The Snowball Effect Part 1

Do you ever start a project and before you know it, it's turned into a whole mess more work than what you bargained for?  I call that the Snowball Effect and it seems to happen to me a lot. 

Every year when we open the lake house in the spring, there's always little things that need to be done.  You know, clean away the cobwebs and the dust that accumulated over the winter, open the windows, clean up the yard, that kind of thing.  So Chablis and I started on the yard, pulling weeds around the patio and spray painting the lawn furniture....

Swept off the back deck and pulled out the deck chairs.....

Cleaned out under the deck where we found the remains of an old army soldier that Tony and his friend had strapped a cherry bomb onto a couple of years ago...... Another one bites the dust.....

Petey inspected our work and kept getting his chain wrapped around everything.  He is no help!

Weeded the back garden and planted some flowers and tomato plants.....

So ok, that wasn't bad and it only took us 2 mornings to get that done and then we moved inside the house because I was itching to move the front room furniture around.  I hate our front room - it's long and narrow and just such a stupid shape.  We decided to dust and vacuum everything as we shoved the furniture around into a new arrangement.  So this is what it looks like now and at least we can get the front windows open and actually sit and look outside....

You would think I'd be happy with all that and just leave well enough alone.  But I can't, because I am insane and this is where the snowball effect came in.  Last year we had a mild earthquake in our area and it rocked the ceiling loose in Chablis' bedroom and the main bathroom.  Since it was the middle of summer and we had more important things to be doing, like swimming, fishing and water skiing, we had just taken a bunch of screws and the power drill and shoved the ceilings back into place.....more or less.....  And it looked like crap but I just sort of ignored it.  Until now.   Like I said, Snowball Effect.....

We go back into Chablis' room and I took one look at the ceiling and decided now was the time to get that fixed.  We pulled out the drill, screws and some spackle, climbed up on a ladder and got the ceiling back together and spackled in.  As I was standing on the ladder my little pea brain started spinning and I decided that we may as well paint the ceiling and since we were going to go to all that trouble, then we may as well paint the whole room because I hated the pink walls and before I knew it, we were on our way to town to get paint, and brushes, and rollers and drop cloths.  Did I mention that I'm insane?

So we cleaned all the furniture, took down the curtains and the shelves, spackled holes, shoved the furniture out of the way and painted the room.  But you'll have to come back and read the next post to see the finished results as well as the other project we tackled.