Arrgghh! I was soooo careful to measure twenty times and cut once, but the 3/4 shower wall I built in the bathroom has a distinct curve at the top. I suck magnificently at do-it-yourself projects. My stupid wall is smack in front of the potty, so now I get to contemplate my mistake mutliple times each day!
Does anyone else try mightily but always end up with bent-over nails and crooked crap?
Where would you like me to start? Our case is one of a disinclination to finish things that need to be done, because we’re too darned tired, busy and inclined to do something else. I have lived with THE world’s ugliest bathroom for two and a half years and I am just finishing it, well, today. I have slopped paint on the floor, on myself, and actually stepped backwards into the pan can.
I started pulling off “wallpaper” that was never meant to come off the flimsy plywood walls (we are living in a vintage double-wide) and then spent a year trying to get the rest of it off. Never should have started that.
I didn’t paint all the way down to the baseboards and cover them, thinking we were going to put new ones in. Then new carpet and lino went down, and we still haven’t put new baseboards and moulding in, so the dark wood paneling and trim peeks out at me from various locations, mocking my inability to do a task thoroughly and carefully.
I painted the dark wood cabinets in the kitchen. Well, I primered them. HALF the kitchen. (It took longer than I expected.) That was a year ago. One side of the kitchen is white-primer, and the other side is 70’s dark-brown. I also painted over the cupboard handles. Talk about sloppy-looking.
I know there’s more, but I’m getting depressed thinking about it. 
Nevertheless, we–or I–shall persevere in my own inept way, because believe me, when you buy a 1974 doublewide that’s been lived in by elderly people, ANYTHING you do is an improvement.
(You ought to have seen the “before”…)
My siblings and I had bought my mom a new refrigerator. I was the one who went to her place to oversee the delivery.
And to install the filter on the ice-maker/water dispenser line.
It should have been a snap: just screw the line into the frig, then the filter itself, then screw in an additional line from the filter to the valve.
But the coupling on the filter-to-valve part of that didn’t fit the valve. No problem; I’d get an adapter. Thirty minutes later, I’m back.
The damned adapter doesn’t fit.
So I go back. The new one doesn’t fit either. One more trip. No go. This time I get smart. Thinking, “I’ll be damned if I’m going back to the hardware store again; I’ll just take the valve with me, to make sure the adapter fits,” I grabbed a wrench and went to work.
On the valve.
Which was attached to a live line.
A 1/2" diameter jet of water was shooting directly at me. With the force of the water coming out, I couldn’t get the valve reattached. I quickly ran outside to turn of the main.
Did I mention that it was November, and there were about eight inches of snow on the ground?
I finally found the main, but it was frozen solid.
Running back in the house, I found the kitchen floor flooded and a small pond flowing into the living room. I grabbed the valve and tried again to reattach it. I had better luck that time and got it most of the way back on. Now just a misty fan of water was spraying out of the top edge of it.
So I called a plumber, who, I assume, was laughing his ass off at me.
i always watch “money pit” before starting any home improvment.
makes me feel so much better.
My kitchen is painted yellow because I found water on my workbench in the basement.
Let me 'splain…
I found water on my workbench in the basement.
I determined it was coming from the bathroom upstairs.
While in the basement, I had my wife turn on the faucet, flush the toilet, fill the tub… all with no result of water falling onto my workbench. That is, until she diverted the tub flow to the shower nozzle. Then, I saw the drips.
I determined that I could get to the pipe between the tub spigot and the shower head by either going through the tiled wall in the bathroom or by going through the drywall in the kitchen.
The kitchen idea was the lesser of two evils.
I cut a hole in the drywall, found the leak and replaced the faulty elbow.
I patched the drywall and spackled it up all pretty.
I primed the wall because I was going to have to repaint it.
I’d originally wanted to paint the kitchen yellow … so now was the excuse I needed to do it.
So… my kitchen is painted yellow because I found water on my workbench in the basement.
Manatee and I must be kindred spirits. The last time I tried to fix the bathroom faucet was the last time that I will ever try to fix the faucet. It is quite amazing how high the water will shoot out when you remove the handle without turning the water off first.
We have a small cabin behind our house where my parents stay when they visit. I started painting the outside about 4 years ago. Every summer I promise myself that this is the year I’m going to finish it.
KRM mentioning how high water will shoot reminded me of another.
My wife had bought a 4’ tall flower-shaped pinwheel for our yard. We stuck it in the ground, but it kept falling over or the kids would pull it out. So we decided to put it up a little more permanently.
At first I was going to pound a piece of PVC into the ground and then slip the base of the pinwheel into that. But then I thought that it might need more stability, so I was going to put in a metal stake, slip the PVC over that, and then the pinwheel into that.
Hammer in hand, I pounded the stake into the ground. About 6" down, I met a bit of resistence. I pounded the stake again and immediately heard a liquidy hissing noise. The first thing that popped into my head was “Please don’t be the sewer, please don’t be the sewer, please don’t be the sewer.”
It wasn’t. It was the water main.
Almost immediately, we had a geyser shooting up higher than the roof. I ran down to our meter to shut off the supply, but there wasn’t a standard valve–it was one of those bar-shaped ones that you need a meter wrench to close. I didn’t have one, but the second neighbor whose house I ran to did.
I couldn’t budge the valve. Even with the neighbor/wrench owner helping. I grapped my biggest adjustable wrench and slipped it over the handle of the meter wrench to provide a little more leverage. That did–geyser averted.
However, my wife had called the city in the meantime. They show up to find me, dripping wet, meter wrench in hand. “You didn’t shut off your water yourself, did you? Because you know, you’re not supposed to tamper with the meter. You could get fined for doing that.”
They didn’t fine me, largely because I played dumb (I know, not too hard to do in this case)–“Oh, I didn’t know that”–and thanked them profusely for coming out so rapidly. Plus I had the kids out with me and I guess they didn’t want to bust my chops in front of them.
Coda: when the plumber came to fix the main, we found that I’d hit it dead-center. If I’d hammered that stake 1/2" to either side, I would have missed the main.
This is sad really.
My brother re did his concrete back porch. He rented a skidstear with a jackhammer on it to remove the old concrete. Set the porch roof on new cassions. Got the steel in and forms. Looks good.
It’s about 18 x 24 feet, a pretty good sized slab. And we needed a concrete pump to do it.
I pleaded with him to hire some flat-workers to do the job, but he wouldn’t have it.
He had already bought all the proper tools.
See, he had done it before, he is going to do it again. Just nothing quite this big.
:sigh:
He had them crank up the mixture of the concrete to 6000 psi. I guess this means additional chemicals in it.
Every have a burn from acid? Heh. That’s nothing. We got burned by a base. Can’t put water on it, just makes it worse. The water in your own skin makes it worse. My brother ended up in the emergency room, his skin was such, they thought that he had a motorcycle accident. They had now idea what to do with him.
You don’t dare put water on it, it just makes it worse, I found some relief by soaking my hands in vinegar. My brother missed 2 weeks of work.
Other than rubber boots we had no protection from the chems in the concrete. Nasty, nasty stuff at 6000 psi…