To ask to be temporarily rehoused whilst new kitchen installed?

[SENwoes]

I will preface this by saying I KNOW I’m very lucky to have a HA house, and I KNOW I’m very lucky to be getting a brand new kitchen for free.

So as above, I have work commencing on 22nd January to rip out the old kitchen and replace it. I don’t have a choice in this, according to the documents, I am unable to say no it’s fine, I’ll keep the old one. I’ve been told the works will take 2 weeks, as it also involves taking up the tiled floor and replacing it with lino.

It’s just dawning on me what a nightmare this will be. I have to completely empty the kitchen obviously, but there’s not really anywhere to put the stuff, it’s a very small house (just living room leading to kitchen/diner downstairs). The big appliances will go outside in the back yard apparently, but everything else will have to be boxed up and kept somewhere. I’ll have no cooking or washing up facilities, and no way of washing or drying clothes.

That’s all pretty standard I know, but my main concern is that I have a disability (CFS) and also both DC are diagnosed with ASD and currently in the house all the time as neither in education. We will essentially be trapped in our bedrooms for 2 weeks as we won’t be able to move in the front room as realistically that’s the only place everything from the kitchen can go. I need to rest…a lot, and the works will be noisy, which will also affect both DC as they struggle badly with loud noises and not being in a calm environment. They’ll also struggle with a team of workmen being in their space for 2 weeks, They both have completely different food aversions and neither of their limited range of foods is conducive to being able to batch cook and set the microwave up somewhere. Realistically it will mean a lot of eating out, but that’s not really affordable for 2 weeks.

Has anyone been in a similar situation and WIBU to ask the HA if there’s anything that could be done to move us while the works are going on? The only family member I could stay with is my DM but she’s a long way away and having works done on her own house which means she doesn’t have a functioning bathroom, so that’s not ideal really.

There's nowhere near enough housing for everyone as it is, with wait lists years long in places. Where are they going to magic up this other house for you to stay in? IF they could offer anything, it would only be B&B emergency style which won't have cooking facilities etc anyway.
You're lucky and you know it, as difficult as it will be it's only 2 weeks, you need to just get on with it.

Could. You book a holiday/stay with family while it’s being done?
as for washing up, we did it in the bathroom.

@AlmostAJillSandwich i don’t expect for a minute they can magic up a house for us, but some kind of temporary accommodation (even a travelodge or something) would be preferable, even if we still can’t cook food there at least it would solve some of the problems in terms of CFS/ASD.

Microwave?
Slow cooker?
Wash up in the bathroom?
Paper plates?

The kitchen won't be totally out of action for the full 14 days.

HA don't have money for rehousing I'm afraid.

@supercatlady I can’t afford to pay for a 2 week holiday sadly, and as I said in my OP I don’t have any family members we could stay with. I thought about washing up in the bathroom but that will be hard going - I’m bedridden a lot of the time and it’s difficult loading the dishwasher energy wise - let alone hoiking everything upstairs, washing it and hoiking it back down again. I’d also have to wash it in the bath as the sink is one of those tiny little ones.

You will have to make it work

You'll have a lovely new kitchen at the end of it

Paper plates? Would that help?

You can ask - and you may get somewhere with proof of disability for any/all of you, but I wouldn't bank on it.

Im in the middle of a Disabled Facilities Grant funded kitchen and bathroom re-fit. There was no provision for us moving out whilst the work was done, and even if there had been, the chances of it meeting our needs would be pretty much nil.

We've managed with the airfryer in the living room, plus the microwave in here. We have a water container for times/days when the water is off or we don't want to go outside to the back yard tap (we've had no sink in the house since last wednesday).
Paper plates over a proper dinner plate means minimal washing of plates, plus as much 'eat it out of the dish it was cooked in/delivered in' as possible.

Realistically, you'll have builders in from 9 til 4.30pm, if you're REALLY unlucky, 8am to 5pm but I think you'll see unicorns doing the tango before you see that happen regularly. The earliest mine have got here is 9.15 and the latest they left was 4.38pm!

If you can pack the living room so that its storage + kitchen, and then camp out in bedrooms, it won't be so bad (We couldn't be in our bedroom at all in week one and two, too loud and not enough room to get past once they had all their kit out. I am hopeful next week I can stay in bed longer as the bathroom is mostly done now and they're focusing on the kitchen.)

