Burning Question: Oh The Horror Story?
Let’s be honest. Not every home improvement project goes the way you planned (take our botched twine mobile attempt for example). And sometimes they can even go horribly wrong. After reading an article in last weekend’s New York Times about DIY disaster stories (including a simple toilet leak that snowballed into a $3000 three-day renovation) we got to wondering: do you have any home repair/do-it-yourself horror stories to share?
Maybe there’s that time when your body came crashing through the attic floor into the room below? Or that simple electrical project that suddenly blacked out the whole neighborhood? There have gotta be a few Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor moments among us…
And even if those examples are a bit on the dramatic side, we’d love to hear if you have any project-gone-awry tales (big or small). Especially if you’re able to look back and laugh now. After all, nobody’s perfect and perhaps we can learn from (or at least laugh along with) each others’ unfortunate but oh so entertaining DIY missteps. So spill it people.
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Actually we just had a mini-horror story from last weekend when my husband tried to sand off part of a kitchen cabinet so we could fit our new fridge.
I seem to botch a lot of small projects so I’m usually too afraid to try anything major. So sad!
http://uwkimmy.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/the-night-of-sawdust/
As a first time homeowner, I knew it wouldn’t be easy to begin updating our 40+ year old home. But I’m beginning to think that Murphy’s Law applies with any DIY project. We’ve owned the home for less than two months, and while I don’t have any “disaster” stories (yet), we have had plenty of mishaps. I fell off a ladder and got pretty banged up, a nosy neighbor reported us to codes and we had no less than 5 trucks pull up to tell us what we were doing was wrong (too bad they all told us a different story on how to fix it), and we discovered a fire waiting to happen in several hallway fixtures. I’m happy to report I now have a drainage specialist, electrician, and plumber all on speed dial. Oh – and the seemingly simple “we hate this linoleum in our master bath so it has to go” is turning in to much more. We discovered a toilet leak and rotting sub-flooring. That may have been a disaster waiting to happen – imagine waking up in the middle of the night to use the restroom only to find yourself in the basement! So now we have a new sub-floor and are preparing for a great master bathroom makeover we weren’t even ready to do yet. Unfortunately, I think this all comes with the territory!!!
oooo DIY horror! like that time I went cheap on the toilet bowl wax ring replacement—NEVER BUY BOL WAX FROM HOME DEPOT—and the toilet ended up leaking down into the kitchen drywall necessitating a full drywall replacement.
http://www.oneprojectcloser.com/general/toilet-heck/
Hmmm, where to begin! After renovating an entire rowhouse MOSTLY ourselves, there are plenty. I think the one I laugh about the most now is, after spending weeks redoing our master bedroom (lighting, drywall, closets, framing doorways, exposing brick, wiring, painting) we were in celebration mode when we finally finished most of it. We put our pretty new duvet on the bed, hung a pretty mirror over our newly painted fireplace mantel, and reveled in our overall DIY awesome-ness. . .
Until the middle of the night we were awoken by a loud crash that scared the living daylights out of us. We live in Baltimore city, so loud noises like that are even more troubling than normal. Turns out my boyfriend had hung the pretty mirror using a tiny hook, didn’t even think about using an anchor or something more substantial. So the whole thing came crashing down. It is hilarious to me now, because after all the complex wiring and framing and planning that he did, without a hitch, he couldn’t do something as simple as hanging a mirror :)
I have a horror story for ya! When my hubz and I first bought our ranch house – one of the bedrooms had a makeshift 1/4 bath in it, which consisted of toilet surrounded by sheetrock. We didn’t think there was any water going to it – HA! So as my cousin and I were painting the fireplace mantle, the guys (our husbands) were going to do demolition on the fake bathroom.***SIGH*** 20 minutes later – we heard the F-Bomb flying out of the room – followed by them running passed the living room and down the stairs. Well when I walked down there it looked like we had a mini rainstorm in our finished basement… Lovely :)
Great question!
