6 Tips On How to Avoid a Kitchen Renovation Nightmare

Renovating your kitchen can be exciting – after many months (or years!) of imagining and planning, you’ve decided to move forward with building your dream kitchen. However, even when everything goes smoothly during construction, it can feel like a nightmare when your regular routine is disrupted. Your house is a construction zone, there will be noise and dust, and you won’t have access to all your usual amenities. To help you through this, we’ve made a list of 6 tips to help you survive your kitchen renovation with ease.

Set up a temporary kitchen

While it’s inconvenient to not have access to everything in your kitchen, a lot can be done with just two electric burners. Think stir fries, pastas, breakfast foods, and one-pot dinner recipes. If possible, renovate your kitchen during the summer months so you can use your barbeque, and set up near a sink for easy cleaning if you can. And on those days where you just can’t face cooking a meal in your makeshift kitchen, have easy snacks on hand. Dried fruit, trail mix, and classic peanut butter and jam can be filling!

Buy paper plates and plastic utensils

Altering how you eat can be challenging enough, especially when there are dishes to wash by hand in a limited space. For easy cleanup, you can buy a pack of 100 paper plates for under $6 and a set of 120 plastic forks, knives, and spoons for under $20. And if the thought of throwing out that much waste doesn’t sit right, there are also compostable options that are made from recycled materials to minimize environmental impact.

Create a budget for eating out more often

While you can certainly make do with a makeshift kitchen, it’s understandable if you get sick of stir fries and pastas. Also, it’s nice to sometimes get away from the mess of a renovation. While eating out may not be a regular part of your family budget, it may likely become a bigger portion of your expenses when you don’t have access to a kitchen. So before your renovation even begins, anticipate how many times per week you’ll go out, multiplied by the timeline of the remodel to keep your budget in check.

Protect your valuables from dust

While we do our very best to minimize dust in your home during the renovation process, we can’t eliminate all dust and it can travel through the vents. Be sure to cover up your furniture and other valuable items to keep your home as dust-proof as possible.

Order as much as possible before the job starts

One of the frustrations that many people fear during a remodel is a delay in the timeline. The construction phase of a kitchen renovation takes an average of 6 weeks, sometimes longer depending on the extent of the remodel. Don’t forget the complete timeline – it can take weeks or months to plan and order supplies before construction even starts. Things like faucets, cabinets, handles, and lighting fixtures can take weeks to arrive, so it’s best to have these items on hand once the remodeling begins to minimize delays in construction.

Remember the big picture

While the noise, dust, and inconvenience can be frustrating, just remember that this a very short period of time in the grand scheme of home ownership. The temporary hassles of a kitchen renovation will be a blip on the radar when you look back on those times from your beautiful new kitchen!

If you are ready to remodel your kitchen, or have questions about the kitchen remodel process, schedule a conversation with us today!