Noisiest will be ripping out the old kitchen - go out for the day. They should give you a clue whats happening each day if you ask so you can decide if you want to stay put or decamp to somewhere else.

My top tip - stash your vacuum cleaner in an easily accessed spot. Our poor Henry has been hidden behind the new kitchen units and work tops that I can't move, for a week, meaning we haven't been able to hoover up all the plaster dust and sweeping only gets you so far!

It will be tough, no doubt about it, but as it’s only for 2 weeks it will be manageable. Stick stuff you can manage without into boxes, and put them in the loft/under beds.
buy a hot plate/slow cooker and set it up in the living room with a microwave.
keep minimal no of plates, bowls, cutlery etc so it can’t stack up. If you only have 3 plates etc you can do washing up little and often and it won’t weigh a ton to get upstairs.

good luck!

Paper plates would definitely help, I had thought about that.

@WiddlinDiddlin thanks, that’s really helpful. Must be a nightmare not having a kitchen or a bathroom! If push comes to shove of course we’ll get through it somehow, but it won’t be great to say the least. I just had a look on Airbnb and there’s a caravan place for £36 a night we could maybe book, I can’t really afford it but I think it might be worth getting the credit card out for!

House you where? I would presume there are people in the housing as it is

Genuine question: do you truly believe private home owners all get to move into a travel lodge or equivalent / nicer for a few weeks?
And that on that basis you are somehow being hard done to?

The vast majority (bar the insanely wealthy or those who actively choose to increase their renovation costs by thousands) get clear a sideboard/coffee table and set up a kettle toaster and microwave (air fryer if lucky). If they can be bothered/it works out their existing fridge might get dragged into a bedroom or living room and they crack on eating toast /cereal and instant noodles & sandwiches/microwave meals for a week or two.
Buy some disposable plates and cutlery if you don't want to wash up it the bathroom. It's literally under £5

If your issue is:
"It's a bit crap" -> yes. It is. but sometimes you have to accept short term pain (2 weeks of inconvenience) for long term gain (a nicer home at the end of it)
"its not fair" -> as my parents explained to my from the age of about 3 "life isn't fair"

There is no kitchens in Travelodges (not picking on you post!)

@SENwoes Are you sure it’s a full 2 weeks? My parents LA house was done a few years ago and I don’t remember it taking as long as that.

Do you have an air fryer? A slow cooker? Parents house is tiny and we moved all the livingroom furniture to one side of the room (as much as we could) and set up the fridge and a small table in the livingroom. We had the kettle, toaster, slow cooker and microwave.

Alternatively - when is the work taking place? Do you have a caravan park nearby? Most places have very cheap deals at the start of the season - could be worth a look at that as an option if you really feel you can’t make it work. I very much doubt the LA will be able to provide temp accommodation

It was .... interesting... the night they left us with a functioning toilet... but the floor around it had a self levelling compound down that should have set before bedtime but due to it being extremely cold... hadn't.

So it was learn to levitate. Or use a bucket.

I cannot levitate.

But that asides, we're coping better than I had expected really. They are very good at telling me if its gonna get REALLY loud, whats happening now/next and that helps my stress levels (we're both AuDHD and i have physical disabilities too).

If you can disappear for all of it, great, if you can only disappear for a bit of it, try to be out whilst they smash out the old kitchen and old tiles, thats verrrrrry loud work!

Many of us have had to put up with much worse when it comes to kitchen renovations. My kitchen was out of use for well over a month when it was being renovated and we made do, a family of 8, with a microwave, kettle, sandwich toaster and crockpot for in the living room for weeks surrounded by boxes. We used the bathroom for washing up. I have eczema so the children washed up whilst the dishwasher was out of action.

Then Covid happened and the delivery of our new kitchen was delayed right after the old kitchen was ripped out so we lugged a couple of hits back out of the skip and balanced a sink and hob onto them for a couple more months.

Shit happens. But at the end of it we had a lovely new kitchen and although frustrating at the time, no one remembers the problems now and it feels like a minor hiccup.

You might feel put out for a bit but you’ll manage. You’ll find ways around it. If it’s really hard to wash up use paper plates for a few days and utilise 1-2 pots only and wash them when you visit the loo anyway. Or batch cook 10 meals in advance and freeze them so you only have to defrost and microwave. It’s very doable.