We had to replace a sewer line – 40 feet long, 15 feet deep. Not surprisingly, no contractor in town wanted to do it. So we had to.
No contractor would pave it for over 8 months, too. That was a disaster. A big truck got stuck in our mud pit.
But we could have running water in the house!
Katie
Oh yeah, I’ve had a few stories…..
A good one was when I tried to tile my entire bath/shower by myself when I was 27. My Mom is super handy and said to put the grout on and leave it for 24hrs. So I did that. But I missed the part where she said I was supposed to sponge off the excess before that 24 hr period. OOPS!! My BF and I spent 4 hrs on a Friday night chipping away hardened grout. It looks great now, but what a pain! Literally!
If that hadn’t happened, the tiling would have been a breeze!
We’ve owned for a year now and so far so good (knock on wood). But this summer I’m starting a slew of DIY remodeling projects, so we’ll see how long we can go without a story.
But, hey, what’s your worst story?
My mom was helping me tackle an “easy” bathroom makeover. You know, painting and some new laminate flooring in my very first house. It’s easy to take up the toilet, lay the flooring and then seal the toilet again, right? Well, not so much in an older house. We could NOT get it sealed tight. (Maybe it was a bad wax ring as another commenter mentioned). Everytime it would leak into my laundry room right below. So frustrating! And to top it off, it was the only bathroom in the house so it was essential we get it back in working order ASAP! Nothing like working under pressure with a full bladder!
We bought a 1950 gem about three years, and before moving in we refinished all of the hardwood floors ourselves (16 hours of sanding, straight), and they turned out beautifully, and we also hand textured the walls and ceilings in every room (the old walls were pretty bumpy and uneven), and talk about an aching back!!! But after all that, it was deciding on the color of paint for the hallway that was the biggest disaster. I’ve decided that hallways are just tricky, because they lack their own natural light, and you have light coming in from other rooms bouncing around and distorting the color. Our soft butter yellow looked more like a highlighter, then we samples a soft sage green that looked more like granny smith apple, finally we thought we would do something a little more bold and dark, so we went with this beautiful daker blue…as my husband was painting I just kept saying, stop, stop, stop! And he would roll faster and faster assured that when I saw it on the wall all complete I would love it. After cringing for two weeks everytime we walked through the hallway, I decided to repaint one more time, although I waited until my husband left town. Went with a yummy oatmeal color, and it is beautiful.
we took up linoleum flooring in our house when we bought it only to find rotting subfloor around the toilet. i’m glad we ripped it up and found it sooner rather than later though, b/c now it’s all fixed and tiled beautifully! i have a feeling there is going to be a toilet theme….
My Uncle picked up a “discount” faucet from one of the huge warehouse stores for my grandmother’s kitchen. I decided it would be nice to help out, and I installed it for her. Unfortunately, the connectors had the worst possible excuse for a seal, and both hot and cold intake tubes slid right out of the connectors during the night, flooding the whole house with 3 inches of water, which my grandmother found in the morning. Two carpet cleaners later, (which was it’s own special job, since we headed out at dawn) we managed to get everything sucked up and dried out, and new stainless steel connectors installed. I never did figure out why Grammy never called for any more projects…..
I still shudder just thinking about this… In the first month of renovations, my husband was trying to remove an old gas hook-up for a grill in our backyard. He was planning on cutting the gas line in the basement that led up to the hook-up in the backyard. Remembering (or should I say assuming) that the guy installing our new AC/heating system had turned off the gas coming into the house, my husband thought that it would be just fine to use an electric (yes, electric) saw to cut right through the gas line. Mid-cut, he hears that horror sound of hissing gas. Freaking out, he sprinted upstairs and outside to try to turn off the gas to the house, only to realize that he needed a different tool. 45 seconds later, he was able to finally cut it off… 45 seconds of gas leaking into our house. Fortunately, he’s still alive… and our house is still standing.
