[Closed] DIY disasters confession room

Painted A LOT of decking last weekend.
Took about 20 hours, including the prep.

[b]Without properly looking at the weather forecast. [/b]

Cue 48 hours of rain.

I'm doing it again now. Just popped in for a break. 😐

we moved into a new house and the kitchen fireplace was boarded up.

"let's take the board off and see what's underneath!"

So I take the board off but the original range has gone and there's just the 4ft by 2ft plate in the chimney breast that the pipe used to go into.

I tap the old plate with the hammer.

120 year old metal plate gives way depositing what must have been 6 inches of soot that was resting on top of it onto me and throughout the kitchen and half the hallway.

It was like something out of a Laurel and Hardy film.

I used a circular saw to cut a piece out of some upstairs floor boards. It was the only way I could do it given the config of the boards and internal walls etc.
The plumber had installed copper radiator pipes through the joists (all good) however he had put them in grooves at the top as oppose to drilling through them which meant they pressed on the underside of the boards! Even though my saw was set to go though the minimum board thickness it still cut through a pipe... How we laughed!

Cut through the domestic power ring with a pair of clippers.

Cue one massive bang and our two 2 yr olds saying 'daddy broken it'.

At least I proved to my wife (who was stood right next to me) that a modern RCD is very safe.

Same here... our sparky had left me a loop off the ring main sticking out to cut later and add a socket. This was upstairs but what he forgot to tell me or didn't know was that it was the downstairs ring. I turned off the upstairs ring and cut with my prize Park cable cutters... BANG flash and the blade of my cutters is spark-eroded beyond repair. Expensive mistake.

mate of mine (honestly) told me of his DIY expertise at the weekend. The dishwasher drain was leaking so he took it off and down to B&Q he went. It was only when he was at the counter he remembered that the washing machine was on and drained through the same system. Returned home to find he now had to replace the utility room floor, the carpet in the hall, sitting room and lino in the kitchen..

We've all done the remove u-bend under sink to clean out and drain the sink "Where shall I put all the water that's in the bowl I caught it with? Down the sink you go! Ah, I hadn't put the u-bend back." thing.

Haven't we?

Haven't we?

*s****s* nope *s****s*

Was painting the floor of my workshop with nice bright blue floor paint. I lost balance whilst pouring some into a tray and now my dad has a somewhat blue ride on mower. 😳

[i]Haven't we? [/i]

only once...

I used to be a kitchen fitter and did a job with a cooker in an island unit, complete with extractor fan suspended from the middle of the ceiling.
The sparky had left a flying lead hanging out of the ceiling, ready to power up the extractor. I turned off the kitchen ring and climbed onto the island to trim back the cable.
BANG! - it turns out he'd taken a spur off the back of a socket in one of the bedrooms above.
I also have a set of spark-eroded cutters.

Haven't we?

only once...

Only the once here too 😳

Fitted new oil boiler and radiators to old plastic pipes- having flushed threm out clean with relevent chemicals

Next week i was renewimg the pipework as the pipes were fine for old vented system at low psi.

New system is pressured combi - the cycle pressure blew the joints apart exposin the face previous fitter hadnt used inserts in any joints. Redone it with copper solder pipe work 🙂

Haven't we?

Nope, although I did once see a housemate of mine start to do just that and went into one of those slow motion "NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooo..." moments which made her jump so much she threw the contents of the tub down her front instead. Still, it saved the floor.

Guy I used to work with had the great idea (after a couple of beers) that to cut the carpet for an L shaped room he would lift the old carpet and place on top of new carpet and cut round. Problem was he put them carpetside to carpetside and cut an opposite hand one.To make things worse he was a steel fabricator and was used to using templates.

My dad chopped a finger off using a circular saw - the blade hit a knot jolting my dad's hand off the handle and a finger went into the whole for the dust bag (which he wasn't using).

The hangboard i've attached above a doorway (into lathe and plaster) is a disaster waiting to happen, but it is holding up ok at present.

