Yes, most families live at home through a kitchen, bathroom, or basement remodel. It works when four things are settled before demo day: where you will cook, where you will shower, which door the crew uses, and what happens to the furnace. Winter makes the last two harder. From November through March the house is shut tight, the furnace is pulling air from every room it can reach, and drywall mud and tile mortar will not cure in a cold room. Timing matters too. Kitchens typically take eight to fourteen weeks once construction begins, so one that starts the first week of November finishes somewhere between the last week of December and early February. Plan the holidays around that date, not the other way around.
Key Takeaways
- In January you cannot shut the furnace off for weeks to keep dust out of the ducts, so the vents in the work area get sealed and the filter gets checked every week.
- Drywall finishing needs the building at 55°F or warmer, and a common thinset needs the air above 50°F for 72 hours after tile is set, so the heat in the work room stays on overnight.
- When an outside wall is opened, the water lines in it lose their insulation, so ask how that wall is protected on a below-zero night.
- A kitchen that starts construction in early November will not be finished for Thanksgiving and probably not for Christmas.
- The one setup that usually means leaving home for part of the job is a house with a single full bathroom having that bathroom remodeled.
Can you live at home while the work happens?
Almost always. What changes from one project to the next is how much of the house you give up, and for how long.
A basement is the easiest. It sits on its own floor, the door at the top of the stairs does half the dust control, and upstairs life barely notices except on loud days. A guest bath in a house with two or more bathrooms is close behind. A kitchen is harder. It is where a household runs, and you lose it from demo day until the counters and sink are back, which is most of the job. The hard cases are a gutted main floor and a single-bathroom house losing that bathroom.
If you are planning more than one project, do not stack the kitchen and your one full bath on the same schedule. We covered why in our guide to what order to remodel in, so I will not repeat it here. This post is about the part that guide skips: what living in the house is like day to day, and what an Iowa winter does to it.
What changes when the windows are shut?
In June, dust control is easy. You turn off the air conditioning for the loud part, crack a window, run a fan blowing out, and the house airs out by dinner. None of that works in January. The furnace runs constantly, the windows stay shut, and the crew is opening an outside door every few minutes during demo and drywall delivery.
The furnace is the dust highway
Forced-air heat pulls air from return grilles all over the house, runs it through the furnace, and pushes it back out to every room. If a return sits in or near the work area, the dust from cutting, demo, and drywall sanding goes into the ductwork and comes out in your bedrooms.
The EPA’s Renovate Right guide, written for work in homes built before 1978, tells contractors to seal off heating and cooling vents in the work area, and it suggests homeowners may need to turn forced-air systems off while the work happens. That second part is easy in May. In an Iowa January you cannot turn the heat off for six weeks.
So the winter version goes like this. Supply registers and returns inside the work zone get covered and taped. The furnace keeps running for the rest of the house. The filter gets checked every week while demo or sanding is going on, and swapped for a fresh one when the dusty phases are done. At the walkthrough, ask your contractor which returns are in or near the work area. A contractor who has to go look has not planned for it yet.
The heat in the work room stays on
Closing the register in the gutted kitchen, or dropping the thermostat to 58 at night because nobody is using that room, can wreck the finish work.
Drywall mud and tile mortar both have minimum temperatures. USG’s joint compound submittal sheet calls for the inside of the building to be held at 55°F or above in cold weather while joints are being finished. TEC’s data sheet for one widely used thinset says to install it only between 50°F and 90°F and to keep the air above 50°F for 72 hours after the tile goes down. Other products carry their own numbers in the same range. A room that drops into the forties overnight is where mud cracks and tile does not bond the way it should.
Leave the heat alone in the work area. If your contractor wants it set somewhere specific, set it there.
Opened walls and water lines
Kitchen sinks often sit on an outside wall, usually under a window, and bathrooms put plumbing on outside walls more often than you would think. When the drywall and insulation come off that wall, the supply lines are sitting a few inches from the sheathing with nothing between them and the cold.