Other mishaps? He did actually fall through the attic floor, with only a stud catching him from falling onto the stairwell. We, too, found rotted sub-flooring in our master bathroom which doubled the length of time needed for the renovation. Oh, and the running total of burst pipes since we bought our house in September is 11. (Yes, it was a foreclosure) We constantly joke about writing a book about our renovation titled “Learning the hard way”…
Hi Sherry! I met you last weekend at the Riverrock event. I’m Mary’s friend. Anyway, on to the disaster. When we moved into our house the downstairs bathroom was painted a muddy purple color over some really atrocious hand-applied textured plaster. It was…unspeakable. I decided to remove the plaster stuff myself and after much trial and error, found that a scraper tool worked best. It was really gross and messy and took *forever*. As I removed, I discovered why the previous owner had plastered over the wall – cracks. Big ones. Wow. I finished removing the plaster and promptly hired a professional to skim coat the walls. It started out as a weekend project and ended up taking a year and a half from start to finish. The bathroom looks fantastic now, though!
I don’t really have any disaster stories to tell(yet!) but have you seen the show Renovation Realities on HGTV and DIY? It is hilarious. The show features people trying to do home renovation on a deadline, a budget, and all by themselves, and all the things that go wrong. Many of them don’t really know what they are doing and have to figure it out along the way.
My husband’s very first large carpentry project was built-ins he made for our den. They were large, flanking the fireplace. The disaster struck one day when he walked into the house with a bloody shop rag wrapped around his hand. “I cut the tip of my finger off.” (I found out later that he had been using safety precautions with the table saw, but it had skipped and pulled the board in quickly. It was his quick reaction that made it as minor an injury as it ended up being.)
The kids had just gone down for their nap, so as I raced upstairs to wake them so I could drive him to the hospital, he said, “No, I’ll walk. Call Mom to come watch them.” We did live in a subdivision adjacent to the hospital, but still! He insisted and walked out the door before I could do anything about it. So, I called my mother-in-law, who got there much faster than she should have, and raced to the ER, where I found DH almost in a faint.
Thankfully, the saw had just sliced deeply into his finger, and there was nothing missing. It’s healed completely now, and you can barely tell where it happened, unless you know what to look for: a slight indentation in the nail.
I was painting a chair white and was just hoping that the 4th coat of paint would work this time… I was sitting on the floor and was painting the legs when I realized that I had missed a spot on one of the other legs, I leaned my head to the side, covered up the spot, and kept right on painting. My husband came home a few minutes later and stopped as soon as I looked up and goes, “So I guess everything is going to be white in this house?” and I had no idea what he was talking about… turns out that when I had leaned so innocently to the side, I had dunked my dark brown hair into the white paint and didn’t even realize it! Thank goodness for water-based paint! Lesson learned!
When remodeling our kitchen we have had a few
- we pulled up the very old 3 layers of linoleum to find a the sub floor. While holding my 10 month old daughter – the sub floor broke and I had one leg hanging in my den that we had refinshed the year before. Thankfully we weren’t hurt – but that hole in the den lasted quite a while
- we screwed into some heating pipes under the floor unknowingly – and they leaked out the hole in the den – so if not for that accident we probably would not have found out about the leak until much more damage had been done
- when removing the old cabinets we found a whole corner of the house (that holds the elictrical box on the outside) had been completely rottted away by a leak in the rook – the electric box was basically only attached to some shingles.
Homeownership and remodeling are always a fun time – you never know what you are going to find until you start!
Attempted to paint the bathroom ceiling for the first time. Started paint and noticed it wasn’t sticking quite well and pulling off the old paint! Old paint was some sort of terrible crap that literally was peeling off. It was awful. 1 hour project became 4 hours.
