How to Prep for a Kitchen Renovation: Essential Tips and Checklist

People ask us all the time “how did you survive such a long kitchen renovation with jobs and kids?” and the answer is: it’s kind of a blur, but we also did a lot to prepare for living kitchen-free for a while. And we thought we’d share our favorite tips for how to prep for a kitchen renovation.

We spent nine months DIY renovating our kitchen, which included it being torn down to the studs, so we went without cabinets and countertops for a good couple of months. We knew we didn’t want to be adding potentially thousands of dollars to our budget to afford eating all our meals out, so we got creative with meal ideas during a kitchen remodel. Plus, the last decade of moving every couple of years and camping when we were too poor for vacations has trained us for this.

Here are our tips on how to prep for a kitchen renovation.

Plan your workspace

Kitchen renovations are a spectrum. We were at the extreme without access to anything for a while, but sometimes you can still use your oven or microwave, etc. depending on how intense your plans are, so it’s important to figure out what you can still use. We installed temporary shelves in our dining room and one wall of the kitchen to hold the daily use items like plates, cutlery, glasses, cutting boards, that kind of thing.

The biggest hero of kitchen renovation cooking? Small appliances.

We used the microwave, crockpot, air fryer, sandwich press, and grill more times than I can count, and set up a little table in our bonus room with all these things like a camp kitchen which made a huge difference in keeping the mess contained.

Prep is key

I basically acted as though I was about to have a baby and spent a whole weekend prepping freezer meals that would be easy to reheat without an oven before we started the demo.

(This was especially easy for me because our second baby was only three months old when we started demo so I had literally just done this whole shebang a few months prior).

I prepped three different kinds of meals: ones that could be thawed and thrown into the slow cooker, marinated meats that could be grilled and served with a salad, or others that were already cooked and could just be microwaved.

I used gallon ziploc bags (these contraptions are so handy to keep everything mess-free​), and printed labels so I knew the name, date, and instructions to cook everything.

The biggest tip for ziploc bag freezing is to lay the bags flat when they first go in so they freeze as flat as possible.
Then once they’ve hardened, you can store them all upright and it saves a ton of space!

I wrote another post with all our favorite oven-free kitchen reno meals, too.

Act like you’re moving

I made a short-term plan for what we’d need, and then bought a few moving boxes and literally packed away everything else as though we were moving. Seasonal dishes, serving platters, mugs, cups, anything I didn’t immediately need, I put into boxes and it really helped the visual clutter and in turn my sanity.

Understand it’s going to suck

It’s a novelty for a while. You look across the room at your husband, shrug, and give each other the ‘that’s so zany’ sitcom head shake for a couple of weeks. But soon it’ll turn into eating toast out of laziness and eyeing that Mexican restaurant menu online as you argue over something petty that I think we can all agree isn’t really about the petty thing.

Plan for more meals out than you’d usually eat, get comfortable with eating salads on the living room floor, and remember it’s temporary. Also, celebrate every milestone along the way! You don’t realize how valuable countertops are until you don’t have any.

Come see the finished view of our kitchen remodel here, and if you liked this post about how to prep for a kitchen renovation, sign up to our newsletter for more updates!