Ooops

by Tawny

Have you ever unintentionally started a huge project?

Not the huge planned projects, like re-tiling a bathroom or landscaping a yard. But oops huge projects.

Like being so sick of the hallway having the only strip of butt-ugly carpet left in a house of hardwood floors, so despite your husband's warning, you decide to rip it up - after all, how bad can the original wood floors be? Well, let me tell ya, they can be pretty bad if the cretins who carpeted over the floor had spilled a bucket of white paint all the way down the badly pitted wood. But... Do you the thing about ripping up carpet when you have no intention of letting your husband put it back when he gets home? Yeah... it means the carpet is toast. That preceded our two-week long refinishing of the hallway and bedroom floors (why refinish just the hall when it flows into the bedrooms?) James still gives me 'the look' when I mention that how great that hallway turned out. Seriously, it was gorgeous! (so are my puppies lounging on it, aren't they?)

I've had a few of these oopses.

And then there are the less expensive oopses. Like when I need to find the oatmeal in the pantry. But someone (aka my daughter) hates oatmeal so she hides it behind the peanut butter or the cereal or anything and everything. A few weeks of this and the oatmeal is good and buried. So I start pulling things out. Before I know it, the pantry is cleared and I'm reorganizing and cleaning it all out. Its usually dinner time by then.

I do this with knitting, too. I see my knitting basket as I walk by and the urge to play with yarn grabs me. Before I know it, I'm relaxing and knitting away. But I'm horrible at remembering where I'm at with a pattern, so I always have to keep going until I reach a pattern change. Or finish.

I need to learn how to do things halfway, or how to take breaks. I've come to discover that I'm pretty much an all or nothing kind of gal. So by now, I should know better than starting projects when I don't have time to finish them, right?

So this weekend I needed a tool from my scrapbook closet. A little background. When we moved into our new house a year ago, I claimed a closet for scrapping supplies. But its not nearly as much space as I had before, and I'll admit, I was unloading more than unpacking. So the closet is stacked willy-nilly with supplies, all teetering precariously upon one another. To get this one stamp, I had to move a few things. By the time my husband came home from camping last night, the entire office and bedroom were strewn with supplies. Because I'd hauled them all out, and knew that there was no point in putting them back until it was tidy.

But... the closet defied tidiness. It required shelves. Seriously, it screamed for them. I was practically screaming myself as I freaked out trying to write in the mess that was my now messy office. James walked in with his backpack and camping supplies slung over his shoulder, took one look at the narrow, meandering path he'd have to traverse to reach the bedroom and... yeah... he gave me 'that look'.

And then he made me wait until today for the shelves!!! How can people wait when oops projects are screaming to be completed? I just don't get that.

How about you? Have you ever accidentally started a big project that turned into much more than you'd anticipated? Do you plan your projects, or are they often accidental ventures into organization? And are you in my neurotic, have to get it finished, camp? Or are you like my husband and comfortable getting it done when it gets done?