Almost a year ago we moved into our new (60s vintage) house. My parents arrived to help us paint. While dumping a bucket of dirty water into the toilet, my father accidentally let the rag in said bucket go down the toilet. We spent the next week running to Target when we needed a bathroom while the plumbers worked on it. A few months later, we took a shower upstairs and the water wouldn’t drain, then went downstairs and saw LOTS of water spilling from the ceiling into the downstairs bathroom we had JUST painted. Plumbers came back…turns out we had a collapsed pipe…in our cement slab foundation. Pipe bypass surgery in sued, kicking a big hole in our “perfect condition” vintage bathroom tile. Then a week later, we had another collapsed pipe under the utility room (more pipe bypass), and we found out our sewer pipe needed to be replaced. Now we had holes in our bathroom which we couldn’t fix because we couldn’t match the vintage tile color. Our brilliant idea was to remove the tile intact from one wall to repair the hole in the other. The sweat and swearing began. 60s bathrooms are built like bunkers, with layers of tile, cement, chicken wire, and backerboard. Needless to say, removing enough tile intact was laughable. So we changed gears and got out the sledgehammer. And gosh darn-it, I smashed a hole in the toilet. So we took out the toilet. Then we decided, why not replace the ugly floor tile? We smashed a hole in that only to discover it had been directly attached to the cement. Months of chiseling later, we had finally removed all the wall and floor tile, only to discover we’d have to skimcoat the (now badly uneven) cement floor. Self-leveling cement does NOT self-level. Picked out floor tile. The perfect color happened to be in 19″ squares. That’s okay, we’ll just cut each tile into 4! Porcelain tile does NOT cut easily, and we had to buy double what we started with. Eventually laid the tile ourselves (sorta crooked) and put up beadboard where the tile surround was, replaced the ugly border tile in the shower, and installed a new toilet (Totos are awesome). Tried to replace the bad shower diverter, only to discover it is completely stuck in the wall…we have a plumber friend coming over to give it a try. Went to install the new sink in the new vanity only to find out the wrong one had been sent…four months ago. Still in negotiations to let me exchange it. So a year later, we STILL have plumbing problems, but all in all are still happy with our house, and are still happily married. ha! When the bathroom is finally finished, we’ll be sure to send before and after picts!
Hey guys!
Quick question- We are looking at sprucing up our 3 season porch. It was added onto our brick home by the previous owners and therefore one wall is red brick. It’s too dark for such a small space, and a space we would like to make bright, so I was wondering your words of wisdom on painting brick. Is it easy to do? Do you know if it’s removable incase we ever wanted to sell the house? Thanks!
Hey Allison,
Here’s a brick painting tutorial for ya (you can find a bunch of step by step tutorials on our How-To tab under the header). It’s definitely not something you can easily undo, though, so I would encourage you guys to think about it a while before grabbing those paint brushes! That being said, we love how much paint lightened up our two dark brick fireplaces.
xo,
Sherry
We bought a 1940s bungalow for our first house and the entire thing was one big DIY project. The horror story, however, happened when we had to tear up six – yes, SIX – layers of linoleum in both the kitchen and the bathroom. (Do you know how many staples are in a floor that’s covered by SIX layers of plastic? THOUSANDS.)
After pulling them all and putting down a new subfloor, we had a lovely new kitchen floor.
A week later, our 6 month-old beagle/coonhound puppy (who’s apparently part GOAT) ripped up a 2′x 3′ patch of that brand new linoleum in the doorway and scattered the pieces throughout the house.
Needless to say, it was the ultimate test of patience (with the house AND the dog). And we finished the house a year later and sold it for a nice chunk of change.
I did a complete bathroom renovation in the house I owned 12 years ago. I ripped out a cheapo shower stall and replaced it with a clawfoot tub like the original would have been.
I have to take out the subflooring – and that’s when I saw that the previous homeowner had removed WAY MORE than he should have when he put in his cheapo tacky shower.
I was on a tight budget – I hired a plumber for the rough plumbing but I did everything else (by myself…. yeah well I am a “type A” home renovator).
