Living in a construction zone

Living in a construction zone

Living in a construction zone is weird.

Everyone warned us ahead of time that renovation of our kitchen and two bathrooms was going to be an awful couple of months, but it really isn’t that bad, as long as you’re willing and able to adapt your lifestyle to this new normal of strangers coming and going all day, loud tools, dust everywhere, being almost trapped in the house (in my case), and of course having no way to cook.

Cooking is certainly the hardest part. For the first week the only appliance we had access to was a toaster. I would start each day with an english muffin on the dining room floor. Then we realized that we could plug in our refrigerator in the garage — you know, our detached garage, which we have to walk through the construction zone and outside into the cold to get to — and that there’s a 3-prong outlet in our upstairs bathroom where we could plug in the microwave. So there’s a microwave in the bathroom… because, like I told you, living in a construction zone is WEIRD.

Even with a fridge and microwave, though, we don’t have any kitchen tools since they’re all packed away and we don’t have a place to wash dishes (our one bathroom sink is now completely stopped up from accidentally trying — ugh, another story for another day). We’ve made a couple of meals on the grill, which is nice — picnic style with just aluminum foil and paper plates so there’s nothing to clean up afterwards.  But for the most part even if we wanted to cook something, we just can’t do it.

So we eat out. It’s certainly expensive, but we try not to go to fancy places and try not to order the most expensive thing on the menu. If we can manage to get to a place while they have happy hour deals, that’s the best. Like, on Mondays Winking Lizard has half-priced pizzas, so we did that two weeks in a row. Those kind of deals are a huge help.

And we eat burritos! Obviously. We’ve probably been eating 2-3 burritos a week since construction started, because there are days when we just really don’t feel like sitting in a restaurant.

For lunch, I’ve become a huge fan of Go Picnic lunches from Target, which are sort of like lunchables for grownups (remember those?). They’re perfect because they don’t have to be refrigerated, so I don’t need to interrupt construction to walk through the kitchen to get to the fridge in the garage. I also rely on microwave rice, and sometimes leftovers that I do keep in the garage.

We’re currently three weeks in to our kitchen project and we’re expecting 3-4 more weeks to go. I’m already thinking about all the things I’m going to learn how to cook when I have a new kitchen to cook in!