Hus Band out of Town

My husband is out of town for 2 WEEKS! He actually left on Monday and will return next Sunday, methinks. I have realized I'm a truly boring person because (as a co-worker put it) instead of being able to "just party and eat pop tarts and drink boxed wine and run around your house naked like when your parents would leave you alone as a teenager. You gotta do shit." I've given myself a long list of things I want to get accomplished while he's away. And I'm boring because I'm really excited about these plans. They are mostly things that involve destroying the kitchen (or at least the small semblance of order that we currently have) which is easier to tolerate when you are one person who thinks that rice krispy treats make for a great dinner.

Oh that reminds me of a second sub-plan to the for these days alone. I was going to try to avoid going to the grocery store entirely to save up for our Seattle vacation. As I had cup a soup last night, I've already had to abandon this plan. Cup a soup 4 days in to being left alone, means you have hit the bottom of the barrel (or pantry) and need to buy some food.

My plans are to:
paint the dining room
hang dining room curtains
continue with painting the kitchen cabinets, which includes making repairs to the wood veneer, moving the fridge, and emptying large drawers full of stuff
paint exterior metal columns black (someone pointed out the current blue/rust looks is sort of shabby chic, but I think black will be better)
use chalkboard paint on drawers (per previous post)

So far, I've begun the prep work for the kitchen painting.

I cleared the dining room (which is totally not a dining room at this point, but a staging area for kitchen improvements). This picture is very sad, because I consider the dining room cleared for painting, yet clearly it's not. Imagine how awful it looked before?!?

 I also bought zero VOC paint for the dining room. (Test painting spot pictured below).