How We're Living Without a Kitchen During the Remodel - A Tour of Our Temporary Cooking Space

We’ve been without a kitchen for over a month during our renovation. The room is totally gutted so needless to say, we’re without a sink, cooktop, oven, organized pantry, and open counter space. And we’ll be without for many many more moons so we’ve set up a functioning temporary kitchen to prevent starvation.

I keep getting asked, “where are you cooking?” And lately, I’m being questioned, “how are you eating during the coronavirus quarantine and without a kitchen?!” Well, don’t worry. 1. Food is my favorite thing, so I always make it a priority. And 2. I’m a planner, so I set us up for culinary success.

The future kitchen is going to be on the other side of the lovely plastic wall and our temporary kitchen is in the nearby dining room. We set up a space to operate as close to a normal kitchen as possible. It’s not perfect, but it works.

To back up, before demolishing the kitchen, actually months before that, I started prepping for the day we’d be cooking in the dining room. I wrote all about it in this blog post where I break down my strategies for making this process easier. Pop over there to catch up on what I did.

And if you like time-lapses, watch the first three minutes of this video to see us emptying all of the cabinets. It’s pretty satisfying.

Here she is! We do use our dining room everyday normally, but it’s taken on a whole new use as our food storage/prepping/cooking/eating area during the construction. I’ll give you a tour.

The main part of our “kitchen” is the appliance zone. We have the toaster oven, microwave, kettle, and blender, then added to the mix just for this temporary kitchenette, an electric cooktop.

We thought about setting up our old stove in the backyard during construction because it would provide the maximum cooking and baking productivity. Ultimately though, we went the electric cooktop route because we could cook inside without traipsing through the whole house to get the the outdoor oven. I found this induction one used on Craigslist and it does the job, but this particular model isn’t so great. But the concept is perfect and could be so handy in other applications, too, so here’s a well-reviewed one if you’re keen on it. We pared down our cooking items and only are using the tea kettle, my trusty cast iron skillet, and a sauce pan. I’m so glad we packed up the all of the other pots and pans - we aren’t using them and don’t miss them.

Not long ago I refreshed the cabinets in the built-in buffet and the storage is coming in very handy. We store all of our bowls, plates, mugs, cups, and glassware in here, now.

We don’t use paper plates or disposable dinnerware normally, so we certainly didn’t want to use them now. Having all of our normal dishes easily accessible makes for easy use of the reusables and maintains a bit of normalcy.

Underneath the upper cabinets of the buffet, are lower drawers which are perfectly sized for the little things. The top drawer is silverware, knives, and small utensils. Below that are cloth napkins, dish towels, and cleaning rags. Again, no disposables here!

Our makeshift pantry lives on the open metal shelves. We reduced the pantry significantly by either eating the food or packing up and storing things for later. Most of what we have available are the essentials that don’t take too much work to make. Being without a functioning kitchen is no time to spend days making sourdough bread or complicated recipes that use a bunch of pots and pans for one meal. As much as it hurts to not make some of our favorite recipes, I’m glad we put away the things we wouldn’t use because now I don’t need to sift through the dry goods just to find the one condiment.

We also have our trusty gravity-fed water filter which is great for applications like these, or camping, or even in a finished kitchen because it requires no dedicated plumbing or electrical. It’s the best - I’ll share a full review soon.

Speaking of meals, we prepped as much home-cooked food in advance as we could. We filled the freezer with black bean quesadillas, sourdough English muffins, bread, butternut squash soup, frozen smoothies, veggie enchiladas, vegan lasagna, and several other goodies I can’t even remember now because I already ate them.

We’ve tried making a few meals from scratch like these sourdough pancakes and it turned out fine, but admittedly was a pain to clean up after. More on cleaning in a bit.

After we ate through some of our pre-made items, we took a trip to my mom’s house and borrowed her kitchen to make another batch of frozen treats. I brought a bunch of groceries to her house and used her utensils and appliances for some serious meal prep. We washed and cut veggies for a week’s worth of salads, cooked a double batch of pancakes, vegan pumpkin chili, oatmeal, a mushroom stir-fry, more bean quesadillas, and baked two spinach pies.

We’re glad we did this when we did because not long afterwards, we self-quarantined due to coronavirus, then not long after were ordered by the state of California to shelter in place. It was a good chance to hang out with my mom and sister before isolating ourselves, and it was a great opportunity to fill the freezer with food to last us for a couple of weeks of quarantine.

Having pre-made home-cooked items on hand is suuuuch a treat right now. We do love eating out, but it’s costly, can’t always be done in pajamas, and just isn’t the same as home-cooked. We’re especially grateful to have these meals on hand during our coronavirus shelter-in-place order. It’s comforting to have familiar foods and to not have to worry about take-out at restaurants during a medical crisis.

Circling around the dining room we also have this cabinet that I took from the old kitchen. It holds the salad spinner, mixing bowls, colander, and tupperware. When we go out to eat at restaurants (pre and post coronavirus quarantine, that is), we take in the Pyrex containers to bring home leftovers in. Sometimes, when eating out, we order a third meal to go and ask them to put it in our Pyrex. It makes it easy peasy days later to have another meal on hand without it being actual leftovers.

Our whole temporary kitchen with my advanced planning and meal prep has been serving us well. But the hardest part by far is cleaning the dishes. We’ve been cleaning everything in the bathroom sink which is lovely as a bathroom sink, but just not the same as a deep kitchen sink. Our console sink also doesn’t have the most spacious countertop area. We tend to put dirty dishes on the ledge, then when it’s full at the end of the day, we wash each one by hand, then put it on a drying pad that I rest on the top of the toilet seat. Sometimes I leave them there and hope that I don’t need to pee anytime soon, but often Ross gets a rag to dry them and put them away. The drying mat is so handy in this application!

We replaced the hand soap pump with the dish soap pump to make cleaning even easier. We did this in the pre-demolished kitchen, too! Our dish soap is gentle enough that we use it as hand soap in the kitchen all the time. Easy peasy.

Washing dishes in a little sink is cumbersome and I’m always petrified I’ll break something. It’s a hassle, but definitely worth it as opposed using disposables that would go to the landfill. We might try cleaning in a bucket in the shower soon, but I’m hopeful that when we finish up the rough-in plumbing in the remodel, we can add a utility sink where the future new sink will go. We’ll see!

And that’s about it! I forgot to show you that we do have a trash/recycling can to the left of the microwave. And I didn’t show off how much we use the dining table for prep and eating, but you get the gist.

Any questions? Leave ‘em in the comments!