I'm a Schizophrenic About Home Projects and So Am I

Lovely though the new closet looks, the new baseboards sill require installing in the upstairs bedroom.

I'm not the kind of guy who likes to begin one project before the current one is finito. I know people – mostly guys – who leave partially completed projects in their wake like a trail of Michael Moore's Ring Ding wrappers. These ADD-addled handymen, bored with a current home-improvement project, abandon it to begin another and then, another. Not a damn thing ever gets finished.

Sorry, that's just not in my makeup. In fact, I typically obsess over an unfinished project to the point I forsake attacking paying projects in the name of completing some in-progress household renovation. (Maybe that's why I have no money. Nah.)

Usually if I walk away from a project it's because 1) I run out of money and have to wait for the coffers to replenish, or 2) I've encountered an unexpected problem and need a couple of days to noodle out a solution.

I recently put my upstairs renovation project on hold to tackle another fixer-upper endeavor. I've been sleeping in the downstairs guestroom for the past several months for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that my bed in the master bedroom is stacked with stuff from the unfinished upstairs-bedroom project. I usually sleep downstairs during June, July and August anyway because it's cooler. Otherwise, I rarely even enter the downstairs guestroom. A couple of weeks ago I noticed several cracks in the walls from the house settling. I've probably patched a dozen such cracks in the nine years I've lived in the house. No big deal, right?

An area with three of the cracks currently under repair in the downstairs guestroom.

Well, that's true, but I happened to have about one-third of a bucket of drywall mud left over from the upstairs projects. The stuff doesn't keep forever once the bucket has been opened. I decided to go ahead and patch the cracks in the downstairs bedroom. With my recent spurt of travels, what should have been a three or four day project – five with painting the involved walls – has stretched into about three weeks and still isn't finished. So I have to walk around stuff and squeeze past the sofa that's pulled out from the wall in that bedroom to get into bed.

Having half of my house in disarray is driving me nuts. I don't know how much more I can take. I should be sanding down the most-recent application of drywall mud rather than writing this post. What is wrong with me?

I have one more scheduled trip looming on the horizon and then a dry spell as far as the eye can see. Well, at least my eye. My goal is to have the downstairs guestroom and the second bedroom upstairs finished by the end of March. Then it's on to finishing the upstairs bath. That will free me up to start on the three outside projects that need doing.

Man, it makes my head hurt. Do you hear voices?