Moving bathroom around put new soil pipe against wall, turned to get drill, had to let go of soil pipe, 4m of 4 inch soil pipe smashed into my head requiring several stitches.

First plumbing attempt was installing central heating, beautiful job all finished ready for filling. Forgot to use flux (didn't know I had to) pissed water throughout the house. Had to redo every joint.

Putting a shower in for a girlfreinds freind got all the bits, pull cord 10mm cable etc, he only has a power shower off hot and cold. Replanned got the right bits. All installed with compression fittings, turned water on but hadn't screwed up the cold compression fitting, blew the fitting off water jetting into my face while she is on the phone to my GF water starts pissing down the wall of her listed cotteage!!!!!!!!!! 😀 Good outcome in the end though with no damage.

Installing a big ceiling rose on which the instructions say to use coving adhesive, but as I'm putting it up I think to myself there is no way this is going to hold so I'll go get my drill and pop a couple of self-tapers in to be sure. But it seems to be holding so I'll nip down the ladder and grab my *CRASH*

Broken ceiling rose and coving adhesive all over the floor and sofa... five minute job takes two hours.

Managed to clean up and did "functional" repair on refit of ceiling rose before wife and kids came home.

Even though my saw was set to go though the minimum board thickness it still cut through a pipe... How we laughed!

My Dad did exactly that when I was a kid. He claims the depth stop slipped.

Just installed 8 more paving slabs to give us a usable patio, only broke two 🙁

My mate was a fitter for British gas and when he was an apprentice, stuck his head through a gap in the floor boards to shout his mate who was getting something from the van. He couldn't get his head back through the gap and the family's labrador took a shine to it and basically shagged his head until the van mate came back and dragged it off.

😆

Another one - I ended up with a kitchen waste flood through the kitchen and into the dining room. Kitchen waste pipe drained down through to the adjacent bathroom waste, and then out under the wall and conservatory to where we knew the main drain was. Kitchen sink water had been backing up and there was a funny smell in the bathroom with a damp patch in the cement floor. Part of the cement floor was a cement "plug" which was being damaged from below by the backed up waste... pop goes the plug and all the waste backed up in the pipes comes up through the floor. Clean that up - get a rodding guy out who jets down the hole in the floor and re-floods the house before realising this is pointless... the fix was to hack a hole in the conservatory floor and find the blockage which was in an old victorian drain which had been cemented over when the conservatory was built. Fix holes in bathroom and conservatory floors (with proper access points of course 🙄 ).

Dad once drilled a 15mm hole (for plumbing) in floorboards in corner of room of house he was doing up, then same in ceiling of room below.

They didnt line up so he asked no.3 son (me) to climb up ally steps resting on wet concrete floor and poke big screwdriiver through hole to see where it came out above.

Cue big bang, heavily damaged screwdriver, wildly swearing son and blown ring main fuse.

He told me to calm down, I pointedly informed him that it was attempted involuntary manslaughter and never, ever, ever, ever helped him again.

I once had a job in London working for a construction site. My first project was leveling the two upper floors in Harrods (used to two separate buildings). During the day when the customers were in we had to use the medium sized kango hammers to keep the noise down. Once the shop closed I got to break out the big toys. I got little carried away with the daddy kango and managed to punch a fairly large hole clean through the 4th floor ceiling. I'd guess about two tonnes of rubble, along with myself and the hammer fell through and destroyed a rather impressive sports goods display.

I'd guess about two tonnes of rubble, along with myself and the hammer fell through and destroyed a rather impressive sports goods display.

The Labrador one was good tho 🙂

Carefully measure proposed sink location in kitchen then send dimensions to worktop company to cut out the hole.

Worktop arrives, and discover that you should have measured more carefully, as the pipe feeds to the sink are coming down where the dishwasher should be fitted.

Solution - use jigsaw to cut relevant section off side of dishwasher casing.

