I'm not saying anything that battle-experienced home renovators don't know. Sometimes, the simplest little task can consume gobs of time and a bucket of money before you realize you made a tragic mistake. Not always, of course. That's how you get suckered into doing it over and over again.
It started as a simple idea: I wanted to have music in my back yard. I could have bought a boombox a/k/a ghetto blaster for a hundred bucks and kept it under the deck. Problem solved and, when all is said and done, that actually would have been a more flexible solution than the mission I set for myself. Even if I wanted XM Radio (which I did) they make XM blasters too. The bonus would have been that I could have had XM in my car as well.
Instead, I wanted the speakers fed by the big, honkin' Denon home theatre system in the living room. Why? I don't freakin' know. Probably because it was there.