How to Live Through a Kitchen Renovation with a Baby

How to Live Through a Kitchen Renovation with a Baby

It’s been a while since our last update on living through a renovation. Our reno, which was quoted at 5 weeks, maybe 6, but hopefully 4, is now in its sixth week. So we stretched to six. And we probably have a month to go before the counters get installed. Pretty much everything else will be done this weekend, except the counters. And without counters, we can’t have a sink or dishwasher. So things are starting to really extend, which is getting tough on us. But this isn’t about us. This is about baby. More specifically: how did we get this far with a baby?

Start before baby starts moving

We’ve read this on other blogs but we really think that things have gone as well as they have with Joey because she’s not moving. She’s not crawling or walking, so basically all she does is sit around all day. Well, lay around all day, I guess. Sometimes she wants to be picked up. Sometimes she wants to go in her swing. Otherwise we just sort of let her do her thing, and “her thing” is generally just hanging out on the bed. Easy as that. If she were crawling, or — and this is hard to even imagine — running around, I don’t know what we’d do. It’s actually pretty easy to deal with her since she is always next to us.

Stick to baby’s schedule

Joey has a pretty standard schedule. She eats around the same time every day. She takes naps in her boppy. She goes to bed around the same time. Then all these workers showed up at our house making a ton of noise, ripping out our cooking apparatus, and it totally threw everything off. Except with Joey. She’s still getting up at the same time, taking naps at the same time, eating and going to bed at the same time. She still hangs out in her boppy: now she just does it on the bed and not on the couch. So while our lives have been totally disrupted, we’ve done our best to make sure her schedule is the same. Sure there are some differences. We used to cook all the time, now we go out to eat quite a bit. Sometimes that pushes Joey’s bedtime a little bit back but we try to make sure it’s not excessive.

Don’t hide baby’s stuff

You may remember from our eating post that cooking for is kind of hard, considering that we made all of our important stuff inaccessible. Pro tip: don’t do this for your baby. Joey likes certain things: her stuffed rabbit Poppy, her boppy, her blanket, Sophie the giraffe, a cat stuffed animal that drives Ruby nuts … baby stuff. Don’t pack this stuff up behind couches that are impossible to move. The things that made her happy prior to a demolished kitchen will also make her happy while your kitchen is being demolished. So keep them handy.

Just chill out

Joey turns five months old next week. As far as she knows, strangers in our house knocking down walls and making a ton of noise is totally normal. For Kerry and me, it’s super stressful. For Joey, it’s just another day. So keep that in mind when you’re starting to freak out. Babies feed off that energy and if you’re trying to calm them down while you’re having a mini panic attack, it’s not going to work. So take a cue from baby, realize that even six weeks isn’t that long in the grand scheme of life, and look forward to your kitchen being done.