This afternoon’s plan was to change out the knobs on the cabinet that lives in the bathroom hallway. That was the plan. A three-minute project, tops.

Before.

This cabinet houses all the things a family needs near the bathroom, as our actual bathroom is tiny (6 foot by 6 foot) and has no storage. It’s an IKEA cabinet I grabbed on a whim from the as is section a couple of years ago. It never had a knob for the bottom drawer and it sits a little funny, but it has the storage we need and its in an out of the way corner so its oddness doesn’t really matter. It also lives in front of a door, semi-camouflaging it.

I’d finally remembered to pick up some knobs when I was at Anthropologie Monday. I removed the old ones on the door and installed the new ones. Then I tried to shut the doors and realized the threaded bit ran into the shelves. Anthro knobs have a long threaded screw so you can cut or break it at the length you need. Rummaging through the basement to find the hacksaw seemed like a lot of work so instead I thought I’d just move the shelf. In retrospect, the hacksaw might have been easier. Moving the shelf led to the realization that the cabinet was a disaster. So I decided to just empty and reorganize the whole thing.

Which led to this.

Ummm, 15 half-used boxes of band aids? Really? Then this thing came out.

Finally there was this.

And then, eventually, I reached the original goal.

My three-minute project took two hours. Because of course I decided to start it just before a work call during a double play date. Multi-tasking insanity. On the plus side I can now easily open the cabinet AND find what I’m looking for afterwards. Even more impressive, the kids were all playing quietly in the basement during the call (do I know how to take a day off or what).

Anyone else experience escalating projects?