Even though I am sure I repaired it properly, I could never get the image of the missing joist out of my head.
After I sold the house a few years later, it hit me that I could stop worrying now. Bathing in that cast iron claw foot tub was never quite as soothing as it would have been, had I simply paid someone else to do it. I will never take on that level of work again! That’s why the pro’s exist!
Not really a reno story but more of a decorating disaster. I wanted to put floating shelves right above the sink so I can display some knick knacks. My husband was a trooper and volunteered to do it for me while I was having my girls night out. Next thing I know I got a picture message showing that he drilled straight through the wall, right into the pipes behind the wall. I came home to the kitchen being soaked and a huge hole in the wall where he replaced the pipe. It was a mess and we still have a hole in the wall, covered up by a message board :)
Well I guess mine is more of a landscaping disaster, but I suppose that you may need to hear it for your own safety. My 2 year old son and I were looking for something to do around outside since my husband had just returned from his night shift and was resting. I decided we would start our own little garden in the backyard. After a quick trip to Home Depot we were ready to go. After about 1 minute into the garden work my son was bored and wanted to ride his tractor around the patio. There was some debris so I grabbed the leaf blower to clear it for him. Here’s where things turn for the worse. I was blowing leaves and twigs and I bent down to pull a weed that grew up between the cracks of my pavers. When SWOOOOOOSH! ALL of the hair on the right side of my hair was sucked into the fan of the blower. Sucked in, wrapped up, tangled and stuck! I had a leaf blower stuck to my head. Panic set in. OMG I have to drive to the hospital with a leaf blower on my sholder. How will I get my son in a car seat? What am I going to do?I grabbed my son up best I could and ran inside to wake my husband. I can only imagine what THAT was like for him. I’m hysterical trying to explain why I am carrying a leaf blower like its a boom box and he is still rubbing his eyes thinking maybe its a dream. His first idea is cut it off. As in cut my hair off? We ain’t talkin about a few hairs its the ENTIRE right side of my hair! Thats a whole piggy! OUT of the question! Plan B: he gets a screw driver, my head lying in his lap with leaf blower on top of it whilst he twists away at screws. I was so embarassed I begged him “please don’t tell anyone I did this, Please!” Piece by piece gets removed until we are down to the motor and the plasic body of the blower which my hair was still treaded thru. He starts to unwrap and unwrap hair. Finally I’m free from it. I run to the mirror to find a BLACK dreadlock all slicked up with motor grease. I remain optimisic, maybe I can just tuck it back behind my ear and no one will notice? UHH! I grab my brush and start working out the tangles. After a few hours that matted rats nest that was once my hair was lying in the sink. I didn’t lose the entire side of hair just the section right behind my ear. After I was free and calm and knew i didnt’ have to wear a hat the rest of my life, I was reading the leaf blower warnings trying to justify my embarassing scenario. I saved my scrap of hair that was left and my broken leaf blower. I was mad for a week saying I was going to write them a letter and blah blah blah. But the more time that passed the less mad I was and started realizing it was kind of funny. Soon after I gave up on that garden. To this day I won’t touch a leaf blower (or hair dryers or electric canopeners or toothbrushes). And that garden….
The previous owners had moved to their new retirement home, while they tried to sell the house. They didn’t empty it out, which included all the food in the kitchen cabinets, including an open bag of dog food. When we moved in, there turned out to be a thriving mouse community in the basement under the kitchen. After sealing up all the gaps to prevent further mouse intrusion, we noticed a smell in the bathroom off the kitchen. At first we thought it was a loose wax seal – so we replaced it. The smell got worse. Turns out one of the mouse highways we sealed up wasn’t to the outside of the house, it was to the bathroom wall. In ripping out the bathroom wall we found a deceased mouse family, and the wires they had chewed through. Also, we found that the external wall had mold, and major water damage/rot — due to failed flashing on the roof above. After having the roof repaired, the window replaced, fixing the chewed wires, replacing damaged studs, resheet-rocking, new beadboard and repainting, it all looks okay now.
