My Abundant Life: Surviving A Kitchen Renovation. Part 1

Planning ahead of time is the key to surviving and staying sane. The kitchen is the heart of a home so when it gets ripped out, chaos can arrive. Here are some ideas and hints that we used to survive our kitchen renovations.

* Setting up a temporary kitchen. This can be quite a big task. For starters, you'll need to empty your kitchen completely. I started by packing everything I haven't used in a while. All these items were boxed up, labelled and stored under the dining table out of the way.

Then I worked out a menu for the next two weeks. After that I got out every utensil, pot and appliance I needed to make those meals. All these things were stacked neatly on top of the dining table. I tried to keep things in groups for each meal. Anything that would be used regularly was put to the front of the dining table.

Here are the items we used often -

Kettle, toaster, microwave, microwave veggie steamer, chopping boards, sharp knives, cutlery, tongs, peeler, electric fry pan, medium fry pan, medium saucepan, portable electric hot plate, dinner set ( 4 of each item only ), serving spoons, cling wrap, foil, plastic bags, plastic storage containers, serviettes, glasses and paper towel. I left out the slow cooker but didn't use it.

* Planning a menu. For a couple of months leading up to our kitchen renovations, I froze every single leftover from our main meal. No one got a chance to have second helpings. By the time our kitchen had been ripped out, I had enough single serves for four nights ( 16 serves ).

When I wrote out our menu, I spaced out the freezer meals so that we wouldn't be using them up straight away. I also tried to use those meals on days when we couldn't get into the kitchen area to do anything. In between those meals I tried to fit in easy cook meals like spag bol, bbq and salad, honey mustard chicken, sliced meat baked potatoes and salad,

* Eating healthy. This was really important for me to be able to still provide good meals for my family. Darren joked that we could have takeaway for two weeks straight. Infact, we had quite a few people tell us this was the way to go. For starters we can't afford takeaway that often. Secondly, I don't like many takeaway options. Thirdly, I'd feel sick after a few days. We always have lots of fresh and frozen veggies on hand. Some nights the meals looked a little different to the usual but we always had a few veggies on the plate.

* Going to bed at a decent time. Some nights this was hard to do but I tried to be in bed by 11 or 11.30pm. We soon learnt that tradies work to a different clock. They like a really early start. One tradie tried to come to our place at 7am only to be told by the kitchen company that was unacceptable.. This is why getting enough sleep is important. You need to be showered, fed and presentable before the tradies show up.