirty/clean dishes on as we did the dishes.

Sounds like we were all set, right? Well, as you can probably imagine, living in a house with a temporary kitchen located in your dining room and your kitchen sink outside is not optimal. It definitely is different than the lifestyle most American's are accustomed to, but in the larger scheme of things it really wasn't that bad. We had a kitchen and it (or at least most of it) was in our house. In many parts of the world that is a luxury. Still, we had some interesting experiences and definitely learned some things in the process which I'll tell you more about in my next post...

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Last Updated ( Friday, 29 December 2006 )

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