need DIY stories to make my feel better

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was doing a home improvement project the other day, and this time it didn’t turn out to be financially beneficial. (thread here).

Now it’s going to cost me - minimum - $400 to get things fixed. Possibly up to $1500.

I need some stories of failed DIY projects that others have experienced (and had to pay someone else a lot of money to fix the mistakes) to make me feel better. I need this especially because I knew the hazards and tried a shortcut to get the job done. As my friend always tells me - dumb should hurt. It does.

Mine was installing a whole house humidifier that resulted in putting a leak in the evap coil of my central A/C unit. Coil may need replacement.

2

Back in the late 1970s my mum here in London took a woodwork class to be self sufficient after divorcing my dad. She went two nights a week for the best part of two months and made a tea trolley. Upon completion she loaded it into her two door Ford Escort and drove home.

Unfortunately try as she might she could not get the thing out the car, and resolutely refused to seek assistance from two men stood at a gate watching her with mounting curiosity.

After an hour she gave up sawed the thing in half.

:smiley:

3

A couple years ago my dad had a problem with wasps over at his place. After getting stung a couple of times he went on the warpath and eventually found the nest in his attic. At this point I advised him to patch the hole in his attic screen and then call an exterminator. But nooooo…

Dad and my brother decided that they would throw on long sleeved shirts and just go up there with a couple cans of Raid. I couldn’t talk them out of it so I stood by downstairs with the first aid kit, ready to mock at a moment’s notice.

It was the middle of summer, maybe 80 degrees, and the attic must have been over 110. This is an unfinished attic with no floor so they were climbing through trusses and standing on the ceiling joists.

From below I followed the thumping and cursing slowly across the house. Then the hiss of the spray cans. Then a chorus of agonized yelps followed immediately by a frantic stampede back across the house at amazing speed, including boots through the ceiling. Dad & bro came popping out of the hatch and surfed down the step ladder head first, miraculously with no broken necks. Behind them rolled a solid wave of indignant wasps stinging everything in sight.

I laughed so hard I fell down while sprinting for the door. I only survived because I got stung too helping them off the floor. Dad managed to have the exterminator show up while we weren’t home so he wouldn’t have to listen to it again. Their hasty retreat kicked out enough of the living room ceiling to where it was easier just to tear it out and start over. Luckily Dad was has a couple of big galoot sons to help haul and hoist a ton of drywall. To this day they both insist it wasn’t such a dumb idea and the ceiling needed replacing anyway.

4

I can blame this on a BIL who used to work with a contractor, so he should have known better.

My mom was having flooding issues in her basement. My husband and I tore down the paneling from the wall that was affected and figured out what needed to be done. One day, assorted family males assembled execute my husband’s planned fix, involving a french drain to direct the water away from the house and down the hill into the yard.

The installation went fine, and the drain hose went into a trench that channeled the water about 30 feet from the foundation. BIL insisted it wouldn’t be a problem to bury the end of the drain, since the ground would absorb the water. Sure, if it’s not a deluge. But then, when the rain was gentle, there was no problem. However, BIL covered the end with soil, and the next time it poured, Mom had a flooded basement. She ended up getting a contractor to put in a sump pump at some ridiculous cost. The next time I stopped by (we live about 100 miles away), I just went out and dug out the end of the drain, then covered it with pea gravel. She’s never had water get into her basement again. All that re-do was for nothing.

My brother-in-law is really a great guy, but he had a major brain-fart that day.

5

Oh, gosh, where do I start? There was the finishing-the-basement project back when I first started my Tim-the-Tool-Man phase. (a) Cut a wire too short going into the breaker box, forgot to trip the main breaker while splicing in a new piece, blew myself off the ladder; (b) drove a sheetrock screw into a cold water supply line; © failed to account for “heaving” of local soil, splintered $100 worth of wall studs and damn near lifted one side of the house off the foundation. Oh, yeah, and then there was the deck on the same house – had to dig up and re-locate three concrete pylons because I mis-measured one side of the deck. That added two days to the project.

6

Here’s one: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7597344&postcount=8

My brother is in construction and makes a tidy second income fixing DIY buffoonery. You’re not the first. The real killer is he often ends up charging more to fix/finsh the job than he would have charged to do it from scratch. It’s amazing the **cked up ways people will try to take shortcuts that turn into dead ends.

7

20+ years ago, we were living in a duplex in North Carolina. We co-owned it with the bank holding the largest portion, of course.

