The first question most people ask about a kitchen remodel is about cabinets. The second one, usually about a week later, is where everybody is supposed to eat.
You can stay in the house through a kitchen project, and most families do. It goes much better when the temporary setup is planned before the old kitchen comes out, instead of improvised the night after it does.
The part of the job when the kitchen is actually gone
A kitchen remodel is not one long stretch with no kitchen. It is demolition, then the work inside the walls, then cabinets, then countertops, then the finish items. The sink usually leaves on demolition day and comes back with the countertop, and there is a wait in between while the countertop is templated to the cabinets that are now actually in your house.
Ask your builder for that sequence in writing, then mark the two dates that matter to you personally: the day the sink goes away, and the day it comes back. Plan your life around those two, not around the final walkthrough.
Set up a temporary kitchen before demolition day
Pick one room away from the work and give it a real setup, not a corner of a counter somewhere.
- A folding table or an unused dresser top for work surface
- The microwave, the coffee maker, and one or two other small appliances you genuinely use
- A decided-in-advance dishwashing station, with a dish rack already sitting there
- A bin or tub for carrying dishes to it
- Paper plates for the first week, without guilt
- The grill, while the weather still allows it
Two weeks of paper plates is not a crisis. Discovering on day one that the microwave has nowhere to plug in is a bad afternoon.
What to keep out of the boxes
Pack the kitchen the way you would pack to move, then pull back out the twenty or so things you actually touch every day: two pans, a knife, a cutting board, the kettle, enough plates and silverware for the household, the kids’ cups, the dog’s bowls.
Label the boxes by where things will go in the new kitchen rather than where they used to live. Unpacking at the end is when the new layout either makes sense or does not, and that is a much better time to find out.
Decide where the refrigerator goes
The refrigerator has to live somewhere for a few weeks, and it needs a working outlet and a path wide enough to get it there. A back room, a hallway or the dining room usually works. An unheated space is riskier than people expect, because a Wisconsin January does not treat a refrigerator the way a kitchen does.
Figure this out a week ahead, with a tape measure, not on the morning the crew arrives.
Dust, and what actually controls it
Dust is the complaint that outlasts every other one. What works is containment at the source: the openings into the work area closed off, floor protection along the route in and out, and the crew using that same path every single day.
Ask how the work area will be sealed and which door the crew will use. Then close the doors on the rooms nobody needs to enter, and take the soft things out of the ones next to the work. No remodel is dust-free. A planned route and a sealed opening is the difference between dust in one part of the house and dust in all of it.
Kids, pets and the daily route
An active work area has tools, open walls and materials stacked where they fit. Pick the door the crew uses and the door the family uses and make them different ones if the house allows it.
Tell the crew which pets will test the plan. Anyone who has worked in occupied houses for long will plan around a door-bolting dog without being asked twice.
The decisions that shorten the no-kitchen stretch
How long you live without a kitchen is mostly set months earlier, by how quickly selections get made. Cabinets and countertops are the long-lead items, and everything behind them moves when they move. If the cabinet decision drags, every date after it drags with it.
That is the real reason to make the big calls early. The decisions that actually drive a kitchen remodel are worth sitting down with before anything is ordered.
Our design and space planning happens in house, so the layout and the selections get worked out before demolition rather than during it. You can see the kitchens we build and how the rooms come together.
When moving out makes more sense
Sometimes staying is the wrong call. If the kitchen is the only path to the rest of the house, if a whole-floor renovation is happening at the same time, if someone in the house needs to avoid construction dust, or if the project runs straight through a holiday you host, it is worth asking the question honestly.
Those are the cases where staying costs more in stress than it saves in anything else.
Questions homeowners ask
How long will we be without a kitchen?
It depends on the scope and on how early the selections were made. Ask for the build sequence at the start and the two dates that matter, rather than one number for the whole job.
Can we keep using the sink?
Usually right up until demolition, and then not again until the countertop is in. That gap is the main thing your temporary setup has to cover.
Should we plan a vacation around it?
If you can be flexible, take it during the stretch with no sink. Ask your builder which weeks those will be once cabinets are ordered.
Will the crew be here every day?
Not every day. There are stretches where the job is waiting on an inspection or a delivery, and that is normal. Ask for the schedule and ask to be told when it changes.
Plan the inconvenience, then forget about it
Bartow Builders has been building and remodeling in Manitowoc County since 1999. If you are thinking about a kitchen and want the whole picture, timeline included, before anything comes apart, start here or call 920-682-7100.
