Never use the phrase, "We'll only have to..."

I still haven't yet recovered what I'm now calling the Peony Tragedy but decided to check up on our next project anyway. Our friends Paul and Leslie wonderfully volunteered to help us hang drywall on the ceiling in our kitchen. Loyal readers may remember that we have one of those beautiful styrofoam dropped ceilings with the requisite and equally beautiful fluorescent light boxes in the kitchen.

I should now recognize that when I say anything that begins with, "We'll only have to..." or "It will only take..." that I'm just asking for it. Well, I thought we'd "only have to" take down the ceiling and disconnect the lights from what I figured would be two separate ceiling electrical boxes. Yep, I was very wrong.

As you can see from the photos above, it's a gigantic mess up there. While the ceiling should be relatively easy to remove, they did a terrible job of rigging the lights - wiring punched directly through the plaster on the walls - and one box with multiple wires running all over the place (including outside to our mud porch). The powder room adjacent to the kitchen that they added at some point was never finished all the way to the ceiling so there is a gap above the wall. I don't know what all of this is going to entail but I know it won't be anything that involves the word "only."