The number of ridiculous plumbing and electrical bodges in my first flat are mind-boggling, looking back. I pity the poor buggers who inherited it off us.

Fortunately my dad was a lecturer in electical installations, so he knows

a) everything there is to know about domestic wiring
b) how houses, floors, ceilings etc are made intimately
c) how technical some things are and not to mess with these things unless you know what you are doing - so he never touched gas.

However, he was not always so wise and proficient. As a young man he was a mining electrician, and him and a mate (somehow, not sure how) managed to take out the power to the entire town when fixing something at the mine.

OH yeah, I know not to mess with well anything beyond my skillset, so pretty much everything upward of decorating, so got my GFs dad (pipefitter) to come and bung an extra couple of radiators in our house. Remove pipe boxing, hmm why are there 3 feed pipes, ah well start cutting sssssssssssssssssssss ah that'll be gas in a copper pipe next to the water, awesome. Not a disaster but a tense few minutes.

You guys try proper technical DIY, I wouldn't mind messing that up a little, but I wouldn't try it in the first place!

Undid 4 mystery bolts in my son's bedroom. Toilet cistern fell of the wall on the other side.

Not my finest hour.

Not a disaster but a tense few minutes.

Should have had a cigarette to calm your nerves.

I worked in a little hotel in Chamonix many summers ago. It had a pretty s****y Siemens telephone system and one morning a phone wasn't working in one of the rooms. I took a look at it and no great problems, a wire has come loose. I'll just strip of a little of the plastic sheathing, shove the wire back in and screw it tight. Don't have anything to strip the wire so will use my teeth..... Bang! I know it wasn't 240v but by god it hurt..

Manager found me wandering around the corridor dazed and confused...

Less than 24 hours later i also managed to pee on an electric fence whilst riding back from Argentiere.

I don't like electricity.

This thread is a great reminder of why I don't do DIY. I think I'll let me wife read it to remind her why I don't do DIY!

[i]Undid 4 mystery bolts in my son's bedroom. Toilet cistern fell of the wall on the other side.[/i]

I like that one 🙂

My dad used to run a small kitchen company. He sent out his fitter to instal a very expensive brass sink at a house. Fitter turns up, helpful neighbour let's him in, fitter bit annoyed that cupboards are fill under sink but empties them and fits new sink. Dad goes round later to check job, no sink there. Footer had installed it in wrong house. They had to leave note for the people on holiday sayng sorry about the cock up, do you want this nice new sink?

Fitting a socket in the house of my mum's friend, for a favour, my dad screwed the surface mounted socket box to the wall. Went into the hallway, saw screws sticking out of the wall. The interior walls were a single piece of plasterboard with no supports...

Broke my hand in two places using a large drill at arms length cutting a hole for a down lighter. It snagged on a larth and whipped round. Note to self don't use big drills at arms length\use a clutch-less drill.
😥 😳

I did finish that hole and one other before a long sitting down in the bathroom with my hand in a bowl of cold water, where my wife found me looking a bit off colour like a cross between these two guys 🙁 before heading to hospital for x-rays and a cast

Cutting and hanging doors is a good one for cockups - you've got to take extra care not to cut the thing upside-down or hinged the wrong way. Have done about a dozen and haven't cocked up yet... still got two to go though...

Harry_the_Spider - Member
Undid 4 mystery bolts in my son's bedroom. Toilet cistern fell of the wall on the other side.

Not my finest hour.

Literally LoL

Just (last weekend) fitted a new cupboard / shelves / changing unit into my soon to be sons nursery. made from scratch, and very nice it was too.
As I came to leave the room, a creaking floorboard got my attention so drove a screw through, right next to the nail head to hold it down prior to carpeting.
Queue water pissing out of main cold feed to upstairs ensuite, pouring through the roof of the ceiling, straight through the new cooker hood and boiler I've just put in, all over the new oak worktops and the newly tiled floor. First job was to dismantle the newly built cupboard with what I had to hand to try to get to the pipework, in a panic I grabbed the only thing I had to hand, a large hammer and destroyed 2 days work in about 2mins....
How I laughed!

