When we started planning our main floor gut job, we decided to tackle the kitchen, living room, and guest room all at once. These three rooms were in fact the only livable spaces in our entire house other than our bedroom, so demolishing all three spaces at once meant our only livable space would be our teeny tiny bedroom.
Kitchen – see those boxes on the floor? That held all our food, dishes, and every kitchen item we owned.
Living in our house in the midst of a major remodel took a lot of patience and motivation. We gutted the kitchen as soon as we could and within a day our only appliance available for cooking was our old college size microwave. We were so anxious to demo the kitchen that we didn’t really plan ahead much when it came to cooking options. We eventually found a small card table and used that for counter space but finding somewhat healthy food options that could be made in a microwave was the hardest part to say the least. This reason alone was our biggest motivation to getting the kitchen done and the day we installed our oven and stove top was definitely one of my top 5 best days to date! (That and the day we installed the dishwasher was pretty great too!)
Kitchen and hallway – I spy our tiny microwave!
Aside from moving everything into our bedroom and and living in that dungeon for 3 months, the other biggest pain point was the dust. I would highly recommend hanging tarps if you’re renovating just a portion of your home. We tracked dust EVERYWHERE. Every day we would do something that generated an abnormal amount of dust and every evening when it was time to eat, we’d clean until we felt it was sanitary enough to cook our dinner. I’m not a neat freak by any means but that constant dust definitely started wearing on us both.
Our roll-off dumpster didn’t show up the day we had planned so we piled everything up in our living room!
At this point we’re 95% done with the living room and kitchen which means we have a livable space and a working kitchen again!!!! (Cannot express how happy I am to have these spaces back!) But we still have a good chunk of work to do elsewhere. I think the picture above sums up our current situation quite well…pretty most places but a horribly disaster behind closed doors!
So I listed a bunch of negatives to living in our home during this renovation but there is one major positive which is the convenience of living where we work. There is no need to drive to the job site so even if we have 30 minutes to an hour, we’re right here and we have all the supplies we need in one spot. We absolutely got things done faster because of this.
I 100% get the appeal of renovating a flip home on the side while having another place to live comfortably, but for our first flip we wanted to get the true reno experience which we have indeed experienced! 🙂
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