Newsletter Appendix B: The year of the kitchen remodel
And how that affected our food expenditure
A note before I begin: I had started writing the 2023 edition of ‘Shitty Housewife Gets Nerdy’, our family newsletter about food spending that we send instead of holiday cards because we like to make things more complicated for ourselves. I told my husband when I was about halfway through that I was at six pages. He asked if I’d added photos yet. When I told him that I hadn’t, he said I was going to have to cut stuff out. I told him I can’t, and his reply was, ‘This is why you have a Substack!’. So in the tradition of my PhD, where I had all this extra stuff I wanted to include but my supervisors told me it wasn’t strictly necessary to the central argument, I’m sticking it in the appendix. Appendix A was all about the food books read in 2023, and here I present you Appendix B, how we ate when we didn’t have a kitchen, and our food away from home expenditure for the year.
Remodelling, cooking and eating without a kitchen, and a whole lot of eating out
The kitchen remodel kind of dominated our lives in 2023. Our old kitchen was demolished in March, and we were able to start using the new and shiny kitchen in November. For about eight months, we cooked in a temporary kitchen that was set up in our living room. We had a fridge and freezer, microwave, toaster oven, slow cooker, bread machine, and an induction plate.
I made a lot of lentil minestrone and chilli in the slow cooker, cooked beans in the slow cooker, and learnt how to make scrambled eggs in the microwave (they were fine but not really something I would recommend unless you had no choice). Here are some numbers that reflected the change in our cooking circumstances:
Much higher expenditure on pre-cut fruit from Trader Joe’s and Vons. We spent $225.14 on pre-cut fruit in 2023 (it was $28.97 in 2022).
Our egg expenditure decreased (microwaved scrambled eggs really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Ha). We spent $142.85 in 2023 compared with $219.99 in 2022.
For the first time we bought pre-cooked rice ($28.73) and pre-cooked chicken ($50.94)
Our expenditure on the CSA produce box went way down ($402 in 2023 compared with over $1,000 in 2021 and 2022) because we stopped the subscription during the months without a kitchen.
And we ate out a lot, because as hard as cooking in a temporary kitchen was, doing the washing up in the bathroom sink was even harder.
If you just look at the average, 2023 was higher than all previous years anyway. This is partly because of inflation, and partly because the kids are older and eat more (this is more noticeable in eating out costs than in grocery expenditure). But if you look at the month-by-month breakdown, you can see our year quite clearly.
Book-ending the year were months of a lot of cooking and eating at home, and we spent about $300 a month when we went to fast casual restaurants once or twice a week. The months without a kitchen are about two or three times the amount. August was low because of Australia, and September was high because when we came back from Australia, our temporary kitchen had become even smaller — the temporary wall had been taken down and with it our temporary storage solution. If we thought March–July were hard in terms of cooking, September was even worse.
October was especially high because we went on a week-long holiday — we drove to Albuquerque, New Mexico, via Phoenix, Arizona, and back. We celebrated Tilly’s birthday, saw an eclipse, and ate delicious food.
Then in November, the appliances were installed, our kitchen was 95% finished and, crucially, it was usable again. I began cooking with a vengeance, and we ate out a lot less in the final two months of the year.
Lessons learnt from the kitchen remodel
This was the first time I had experience with any kind of kitchen remodel, and one of the surprising things to me was that we didn’t lose and get the kitchen back on two neat occasions. It wasn’t that we suddenly lost it all and just as suddenly got it back. We lost the kitchen in stages. First, we lost the pantry, and the way we stored food had to change. Then, we lost most of the contents of the kitchen as we packed most of it into storage. Then, we lost the dishwasher. Then, we lost the sink, as the plumbing had to get disconnected. At each of those steps we adjusted how we cooked and what we were able to do in the kitchen. This lasted a few weeks.
Then, after the demolition of the old kitchen, we adjusted to the temp kitchen set up in our living room. We got used to that, and figured out a new rhythm and a new regular menu. This lasted about five months. We skipped the country and left behind our construction site home for a month, and when we returned we had to adjust again. The temp kitchen had shrunk in our time away and it became even harder to cook. So for a couple of months, we just didn’t. I bought the kids’ lunches from school for September and October, and we ate out even more than we had been.
Getting the kitchen back happened in stages, too. First, we got the kitchen island, and we had more food prep space. Then, we got the sink. And finally, the appliances were installed and we could actually use the kitchen. There were other steps within all of this, like waiting for the cupboards to be usable and being able to move our kitchen contents out of storage and into the kitchen. As I write this in January 2024, we are still waiting for the last and tiniest details to be completed — the kitchen is 99.9% completed but the design company isn’t out of our lives yet.
One other lesson/piece of advice from this remodel experience is to budget for eating out. I knew going in roughly what the estimate for the remodel was, and also mentally prepared for the final number to be higher than the original quote (it always is). I also knew we would be eating out more than usual. What I didn’t know was quite how much our eating out would increase by. Well, now I do! For us at least, our eating out expenditure was about three times what it typically was. Your mileage may vary, but if you are planning a remodel, budgeting 3x the usual amount for eating out may be a safe guide.
Coming up, Appendix C: Ultra-processed foods and did we manage to reduce the amount of UPF we ate? And eventually, the actual newsletter!