Kitchen renovation survival tips

[MrsMouse03]

Hello, we are having our 20+ year old kitchen ripped out and a lovely new one fitted in a couple of months.

What are your best tips for coping with this in terms of keeping food and meal prep.

We also have two dogs and two cats and I'm a bit worried about how to deal with cat litter etc as normally in the utility room.

Thank you for any advice

How long will you be without your kitchen? Can you move your fridge into another room and set up a temporary kitchen? We bought two induction hobs (plug in) from Ikea and coupled with the fridge and a microwave it's...ok. Cats - you will probably have to keep them out of the way of the tradesmen so could you set them up in a room upstairs? We moved ours a couple of weeks before the work started to get them used to it.

Thanks @bravotango the fitters said two full weeks.

Great idea to move cats to another room a couple of weeks before thank you.

A slow cooker is invaluable in this situation.

If you are using a microwave in the interim, do not put it on a wooden piece of furniture, as it leaks steam from the bottom, which takes off the finish of the wood.

Put down the best quality carpet covers you can find for while the workmen are in and out of the house (if you have carpet anywhere they are likely to tread).

Allow some extra budget for electrical work. When the new kitchen goes in, they replace all the kitchen circuits, but may find that they also need to add additional circuits if your kitchen currently shares a circuit with anything else.

Hire a portaloo if you can afford it

I’m currently having a kitchen fitted in a one bed flat! Moved my cat out to a cattery for the fortnight but presumably your place is bigger.

Have set up a mini kitchen on the dining table so the microwave, kettle and toaster. I’m eating basically ready meals with bagged salad, fruit and juice for goodness. It’s been fine tbh!

The biggest issue was washing up. I have a downstairs loo but the sink is minuscule. So if possible for them to hook up a temporary sink? In one house they did it in the hallway just outside the kitchen (they could access the kitchen from the back).
They moved the fridge to the opposite side of the room then when new one arrived I just transferred the food over and they got rid of the old one then.
I have cats too so just shut them in the living room when guys were moving things in and out.

Oh @onedayoranother I didn't think about washing up! We also have tiny sink in but won't be much use.

We had ours done in November. We used the microwave and sandwich toaster a lot. The worst thing was not having a sink and having to cart the washing up upstairs to the bathroom. Other than that it wasn't too bad. We were without a kitchen for 5 weeks.

We did our washing up in a washing up bowl in the bath, and kept meals very simple - either things thay could be heated in the microwave, or on a single ring camping stove that we set up in the living room, along with the fridge, kettle and toaster. DH and I both had our main meals at lunch, so he would have in his office and I'd go out for lunch as was wfh - local supermarket cafe or similar for a cheap hot meal - so evening meal could be soup/sandwich or something simple.