Kitchen Reno, Part 5: The Auxiliary Kitchen

Our kitchen has finally been cleared.  It's easy to under-estimate the amount of time it takes to accomplish this.  My wife, Judy, and I have been gradually working at it for weeks now, and yet we only just managed to complete the task the day before our current kitchen was scheduled for demolition.

Some of our old kitchen's contents were given away, some were thrown away, some were placed in storage, but a lot of it was moved to an auxiliary kitchen that we set up for use while the new kitchen is being constructed.  After all, we still need to be able to prepare meals, we need a place to store food and ingredients, we need a source of drinking water and we would like to be able to enjoy the occasional cup of coffee or tea and other such non-essentials.

A spare bedroom that was occupied by my daughter and her husband before they finally left the nest was turned into an auxiliary kitchen.  Our portable dishwasher, which had probably been looking forward to a bit of a holiday, considering that there would be no water tap to connect it to and, therefore, no way for it to do its regular job, was doubtless rudely surprised when it found itself re-purposed as a counter-top, appliance stand and makeshift cabinet for most of our dishes.  

For drinking water, we moved our water cooler, which dispenses both hot and cold water, from our old kitchen to the auxiliary kitchen.  A portable shelving unit with wheels on its legs had been our microwave stand as well as a place to keep cat's food and other sundries.  It now supports our air fryer, an electric induction hot plate which can be used for boiling water and heating sauces or broths, some boxes containing garbage and compostable waste bags, some cook books and other sundries. A couple of large plastic totes were re-purposed as a countertop on which we set our kitchen knives and a cutting board.  These totes aren't empty.  They contain items from our old kitchen which we won't need to access or use until the new kitchen is completed.

Our microwave oven still comes in very handy for meal preparation, of course, so one of the bedside tables that our kids had left behind was re-purposed as a microwave stand.  Our bread box containing bread (what else?), buns, english muffins and other grain products sits atop the microwave, just as it did in our old kitchen.  We can also use our crock pot as a slow cooker and our electric frying pans for fried foods.  

We set up a makeshift pantry by strategically stacking empty large, plastic totes and an empty cardboard box on their sides for use as shelving.  The contents of the old pantry went onto these makeshift shelves.

An old metal shelving unit that we weren't using for anything else was used for storing pots and pans as well as our tea pot in a readily accessible manner.

Finally, our old kitchen drawers containing cutlery and other smaller kitchen utensils as well as cookbooks and such were set on the floor with their contents left inside them for now.  

 We had intended to move our refrigerator into the auxiliary kitchen.  There was room for it, right next to the water cooler.  Unfortunately, while I checked to ensure that the fridge would fit into the spare bedroom that houses the auxiliary kitchen, I failed to check whether it fit through the door to that room.  It does not.  So, the good folks from Borman Construction, who helped us to move the fridge between rooms, set it up in our dining room instead.  Not quite as elegant, but workable.

This is to be our de facto kitchen for the coming month.