A couple of months ago I wrote about the unexpected opportunity to remodel our kitchen. At the time, we had no usable kitchen and were just dealing with drying out the water from the leak and hadn’t yet decided how to resolve the issue. First things first, right?
Two and a half months later, we have a minimally functional kitchen and a plan for a full remodel. It’s amazing how everything snowballs. One little leak to a full kitchen remodel, flooring through most of the house and a fresh coat of paint through much of it too. It’s also amazing how long everything takes… First sorting out what we wanted to do (minimum fixes or full remodel), then getting the contractor bids, and on to decisions and orders. The decisions have been made, the orders have all been placed. Now we wait.
In the meantime, I thought I would give you a tour of some of the features of our interim kitchen.
Isn’t this a lovely storage unit? We have no water or drain hooked up, so the sink is really just there to plug the hole in the cabinet. We keep our paper and plastic ware stocked there, to keep us from dumping things into the sink. It’s amazing what a habit that is! Since there is no water or drain, we have no dishwasher either. We do our dishes in the bathroom sink. Kind of inconvenient, as it’s down the hall, but my son has learned a useful life skill (washing dishes by hand) so that’s a plus.
Note the charming rustic finish of the window frame above the sink. Also the lovely grey countertops. Folding plastic tables fit perfectly on the cabinets as temporary counters.
We still have use of our cooktop, but the oven is currently unusable. In the effort to get the flooring up to dry out the subfloor, the range was moved and the glass on the oven door broke along with the handle. So we don’t use our oven at the moment, for fear of burning ourselves or our pets. No point in replacing it when you are getting a new gas range in a few weeks, right?
Note also the rustic subfloor look we’ve got going on! Yes, it’s attractive, and matches that rustic window framing. A nice touch, don’t you think? I’m sure it will soon be all the rage.
There is one bright spot in all of this. We got our new refrigerator early, and so we actually have water in the kitchen now, from the water dispenser in the door. What a luxury! I’ve never had such a thing before. We don’t fill up the pasta pot here, but it’s nice to at least have a water source for little things. Like drinking.
It’s not been optimum, but we’ve been making it work. If at the beginning we knew how long everything would take, we might have at least hooked our sink back up, but there’s no point this close to the end.
In about three weeks, the full demo begins and the remodel will truly be underway. We’ll lose our kitchen for a month, which at this point seems inconvenient but not insurmountable. Grill, crockpot, and microwave for cooking. Refrigerator in the garage, water down the hall in the bathroom. What’s a few extra steps to get dinner ready? It doesn’t seem so inconvenient, since we’ve already been living with a partial kitchen for two months.
A kitchen remodel wasn’t in our plans this year, so all of this certainly wasn’t the timing of our choosing, but we have adapted and are muddling through. At the end of all of the work, with a new kitchen, flooring and paint, our house of sixteen years will feel practically brand new. I’m not sure, after four months without a fully functional kitchen, we’ll even quite know what to do.