Maybe next time just turn the water off instead

Bloke I used to work with took the thin bit of plywood back out of a fitted cupboard in his bedroom.

Only to find it was also the back of the corresponding fitted cupboard in his next door neighbours bedroom.

He did say he'd always felt you could virtually hear people breathing in the next house at night.

Not DIY but I narrowly avoided a disaster when some builders were gutting the downstairs of our house to move some walls around. One of them was about to cut out a pipe with a disk cutter when I walked in and suggested that we checked that the gas was turned off in case it was a gas pipe.

It was a gas pipe and the gas was still on 😯 . I'm guessing it would have been a bit of a fire. It's also why I'm not always quite so keen to always get in 'professionals'

Undid 4 mystery bolts in my son's bedroom. Toilet cistern fell of the wall on the other side.

Not my finest hour.

Still made me LOL.

Another one from me. And another with electrickery (I probably thought I knew what I was doing because my dad was an electrical engineer so I thought perhaps I would absorb some of his intelligence).... Anyway, a set of fairy lights weren't working in the chip shop I was working at, it was Christmas and we wanted to brighten the place up. I *thought* I had shortened the set correctly to take out a split in the wire. Plugged it in and [b]*KER_BANG* [/b]- I went flying across the floor in full view of a row of people waiting to be served.

Bloke I used to work with took the thin bit of plywood back out of a fitted cupboard in his bedroom.

Only to find it was also the back of the corresponding fitted cupboard in his next door neighbours bedroom.

He did say he'd always felt you could virtually hear people breathing in the next house at night.

I also have a set of spark-eroded cutters.

+1, although they now make a nice set of wire strippers as there is a nice round hole in the blades.

Completely forgot to switch off Mains before deciding to cut through cable - got the fright of my life when it went bang in front of me. I was more embarrassed at my ineptitude than shocked, I do supposedly have a degree in Electronics....

When I was about 14 my good mate got really into martial arts and decided to build his own dojo in the garden. Spent loads on materials, took him ages. We(his mates) got invited round for the grand opening. Very impressive handmade space with a veranda, all decorated like something out of karate kid. He strolls out dressed like Steven Segal for a 'demonstration'. One roundhouse to his kick bag and the entire thing collapsed on him. Turned out he'd put the whole thing together with nails, not very big ones. Naturally we all were on the floor in hysterics before pulling him out.

I worked for a posh landscape company in my gap year and we were doing a garden in Chelsea and my friend was charged with removing a weird rotton trunk near the house. That will pull down easy he thought. Turns out it was some feature full of concrete which promptly smashed through the stone balustrade and on through the dining room French doors.

On another job(chelsea again)there was no access so the entire thing had to go through the house. Tons of rubbish out, tons of materials in with no mishaps. Until the last day the very last thing to come out was a ladder which I grazed all along the back of a very expensive black leather sofa. I am slightly ashamed to admit that it was sorted with a black marker pen. The client insisted in calling me 'gardener boy' for 4 weeks and was a nightmare to deal with. Never heard about the sofa!

Spent all day making a cage for my stepdaughter's hamster. Like a scene out of The Wonder Years, we measuerd, sawed, laughed and, just as I hammered the last nail into the roof of the cage, cried when I realised there was no door.

I was working on a job and a plumber was working in the kitchen,no core drill so bashing a big hole in the external wall.After he's made quite a big hole he says to me 'there's a sweeping brush in the cavity,hang on,there's a shovel as well.'
Sticks his hand in and starts pulling tools through the hole then says 'There's a bloody bike in there!In the cavity!'
I stuck my head out the door and he had his arm in the attached out house which was being used as a shed.The wall was only a single skin and no,it wasn't a 29er

A customer rang me to ask me to look at some squeeking chipboard flooring upstairs, lifted the carpet and there where lines of nice screws going the full length of the room, and the floor wasnt squeeking.