Whoa! Quite the horror stories. The leaf blower incident was my favorite, Stephanie A.
My story involves my family room makeover featured on YHL.
I had the textured ceiling tested for asbestos, and it had only TRACE elements. I was psyched. But it turns out trace, less that 1%, is still handled like asbestos. Sooooo, we had it abated by guys in hazmat suits. The tile floor too, even though we didn’t have it tested… but just in case. An inexpensive DIY project turned pricey, but we didn’t want to mess around w/ asbestos.
In our first house remodel, the single bathroom was disgusting. I got the stomach flu one night and almost was more sick about having to sit on the floor than the vomitting itself.
The next week I decided that in the “mean time” we would lay some of those peel and stick tiles. but the floor needed leveling big time. I bought a leveling compound, and removed the other disgusting floor, only to find that the toilet was only supported by the cast iron plubming (as well as the 3′x 3′ square of flooring around the toilet).
So my little “mean time” project turned into an entire remodel top to bottom, including new framing, and floor joists. But at least we didn’t enexpectedly fall into the cellar at 3:00 in the morning!
My fiance and I recently refinished our kitchen cabinets. We followed your instructions to a T but ended up with weird little bumps all over the cabinets. Not your fault, we think we just have a really dusty apartment. Yuck.
But that wasn’t the big disaster. The paint, that was the big disaster. We wanted our 70 year old cabinets to be black. We have this too cute original retro stove/oven that is pale yellow that we thought would really pop with the black cabinets. Well, getting black paint is easier said than done. First we went with a Behr paint, Ace of Spades. Looked black on the card, but after the first coat we realized it was more of a charcoal grey. Well that led my beloved to Home Depot where he picked up a can of what the HD paint guy swore was the blackest of the black, Ralph Lauren Tea Kettle Black.
He must have mixed incorrectly because the color we ended up with was not the same color as the paint chip- we got a midnight blue color. Perfectly lovely, but true black she ain’t. Ce la vie, they’re pretty. Will send our before and after pics for your judgement!
Thanks! And keep on keepin’ on with younghouselove!
Hey Lauren,
The midnight blue color sounds lovely! And for future reference, the best true black paint we’ve found is Glidden’s Dark Secret. As for the little bumps on the cabinets, it sounds like it could have been the roller (good quality wool rollers don’t rile up the paint as much and cause bubbles and prickling like a foam one can). It also could have been the paint itself (if you mix paint a lot it gets sort of bubbly and foamy (sort of like soap) so we always mix it slowly with a paint stick and let it settle for a bit, and whenever we pour it into our paint tray we do it slowly to avoid the foamy paint predicament. Hope it helps!
xo,
Sherry
When my husband and I moved into our apartmnt in 2006, we decided we wanted to put some paint on the walls. We got the keys on a Friday morning, and immediately got to work painting. The first room we painted was our office/spare bedroom. My husband fell in love with this gorgeous shade of blue. We were nearly finished with that room; I was working on some of the edges, my sister was working on one corner, and my husband was painting above the door. He decided that he would hold the paint tray while he was painting. He ended up leaning back just enough to reach the wall, and the paint poured all down the front of him. He had it all over his shirt, shorts, shoes, and our carpet. While my sister and I sopped up as much as possible and kept the carpet wet, my husband ran to Home Depot and rented a Rug Doctor. We were able to get all of the paint out of the carpet. You couldn’t even tell that the cream carpet had blue paint all over it. My husband’s shirt, shoes, and shorts still have the paint on them though.
Hey everyone – loving the stories, so please keep them coming (hazmat suits, anna see?? WOW!).
