First off don’t panic when you first start out thinking about how to eat well during a home renovation, I have been through this myself and I have come up with many tips and a guide to help you survive without a kitchen during a home renovation! Sometimes the best thing to know during a home renovation is when to put down the tools and get a pizza delivered – plus saving money while doing so is an added bonus. More money for accessories once your kitchen is complete! A big piece of advice on eating well is keeping your bank balance healthy too!
When we first started our house extension all the work was started outside the house, and the inside of the house was untouched. So you can start to get an idea of how much impact it has on you having the builders in your home each and every day, and if your builders are like mine, they kept outside as long as possible, without disturbing the inside of our home too much. This is your time to get prepared and start prepping for when they knock through into your home, and you have to stop using your kitchen and create a temporary kitchen within your home elsewhere.
Setting Up A Clean Area Of Your Home
We had a side extension added to our home, which meant we could use the front living room as our clean space and set up a makeshift kitchen, dining area, and living space that we could keep clean and dust-free. Although this was harder than we thought! Dust gets everywhere, so invest in some sofa covers to keep dust off the fabrics, and dust sheets so you can cover over everything when you’re not using it. Store items in closed boxes with lids as this shuts out the dust, and this also keeps your cooking utensils and plates clean. Create a box that you can fill up with food items, you may have to visit the grocery store more often as you won’t have so much space to store items away.
This was the one room we lived in!
The builders installed our oven in the room where we were living, but I wouldn’t bother doing that if I did it again. You can easily create healthy meals using the items I mention in this post now. We used the wall space to hang up the television to get it off the floor and purchased stackable boxes which saves space, but you could also save a couple of old kitchen cabinets and create a makeshift kitchenette! We had a small fridge and freezer that we sat next to each other, and used the dining room table raised and sat over them to create a large worktop space, used this as our food preparation space, and had all our small appliances on top of this. All this can be covered over with large dust sheets each day and keep all the doors shut.
Most Important Electrical Items To Survive Your Kitchen Renovation
So if you’re having a home renovation, kitchen remodel, or house extension and you lose your kitchen space completely, these are the items you could use to allow you to still have a cook home-cooked meal, and the best way to create a temporary kitchen. You don’t need all of them, but a combination of them would work for you depending on the type of food you like to eat as a family.
Slow Cooker – A slow cooker is a great cooking appliance to have in your home to cook easy meals for family members or for you to create some batch cook meals and pop them in the freezer to be able to use freezer meals on other days. You can fill your slow cooker with wholesome foods, and it’s not just good for the winter, you can use them in the warmer months and make easy pasta meals.
Air Fryer – We didn’t have one of these when we were going through our renovation project, but I would instantly have one of these now. I love our Ninja air fryer and with a family of 5 it can cook enough food for us all, we even cook a roast chicken in this, which is a great way of cooking 2 days worth of meals and creating an easy meal for the next day. You could cook oven items in here, and I am even now seeing food packaging with air fryer instructions on it! As long as you go slightly lower in temp and time than the oven timings, and spray some olive oil on the rack, it usually cooks well.
Combination Microwave – A combination microwave does lots of things, you can grill, microwave and oven cook. Great for heating up your milk for breakfast, cold cups of tea and sauces. Using these items would allow you not to worry about having a large oven in your room.
Kettle – You need a kettle! The amount of tea and coffee I made for the construction workers was crazy, let alone making sure you could have a cup of tea and coffee!
Toaster – Having a toaster is important if you want to toast bread or muffins etc, however, if you have an air fryer you can do this in there, saving extra money and space using more electrical items
Hot Plate – A hot plate allows you to use it as you would with a hob, this electric hob can heat up water for pasta, milk, and cooking casseroles quickly. You can purchase electric versions, or gas camping-style ones if you’re short of electric points.
Water Dispenser – If you cannot get to a water source more easily, or the water gets cut off often you could get a water tank with a water dispenser on the top, this USB water dispenser pump will use the bottled water and you can fill water bottles, cups and saucepans up with water.
Air Diffuser – Consider getting an air diffuser in the room, this would keep the air that your breathing cleaner and healthier for you. You’re going to be spending a lot more time in this room, so reduce the dirt and dust in there.
Most Important Items To Help You Eat Well During Your Home Renovations
Along with the electrical items above, you need to think about items that will help you eat well during your home renovations, and make your life easier during the renovation project. These are the items I found that helped me keep on top of life!
Stackable Boxes With Closed Lids – These you can use to store all your food items, your items to meal prep with, cutlery, and plates.
Bucket and Pre-Filled Washing Up Scrubber – How are you going to wash your dirty dishes and items at the end of the day if you don’t have a kitchen sink? I used a large bucket with handles to carry my dirty dishes in and our water source was up in the bathroom upstairs. This means you can carry a big chunk of items in this and use the pre-filled washing-up scrubber to wash the items in the shower!
Dust Sheets and Cling Film – Cover everything! This is the sofa, fabric items in the rooms, the prep space you have, and the food you have prepared in plastic wrap.