As for the noise and your DC, maybe work with the builders to figure out the most noisy days/times and take them to a coffe shop/library for a few days.

Ok so probably not worth asking then is the upshot.

@Inyourwildestdreams I do have an airfryer, yes. And unfortunately they did say it would be two weeks due to the tiled floor needing to be taken out, normally it’s just a week. I don’t think most caravan parks are open yet, my DM owns a caravan on one but they don’t open until March which is very annoying as that would have been the perfect solution.

@WiddlinDiddlin at least you’ve kept your sense of humour about it! Great tips, thanks. I think I’ll contact the HA tomorrow and ask if they can give me any kind of idea of the schedule of works over those two weeks, it may be that we only need to disappear for a few days rather than the full fortnight.

@laloo, thanks, that’s good advice. The DC are teenagers and really don’t get along, and we also have a dog to factor in just to complicate matters, so jointly leaving the house in the middle of winter and entertaining ourselves for a day isn’t an easy thing to do…especially as I can’t drive far or stay awake for long. I think avoiding the worst days of it by booking somewhere cheap to stay on my credit card is the best solution, and managing with takeaways/airfryer meals around that.

@SENwoes How long do you have until the works start? We have a Parkdean park nearby and they open at the start of Feb. Also worth looking around for little independent caravan/self catering places.

I contacted a lot of places near us this time last year as we we’d just moved into a new house and gone away for a week while the bathroom was ripped out and a new one fitted (only bathroom and we had a 2.5year old 😅). Literally arrived at our holiday and got a call from our builder to say the bathroom suite that was delivered was wrong and it would take 2 weeks to get a replacement 😬 and they’d already half ripped out the old one. So we had a weeks holiday for no reason and came back to a building site 😅
But when contacting caravan places near us we were offered some really reasonable prices because of the time of year! Definitely worth a look if you’d rather not just make do with the house

@Inyourwildestdreams oh god what a nightmare for you! The work starts in a week’s time so I don’t think many caravan places will be open by then. The one I saw on Airbnb looks nice but it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere, on a farm. So not much to do around there but at least it would be less chaotic.

You will have to make it work. What do you think homeowners do when they get a new kitchen fitted?

When we’ve had new kitchens fitted we’ve done washing up in the bath tub and set up a mini kitchen in the corner of the lounge. It’s just what people do and it’s only two weeks.

It is hard to be disabled and have limited resources, needing to often be in bed etc. It sounds as if you’re just about coping without this work on top. I understand it sounds absolutely daunting.

Firstly, I would make peace with not having the living room available for much. Do you need the tv from there?

If you are able to batch cook this will be the best solution. I don’t really see how a travelodge would help tbh as you’ll have zero cooking facilities and you’re absolutely not allowed to cook in your room without a kitchen.

Can you set up a cooking station in your bedroom or at the top of the stairs if there’s room on the landing? Think about what would be most useful - air fryer, camping stove or microwave and invest in one of those. An airfryer is supposed do use a lot less energy so may be worthwhile? The more expensive ones have 2 compartments so you can cook say nuggets and chips at the same time - idk what your kids will eat.

You can cook a number of things in a kettle including things like eggs and noodles so maybe have a google at suggestions. You can also buy bags, which are safe to boil food in. I wouldn’t want to use them long term but this is just for a couple of weeks.

How old are your kids? Can they help with setting all of this up? Bringing cups, cooking utensils and other supplies upstairs etc? Could you put them in charge of bringing water needed?

Can you get a food delivery? Maybe spend a little more on some ready meals? If you buy a 6 pack of 2 litre water bottles, you’ll have enough water for cooking. You can get your kids to refill these from the bathroom / outside tap.

Sorry but I think YABU. It's not ideal but short term and you'll manage.

Batch cook 3 or 5 casseroles now for the first week.
Reheat in slow cooker Serve with uncooked salad and bread.
Have take away every second day - pizza, fish and chips, pies and reheat or cook a slow cooker meal every second day. Eat cup-a-soups and toast with tomato etc.
You will be fine.
Drink lots of hot drinks and learn to make a meal with boiled water from the kettle - savaloys, three minute noodles, raw blanched vegies with grated cheese, canned fruit, jelly.

Your HA should have a policy on this, check their website. It may be worth asking as you may be entitled to compensation at least. Repairs for social tenants | Housing Rights