Despite what our contractor thinks, we know that this kitchen renovation is going to take longer than just a few weeks. And after living through our messy dining room wall removal, we knew that we needed a better setup to keep ourselves sane.
While I was busy project managing much of the kitchen work (and trying to finish our new basement stairs), I left Alex in charge of setting up a make-shift kitchen in the basement.
Luckily our kitchen renovation was delayed so much that we are now going to be in construction for the summer months instead of late winter, when we can use our backyard and our BBQ.
The first step in preparing our basement for this new, temporary kitchen was to clean it out. Since we’ve stayed in the house during every renovation we’ve done over the last 5 years, we’ve used out basement as a place to throw anything we don’t have time to deal with. It’s not a total disaster, and probably still better than most, but it’s not clean enough for us to live in for 3 months.
After a good 4 weeks of organizing, donating and throwing things out, we finally had a ready-to-use space that would get us through the construction. It wasn’t a fun job, and we still have much more to do before we finish the basement, but the results were pretty great for what we need now.
Then we headed to Ikea to buy our all-in-one kitchen!
Thanks to a great all-in-one kitchen set from Ikea, we were able to (relatively) cheaply set up everything we would need over the next 3 months: a sink, a food prep surface and a cook top. We left our fridge upstairs in the dining room and will move it when we finish the stairs.
It wasn’t a super easy setup; Alex had to make sure that the kitchen had power and proper plumbing. But once set up, it was pretty sleek.
We also set up our living room furniture downstairs since we also wanted a clean space to relax at night.
Meanwhile, we fully packed our stuff upstairs and stored it in the corner of the living room, along with some of the kitchen reno materials we would need later on. We’ll have to move these temporarily when we finish the floors, but that’s another problem for later.