Wipe Clean Cooking Items – The best thing is to use easy-to-clean cooking utensils and kitchen chopping boards, the IKEA plastic lightweight chopping boards are perfect for this.
Throw Away Items – I don’t encourage the use of throw-away items to be used long term as it’s not very sustainable, but if you’re short of time on some days you could use paper plates to save on washing up.
Closed Lid Bins - Have a small closed lid bin, you don’t want to fill it up with smelly rubbish and it being left in the one room you are in. Even consider removing the bin from the room you’re in when not being used.
Cook Books – I have a few cookbooks that I love to use now to create nutritious meals for my family and I would have used these so much during our renovation process, What’s For Dinner even has meal plans for the week so you don’t need to even think about meal ideas yourself!
Surface Wipes – I would usually use reusable kitchen cleaning cloths but you can’t wash them out easily, so get some packets of kitchen cleaning cloths to wipe surfaces and items down.
Planning Is Key
Planning and preparation is a big key to surviving your home renovation and living within a construction zone. If you’re like us, we didn’t have the option of moving out of our home, so with 2 adults, 3 children and a large dog that all needed feeding, we had to get organised and think about how our new daily routine would work, and we all had to pull together on this one!
Layout of Room – The kitchen being ripped out for me was my most stressful room when it came to the renovation, it was one of the most used rooms and it was cold, full of dirt and mess. I did not want to be in there at any point! So I lived in our one room, so it had to work for us. Take all of my advice above about the layout of the room, and include items that make your daily life easier for you.
Batch Cooking – Can you start batch cooking items to store in your deep freezer, or find some good friends who have one that you can store lots of pre-prepared meals in, this would allow you to keep healthy eating and so much easier to have dinners done and no meal prep to deal with.
Meal Prep – If you’re able to try meal prep when you don’t have your one room full of people! I tried to meal prep during the daytime when builders were busy, this was the perfect time for me as I was working from home, being there for the build and not the stress of family around me. It makes good use of time, and you can just chuck in everything when it comes to cooking.
Make A Grocery List – Your mind is going to be in full-on interior designer mode during the build, with questions being asked of you all the time, you want to keep decision fatigue away! Creating a shopping list of the ingredients for your meals is so important, you want to be able to shop quickly and easily, making the best use of time for you.
Make A Meal Plan – Planning your meals allows you to pick a healthy choice for your dinners, rather than quick choices you can remember and what is the easiest thing to cook! I have a cookbook which has family-friendly meals in it that are cooked within 30 minutes, this is perfect for us as you don’t want to be meal-prepping and cooking for ages each night. Think about adding a treat night to your meal plans too, we all need a break and let someone else cook for you!
Get Items For Temporary Kitchen Early – Once you’ve decided on what tools and items you want in your temporary kitchen during your home renovation project, get them! You never know when the builders are going to need to start the rip out, and it’s a good idea to have everything ready for it to start.
With a little bit of planning you will be sailing through your home renovations and family life will be smooth sailing!
Making It Super Easy During Your House Renovation
If you’re having a bathroom renovation, house renovation or kitchen renovation it can all have an effect on your mental health, times like this can be stressful, even when it’s an exciting time and you can’t wait to get into your new home and finished kitchen! So make life easier for yourself, and give yourself a break from things.
Ready Meals – Ready meals are great to have if you’re short on time, people are eating at different times of the day and your daily schedule is busy. Being stored in your little fridge, everyone can just take out theirs when they want it and pop in the microwave to cook. This is the best time to try out all the different ready meals on the market, and find your favourite ones!
Takeaways – This is time to treat yourself, it’s been a busy week and you just want to kick back and not worry about cooking! Look into purchasing a tastecard, which is the UK’s largest dining club and can offer incredible discounts on takeaways, like 50% off pizza delivery! You could all take some time out together, put on a movie, shut the door to the mess and enjoy a pizza together.
Eating Out – If the house gets too much being in, you can also use your tastecard for dining out and if you’re looking for some restaurant savings by using your tastecard you can get 2 for 1, 50% off restaurants, and 25% off food & drinks at 1000s of UK restaurants, including Prezzo, Beefeater, Krispy Kreme and Burger King, charming independents, coffee shops and more! On average, members save around £23 per meal, meaning you save yourself around £276 a year if you eat out once a month. Saving you a lot of money, eating some great meals and getting away from the mess and stress! If that’s really nice being out of the house, you can extend your day and combine this with visiting an attraction with the children like the SEALIFE Centre and saving more money on your entrance fee with a tastecard. To access these savings with tastecard, there is a great price of an upfront payment of £29.99 or just £3.99 per month, which you can cancel anytime
I hope this has helped you feel more prepared for your home renovation, and you now feel ready to know how to eat well during a home renovation, it may feel like it’s never going to end whilst you are in this, but it will soon be and your beautiful new house will be waiting for you. You can dream of waking up in the morning, having a coffee at your clean table, heading off to a farmers market to pick up fresh healthy food and coming home to prepare it all on your new kitchen worktop and feeding all the family yummy healthy food!