Jill asked for our horror story and we unfortunately (or fortunately) don’t have a completely insane one quite yet. Our closest call was when we simply wanted to replace the fixtures in our shower because they were a little rusted. When we pulled back the access panel behind the tub it revealed even worse rust and corrosion around the 50+ year old pipes in the wall. They began leaking after the slightest touch. That, coupled with the fact that it’s very difficult to turn off the water to our house (I have to stick my hand down a hole in the front yard – and it was pouring rain on this particular day), meant we were on the road to disaster. But I got the water turned off and we waved the white flag and called in a professional to replace the entire shower plumbing for us. Now it’s as good as new!
But trust us, if we have a horror story anytime soon you guys will be the first to hear about it.
-John
This isn’t necessarily about a home improvement project gone wrong rather – something we had meant to improve and didn’t which turned into a giant mess. We bought our home (obviously a flip) about 3 years ago. There is a cellar underneath which can be accessed only by a set of stairs outside. The cellar houses our hot water heater and our furnace. Well, it snowed – a lot- this winter. We were frozen up from before Christmas to after Christmas. Here is the story I wrote in my blog…
… I stayed awake late watching BBC shows on Youtube. Around 11:45, I went out to feed our annoying cat and I heard a hissing sound begin as I was turning around to go back inside. You see the weather had gone from freezing or well below, to about 40 degrees in a matter of hours. We had this ridiculous pipe situation – installed by the crack-heads who owned this house previously- in the stair well to the basement, where the furnace resides, is a pipe which is connected to the hose spigot for the back yard. It was wrapped in an insulating foam tube (except for a small line down the back, presumably where it was split to allow you to get the pipe foamy stuff onto the pipe. Well, that was where it cracked. Sending out an enormous stream of water, right into the stairwell and right into the basement. My husband had fallen asleep while reading to our little girl and so I ran in to tell him. He wakes up hard so it was a struggle. He came out and got a pipe wrench and a shovel to dig to the shut-off valve in the front yard. He had built an igloo for our daughter right over the valve shut-off. While he was out there, he dropped the wrench in the snow and couldn’t find it again. I was down the icy stairs, bucketing water. Then I ran inside and called my sister. Scared her half to death – late night calls do that. She said to call the fire department. Which I did. They rushed over, shut the valve off, cut the offending pipe off the house, installed a temporary faucet, vacuumed the basement full of 4-6 inches of water and then left. It was 2:30 before we got to sleep. Our daughter slept through it all. The firemen tromping through the house, cutting the pipe off, running up and down the icy stairs with their wet-vacs, shouting, joking, me panicking. Her aunt and uncle showing up for moral support. Dear heavens. So, we are now the proud owners of a wet/dry vac and a nifty, hastily built awning for the back stairs – to prevent the ice dam that is melting out of our gutters from further flooding the basement and its nasty set of stairs. Some architect/50′s home designer has a lot to answer for. Who in the heck would design such a crappy basement entrance? And yes, we are slackers, we should have replaced the cruddy pipe/spigot thingy long ago. Nothing like a swimming pool in your basement as a wake-up call! And I will forever be grateful to the fire department. Way to go guys!
These are so fun!
A few years ago — well, gosh, maybe 15 — we were on vacation. We were in Baltimore at an Orioles game, and after the game decided to drive home instead of spending the night there. Three hours later, maybe 2:00 am, we get to our house. My ex was carrying older son David (six years old), I had three year old Elliot. We walked in the front door … and there was no furniture in our downstairs. No rugs, no furniture … no nothing. We carried the boys upstairs, put them to bed, looked at each other … and just went to bed.
The next morning I called my mom (who had been feeding the cat in our absence) and learned that the kitchen faucet, recently DIY-installed, had broken off, and hot water had flooded the downstairs. My aunt had come by to feed the cat, and when she opened the front door it was like a cartoon, with a waterfall pouring out onto her feet (and the cat leaping from the stairs out the door and out into the yard!). She sounded the alarm and got five neighbor families involved in squeegy-ing, mopping, and moving all the furniture onto the deck!
The hardwood floors were a total loss and had to be replace (itself a disaster), but eventually all was put right.
