Kitchen Reno: Part 2 - The Best Laid Plans

The scope of our planned kitchen renovation means literally gutting the existing kitchen and building a new one from scratch.  Given that a kitchen cannot be demolished and rebuilt in a day or less (trust me, I checked!), it then follows that, from the day that the wrecking ball meets our current kitchen until the completion of the new one, our home is not going to have a kitchen.  Having arrived at this conclusion, my wife, Judy, and I came to the realization that, before the kitchen renovation begins in earnest, we will have to:

1. Clear out anything that we don't wish to see destroyed along with the old kitchen, including all appliances, dishware, cutlery, food, the cat, etc. 
   
   
2. Find an alternate means of fulfilling all the functions that the old kitchen used to fulfill, including food preparation and storage plus dispensary of drinking water and the washing of used dishes.  We may be increasing our reliance on paper plates, disposable cups and plastic cutlery but a certain amount of dishware reuse will be unavoidable, if only those accoutrements used in food preparation.  I Googled and I Googled but not even Gemini was able to find anything like a disposable paper saucepan.

And so it was that we set about planning ways of overcoming these hurdles, one by one.  Our basic approach will be to set up a temporary makeshift kitchen to be used while the new one is under construction.  Fortunately, we have a spare room that we can designate for just such a purpose. It's a bedroom that was recently vacated by our daughter and her husband, who finally moved into a place of their own.  It's largely empty, save for a few odds and ends left behind by the "kids", including a night table that looks like it might make a decent microwave stand.

This room will house the refrigerator, a microwave oven, an air fryer, a slow cooker, a toaster and a Keurig coffee maker, all of which will be moved from the old kitchen to the makeshift one.  Small tables that we happen to have standing around in our basement and large plastic tote containers will be employed as makeshift counters upon which the smaller appliances will be placed.  There will be no functional stove, obviously.  All food preparation will have to be done using the aforementioned list of appliances and/or our (outdoor) gas grille, which is equipped with a side burner for heating pots of water and such.  The renovation is scheduled to start in late September or early October (no firm date yet) so the weather should be amenable to firing up the gas grille for the first little while, anyway.

Once the old kitchen is put out of commission, there will be no tap that dispenses drinkable water until the new kitchen comes online.  We do have running water in the bathroom and laundry room but neither Judy nor I feel very comfortable about drinking the water dispensed by either of those.  Fortunately, we do have an electric water cooler which uses those large 19-litre plastic bottles of spring water that can be purchased at most grocery stores.  This water cooler dispenses both cold and hot water, depending on our beverage needs, and will be moved from the old kitchen to the makeshift one along with the other appliances.

As for cleaning used dishes, that will be done using the laundry tub.

The stove will be either given away or discarded, to be replaced with a new one, and the portable dishwasher will likewise be either given away, sold (for a song) or discarded, to be replaced by a built-in one.  Note:  The cost of these two new appliances is not part of the $50,000 quoted in my last post, so these will increase the project's total price tag, somewhat.

Having established the plan, such as it is, Judy and I tackled the task of clearing out as much of the cabinets as we could. We decided to start with the pantry, having agreed that anything following that could only be easier, not to mention less icky (with the possible exception of the refrigerator) as the rest doesn't involve food storage.  When possible, get the nasty stuff out of the way first, I always say.

We decided to group everything which came out of the pantry (or any other kitchen cabinet for that matter) into the following categories:

1. Need - Anything which we will need to be able to access and use while the new kitchen is under construction (for example, plates, cutlery, drinking glasses, sugar, coffee, bread, etc.)  These items will be left where they are, to be moved to the makeshift kitchen just before the old one is demolished.
   
   
2. Store - Anything which will not be needed while the new kitchen is under construction, but which we plan to keep (for example, a cake plate, empty vases, seldom-used food preparation tools such as the cheese grater, etc.)  These items will be packed into boxes and totes, to be unpacked when the new kitchen is complete.
   
   
3. Discard - Anything which is broken or has expired/gone bad or anything which we simply do not want to keep.  These items will be given away or thrown out.

We started with the top pantry shelf, on which were stored the most seldom-used items, being the hardest to reach.  That contained just two items; a glass cake plate, with cover (that's a "store") and a decorative four-piece serving bowl set with matching tray which had been a gift from someone  and which  we had never used and weren't ever likely to use.  That ended up going to our daughter, who fancied it.  Fortunately, she didn't turn out to be the person who had gifted it to us in the first place or, if she was, she has the best poker face that I've ever seen!

The remaining pantry shelves contained mainly food as well as miscellaneous food storage and preparation items.  There was an awful lot of old/expired food (some never opened) which we had forgotten about and, in some cases, had not even known about, having been purchased and stored in the pantry by the "kids" without our knowledge. 

There were also certain contrivances about whose origins we had no clue, but we were sure we had never purchased.  One example was a deep fryer basket (the mesh kind that one fills with french fries or fish, to be lowered into a vat of frying oil).  This was especially peculiar as we don't have a deep fryer.  Another somewhat esoteric one was a European tool in a box labeled "Eiershalensollbruchstellenverusacher" (a German moniker which roughly translates to "Eggshell breaking point designator," another example of the German penchant for inventing long monikers for very specific things!) As far as I could make out, this seemed to be a tool for cleanly cracking an eggshell around its entire perimeter at whatever point the user designates.  No messy tapping the egg with a spoon or on the rim of a hard bowl for those fastidious Germans, no sir!  I believe it was a gift from one of my Austrian aunts. Don't tell her, but it went into the "discard" group.

As you can well imagine, emptying all of one's kitchen cabinets and drawers is a tedious and time-consuming task.  By starting early (well before we even had a firm start date for the actual renovation), Judy and I were able to make the job more manageable by doing just a little (usually just one or two shelves) each day.