We had wallpaper installed in the kitchen, and in the bathroom. Despite attending a DIY wallpapering seminar, we didn’t feel up to doing it ourself so we paid to have it installed.

After a few months, the wallpaper in the bathroom began to peel away in one corner. Dunno if it was improperly installed, the bathroom wasn’t vented, or whatever, but repeated attempts to reglue it were not successful.

So we read up on how to remove wallpaper (this was the scrubbable, strippable stuff so it should have been easy).

We wound up removing a fair bit of the surface layer of the drywall, before we gave up and decided to call in a pro.

Much spackling was involved (IIRC, the fellow used a significant amount of a 5 gallon bucket). Much laughing was involved (on the part of the fellow we paid several hundred bucks to fix our mistake).

Lesson learned. Wallpaper is nearly always evil. (“nearly always” - the kitchen still looked nice when we moved out, and we did wallpaper in our dining room).

8

This is more of a “didn’t do it myself” story, but in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 I remembered to put weather stain on my back porch. By 2002 I just looked at the porch and thought “I’ll have to stain it sometime.”

I thought the same thing in 2003, 2004, 2005,2006, and 2007 but I didn’t do anything. When 2008 rolled around I fell through the porch.

9

Wasn’t me, but my uncle:

He bought a used cabin cruiser boat, maybe 25-30 feet long. It was well used, and all of the upholstery, wood trim, etc. had to be replaced, the metal bits de-rusted, and paint applied all over. He spent a few months working on this when he had free time.

Eventually he was finished, and the boat was looking good!

For some reason, (and don’t ask me why 'cause I don’t know!) he decided to see how the boat floated… so he hooked the boat trailer to the back of his pickup truck and hauled it around behind his house where he had a small pond; perhaps twice the size of the boat in diameter.

He began backing the boat and trailer into the water.

As he slowly backed into the pond, he realized that the boat wasn’t floating quite the way it should have been, and he stopped, applied the parking brake, and jumped out to investigate.

It turned out that he had neglected to put the plug into the drain hole in the back of the boat, and his boat was slowly filling with water and settling back onto the trailer he had been trying to float it off!

He jumped back into the truck to pull the boat and trailer out, but by then enough water had entered the boat that he merely succeeded in burying his 2 rear tires in mud. No problem, he popped it into 4 wheel drive. And shortly all 4 wheels were entrenched and the truck axles were at ground level.

As he was the only person at home at the time, and there were no other vehicles, he walked about 2 miles up the road to a neighboring farm to borrow their tractor.

Which he got stuck in the mud in front of the truck a short while later.

A longer walk up the road to another farm resulted, an hour or so later, in yet a second tractor stuck in the mud in front of the first tractor, the truck, and the now almost completely submerged boat and trailer.

A backhoe was eventually required to un-stick everything, and my uncle started over on the remodel of the boat…

(true story! AND, several months later he, my aunt and several cousins were on Lake Eerie in the boat, hit a partially submerged log, sunk the boat for good, and had to all swim a mile or so to shore…)

10

That boat wasn’t named the “Minnow”, was it?

11

Couple of years ago I managed to get roped in to helping a buddy work on some plumbing. The final step was the tie in to the main sewer line in the basement. Now, I was standing right there when he told his wife about this, and asked her to be sure not to put anything down the drain for the next couple of hours.

We were nearly done when we heard that awful wa-woosh-gurgle-gurgle from upstairs. My buddy whirled around, grabbed the freshly cut pipe from my hands, and stuffed it into place with only seconds to spare. The load gurgled past with only a drop or two of leakage. We both howled in unison, and from upstairs we heard a timid female, “Ooops! Sorry!!”

I’m sure glad we measured that pipe just right.

12

My brother is presently demonstrating that DIY is risky, because if someone does something stupid, the homeowner gets hurt. He injured the muscles or something in his middle finger this summer–probably while using a jackhammer. So the bricks for the patio are still stacked up on the driveway 4 months later, and probably will be till spring.

And in building new cabinets, he skinned the tip of the SAME finger with the saw. Apparently, the saw had been turned off, but he’d forgotten that it didn’t stop spinning immediately, and now he has a bloody bandaid on his fingertip.

13

My mom and I refinished the hardwood floors in two of the bedrooms of her house. All I can say is that it’s a good thing we had recently swept up a lot of the dust because, otherwise, the electrical fire that started when she pulled the belt sander’s cord directly in front of it* would have done a lot more damage.

*In her version of this story, I “ran over the cord to the sander”, which is technically true, but only because I moved the sander onto an area of the floor that was completely cord-free only seconds before.