But nobody could believe we just went to bed when we saw it!
We live in a 1959 historic home (yes in Arizona 1959 gets you historic status!) and have done most of our renovation ourselves. There is a total learning curve with DIY projects and at this point we have a list of things you do yourself and a list of things you just call a professional to do!
At the top of our list is kitchen countertops. In an effort to be budget friendly we picked out some beautiful large stone tiles that we were going to use as our countertops in our small galley kitchen. My husband did tile professionally so all seemed well. Until we got to the part where we had to have the template cut for the sink. The tiles that went around the sink were professionally cut but we miscalculated the cuts and they were made too narrow–so when they were laid and grouted in–if one person put down a pot that was too heavy or pressed on the tile too hard they would crack! The way they had to be laid–they had to be attached to the sink so in order to replace any future (and inevitable) cracks you would have to remove the entire sink!
Completely disheartened, and finally defeated the hubs and I have now made a trip to Lowes and picked out a single surface countertop–one that comes with professional installation! The tiles cost us $600. The countertop cost us $2,000. The lesson we have learned though: A kitchen countertop is one of those things where you just buck up and budget out the cost of materials and labor and save yourself the trouble! You can make up the costs in other places!
We live in a house that was built in 1948. We decided… like the naive first time home buyers we were (are!) that we would update the kitchen. Add one of those fancy machines that wash the dished for you! One problem… the dishwashers are all standard counter depth… and in 1948 I guess standard counter depth was whatever fit the space. In our houses that was less than 2 feet. Ok… well we could fake it we think. We will pull the lower cabinets out and put new sides on! SO…. we get to work painting, sanding, taking doors apart… The day before the countertop was too arrive we decided to pop out the base cabinets. Except…. they were built to the wall. Hammer and nails built to the wall. And to the floor. So that was a grand learning experience in the craftmanship of 1940′s home building. They fell apart, pieces of wood everywhere. Nothing to do but start over! Which we did. And by we I totally mean my dad and his tablesaw.
Disaster #2 – same kitchen. During finishing touches stages I asked my hubby to hang a shelf along the length of one wall. First 2 brackets no sweat. But the last bracket provided the lessons (and ingrained the fear) of hanging things from plaster and lathe walls. I’m telling you my husband for a moment was a ringer for Yosemite Sam. :P
A few weeks ago we decided it was finally time to get rid of our horrible toilet (the one I yelled at on a daily basis to actually flush) and replace it with a nice 5 star flusher. Apparently our cast iron toilet flange was so old and corroded that my husband couldn’t get the bolts to hold to ANYTHING. There was much cussing and the dogs paced nervously. 4 more trips to lowes. Our easy toilet swap TOOK 24 HOURS. I should mention it is a 1 bathroom house. We made quite a few trips down the street to starbucks. I still have no idea how my husband got it to finally work. But it was sooo worth it – if you only have 1 toilet in your house, it should be a great one.
Well my story didn’t happen inside, but outside, while we were digging a ditch for new shrubs at my parent’s home.
After calling the city and all the utilities people to come and mark where wires were buried, we started digging a long (think 100ft +) trench so we could plop some (60) evergreens in to replace an old fence.
As we’re digging away with our rented mini backhowe, we pull up a thick black “root”. At first we didn’t think it was anything more than a root from one of the large trees… Then we dug up a similar “root”, then another… I should mention that it had started to rain and get dark by the time we were about 75% done.
Later in the evening, our neighbour comes by and asks us if our tv is working (we say yes, because we’ve got satelite). Then another neighbour drops by… Same thing.
At the end of the day, we put two and two togehter! The “root” that we dug up, was the main cable tv line for our block! Oops!
Needless to say, we weren’t too popular for the rest of the weekend, and the cable guy that came by the next day to fix it didn’t like us much either… We had damaged the wire in about 4 places! Yikes!
Lesson learned: Even if you “call before you dig”, you may still dig something up!