The American Red Cross lists pipes that run along exterior walls with little or no insulation among the ones that freeze most often. An open stud bay in late January fits that description exactly. Ask before demo what the plan is for that wall overnight. Depending on the job, that might mean shutting off and draining that branch, keeping temporary insulation in the bay until the plumber is done, or holding the room warm enough that it does not matter. Any of those works. No answer at all is the one that worries me.
One door for the crew, and it is not your front door
The EPA guide recommends a separate path for the contractor to carry materials in and out, ideally not the entrance your family uses. Good dust advice in any season. In winter it also decides where the salt, the slush, and the cold air come in.
For most suburban houses the garage service door is the right answer. It keeps traffic off your front entry, the garage takes the slush, and the door into the house stays closed more than a front door would during a drywall delivery. Floor protection should run from that door to the work area and nowhere else.
Snow, the dumpster, and the street
A dumpster in the driveway means your cars move to the street, and the street is exactly where you cannot park when it snows. Ankeny bans parking on every public street when a snow ordinance is declared, and cars left out get a $40 ticket and may be towed, according to the city’s snow and ice control page. The same page puts sidewalk clearing on the property owner within 24 hours after the snow stops. That stays your job during a remodel, and the crew’s path to the garage needs shoveling as much as the front walk does.
Des Moines restricts residential street parking during snow removal, and a few older neighborhoods, including Sherman Hill, Drake, Carpenter, Drake Park, and part of River Bend, run on odd and even side parking instead. Before the dumpster shows up, decide where it sits, where your vehicles go on a snow night, and where the crew parks.
Where do you cook for two or three months?
Somewhere else in the house, and it pays to set it up properly before demo instead of improvising the first night.
The dining room is the usual spot. The refrigerator moves there, along with a microwave, a coffee maker, and an electric skillet or a countertop induction burner. Plug them into different circuits. A microwave and an electric skillet on the same dining room circuit will trip the breaker, usually right when dinner is half done.
Cooking turns out to be the easy part. Dishes are what wear people down. There is no kitchen sink, so everything gets washed in a laundry tub, a bathroom vanity, or the bathtub, or it does not get washed because you switched to paper plates. In summer people grill and rinse things off with the hose. In December the hose bib is shut off for the winter and nobody wants to stand at the grill in the dark at 5:30. Budget for eating out more than you think you will. Nobody gets graded on it.
One more thing on kitchens. The eight to fourteen weeks is construction. Design, selections, and cabinet lead time all come first, which is why our planning and budgeting guide treats a twelve-week build as roughly five months once you count everything before it. The temporary kitchen only starts on demo day.
What if it is your only shower?
A bathroom remodel typically runs four to eight weeks of active construction. If that is the only shower in the house, there is a stretch in the middle where you do not have one, and some days the toilet is out too while the floor is open.
People handle it a few ways: a gym membership for the month, a relative across town, or a short-term rental for the part of the job where the shower is torn out. A powder room covers the toilet problem but not the shower. If you have neither, I would rather you plan a couple of weeks away up front than tell yourself you will tough it out. Toughing it out in February, with a dumpster in the driveway and no shower, is how this goes badly.
Can you get it done before the holidays?
Run the calendar first. Thanksgiving is November 26 this year and Christmas falls on a Friday. A kitchen that begins construction on November 2 and runs eight weeks finishes around December 28. If it runs fourteen, you are into the second week of February. And those weeks only start once design and selections are done and cabinets are on order. If your first call to a contractor is in October, construction is not starting November 2.
So here is where I land, and it costs us some jobs. If the reason you want a new kitchen is to host Christmas in it, start in January and host this year in the kitchen you have. Rushing a schedule to beat a holiday is how selections get made in a weekend and regretted for fifteen years. Please do not start demo the week before Thanksgiving to get a head start, either. You will be hosting around plastic walls and a dumpster.
A basement is different. If the upstairs is untouched, a basement that is mid-drywall over Christmas is a closed door and some weekday noise. Plenty of families host through that without the guests noticing.
