Water stains and other small wars

I finally got fed up enough with my office ceiling to paint it. It's one of those things that I notice all the time and it annoys me, but I HATE painting ceilings, especially after my experience in the dining room in January. Anyway, my office had some pretty gnarly water stains on the ceiling (which we think came into being pre-1995, when the roof got redone. You can see water stains on the shake shingles in the attic), which I semi-successfully painted over.

I say "semi" because apparently, painting over water stains is no picnic. I would have known this if I hadn't decided beforehand that people who whine about painting over water stains just don't apply the paint thick enough, and bothered to do a quick search about it. After the paint started refusing to stick to the plaster, I did just that. THEN I applied another coat of paint, extra-thick. Results:

Not bad! Definitely an improvement, especially after I....

That's right...bleach. In the course of my Googling, I ran across some savvy mom who recommended wiping water stains with straight bleach. I would NOT recommend doing this on any wall that's not white to begin with. But we had some water stains on the ceiling of our bedroom, which happens to be directly beneath the upstairs bathroom. This is the other ceiling-painting project I've been avoiding and stewing about. It's only a relatively small area, but I figured matching the paint color would be impossible, so I'd have to do the whole ceiling.

The bleach was worth a shot, and it WORKED!! I put on my protective eyewear, grabbed a glove, and took my cup of bleach and sponge into the bedroom. A few wipes later, and the stains were gone. The ceiling's slightly whiter than the surrounding areas, but I can live with that.

I also "fixed" our vacuum cleaner, which had developed an odd habit of working for 7 minutes, then slowly turning off, by removing the world's biggest clump of dusty crap that had lodged inside it.

One more thing....

Last Sunday, we brought back enough mulch to finish covering this bed in our side driveway. Minus those prickly juniper bushes and plus a little mulch, and it's looking a lot better.