Whatever you are building, tell your contractor at the start which dates matter: hosting days, guests staying over, the week you are out of town. City offices close for the holidays too, so inspections near those dates can take longer to get on the calendar.
What about kids, pets, and working from home?
Dogs and an outside door that keeps opening do not mix, and in January a dog that slips out is a bigger problem than it is in July. Decide where the dog spends crew hours before the first day. The EPA guide makes the same point for a different reason: in an older house, pets can track lead dust from the work area into the rest of the home.
For kids, the plastic wall is not a door. It has to be treated like one anyway, and that rule needs saying out loud more than once.
If you work from home, demo week is loud. All day, not now and then. Plan calls somewhere else that week, and ask your contractor when the next loud stretch is coming, because there is usually one when tile gets cut or flooring goes down.
When does it make sense to leave for a while?
Not often, but there are a few cases where I would tell you to.
The first is an older home where painted surfaces are being disturbed and there are young children or someone pregnant in the house. The EPA guide says work areas in pre-1978 homes should not be accessible to the people living there while the work happens, and it raises the option of moving out temporarily. Federal rules also require the firm doing that work to be certified for lead-safe practices, so ask to see the certification. A lot of the housing in older Des Moines neighborhoods was built before that cutoff.
The second is a gutted main floor, where the kitchen, the main living space, and the path to the bedrooms are all part of the job at once. You can technically stay. Most people who try it wish they had not.
The third is the one-bathroom house covered above. And a short one: if hardwood floors are being refinished in place, plan on a few days when nobody walks on them, which can mean a few days somewhere else.
Where Elk River Contracting fits
Elk River Contracting is a family-owned design-build remodeler in Ankeny, founded in 2022 by Cole and Marquel Stuedemann, and most of the homes we work in are lived in the whole time. The questions in this post get answered at the walkthrough and the in-office estimate review, before the crew swings a hammer: where the temporary kitchen goes, which door the crew uses, which vents get sealed, and what happens on a night the temperature drops below zero. Those are settled up front, not at change order time. It is a value we put on our About page: we are there to remodel the house, not to take over the household’s calendar.
The reviews come back on the same few things: clean job sites, smooth scheduling, and a team that stays in touch. You can see it in projects like the SW Ankeny kitchen remodel. If the project is a kitchen, a bathroom, or a basement, the living arrangements are the same kind of conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I change my furnace filter during a remodel?
Yes. Check it every week while there is demo or drywall sanding going on, because fine dust loads a filter fast, and put in a fresh one once the dusty phases are over. Sealing the vents in the work area does most of the job. The filter catches what gets past.
Will the crew need a key or a garage code?
For a job that runs several weeks, usually yes, since you will not be home every morning when the crew arrives. A garage keypad code you can change when the project ends is easier than handing out a house key. Decide who has access at the start.
Is it safe to stay home during demolition in an older house?
It depends on who lives there and how the work is contained. If the house was built before 1978 and painted surfaces are being disturbed, federal rules require a certified firm and lead-safe practices, and the EPA advises keeping occupants out of the work area. With young children or a pregnancy in the house, plan on being somewhere else for the demolition at minimum.
Do I need to move out for a basement finish?
Rarely. The basement is its own floor, the stairwell door controls most of the dust, and the upstairs keeps working normally. Expect weekday noise and some traffic through whatever door the crew uses.
Can I get a kitchen done in time to host Thanksgiving or Christmas?
Only if construction starts well before November, which depends on finishing design and selections first. Most homeowners are better off hosting the holidays in the kitchen they have and starting in January than rushing a schedule and regretting the choices for years. The full math is in the Can you get it done before the holidays? section.
Where to start
If you are weighing a project this winter, settle the living arrangements before you settle the tile. Where you will cook, shower, and park, and which dates cannot move, belong on the table at the first walkthrough. If you want help working that out for your house, get in touch and we will start with a phone call.