So i asked who had put the screws in so neatly, the lady then beconened me downstairs to the kitchen,ceiling with holes punched in it, kitchen wall cupboards hanging off walls etc.

Her husband had bought a box of screws and marked out the joists, and driled and screwed through nunerous water pipes for the on suites, and the central heating pipes,that night the water filled the kitchen ceiling voids and pulled the ceiling down along with the kitchen units.

Another ladies husband did the same with the gas pipe feeding the gas fire, that ran through the ceiling void and down the chimney brest wall.

and so called proffesionals connected the water main to a gas pipe, when the gas was switched on at the meter, water flowed into the gas main causing a major gas emergency as water overcame the flow of the gas,with the possibility of gas cuts to neighbours.

In August 2003 (You remember that hot summer) I was removing a stud wall in between two of the bedrooms. The plaster board came off okay and I then started to dismantle the frame. I was pulling out nails with a claw hammer and as I pulled one, the hammer came flying at me and hit me just above the eye. I felt okay and continued. Now remember it was very hot and I was continually mopping my face. I thought I was sweating and it wasn't until half an hour later when my wife popped in and asked me why I was covered in blood. The t-shirt I was wearing was blood red but I was so engrossed in the task that I hadn't noticed. I ended up going straight to A&E for stitches.

Needed to cut some plywood using a 9 inch circular saw. Didn't have a workbench, so figured I would clamp the board to the kitchen table.
What could possibly go wrong?

Wood slipped and I put a foot long channel along the edge of the table.

I was doing up my bathroom a couple of years back (still not finished 😀 ) I dragged out the old cast Iron bath and set off to B&Q to buy a new one. Got the one I wanted and struggled to get it in my car which was an Astra VXR, not a lot of room.

I drove home for about 10 miles with a bath sticking out the back of the car, dragged it upstairs and juggled it into the bathroom. It was too long, one end was on the floor, the other half way up the wall.

I thought baths were all pretty much a standard length.

So it was back to the car with the bath and trundled off to B&Q, yeah I got some looks and had to wait a week for the correct length bath!

Measure your bath!

I drilled through a gas pipe, as I was using an electric drill thought I was lucky as it wasn't a water pipe.

Not really a DIY disaster, but I had to access a site at work via a deserted/derelict shop. It was fenced off but inside was still full of seaside holiday tat so we amused ourselves looking at some postcards and sticks of rock. I then moved a 10 litre tin of paint that was blocking the door, except the bottom stayed stuck to the floor...

...followed by 5 minutes of scooping up ballast from the bags that were anchoring the temporary fencing and spreading it over the floor so we didn't get covered in paint 🙂 When we got below the shop we worked out why it had 'unsafe structure' written on the fence...the very rusty scaffolding holding up the shop was not connected to the very rusty scaffolding coming up from the floor, there was just a big air gap where it had disintegrated. There were just a few slightly less old and very rusty scaffolding taking up the strain 😯

Oh, and I knocked an expensive tin of varnish over and the lid popped off, and then in a panic grabbed a new dustpan to scoop it back up. Unfortunately I dumped it back into the half full tin so not only ruined the carpet, I also added carpet fluff and dirt to the remaining varnish and ruined it. The trade place I bought it from were very good and swapped it for a new one when I suggested the lid wasn't on properly 🙂

I pushed the wrong button on a theatre lighting console and instead of turning on lamps 1 AND 500, turned on lamps 1 THROUGH 500 to maximum brightness.

The 200A fuse at the theatre was fine; but whatever blew up at the substation wasn't.

woody21 - Member
I drilled through a gas pipe, as I was using an electric drill thought I was lucky as it wasn't a water pipe.

My ineptitude at DIY knows no bounds; fortunately even the wife has registered this and the plan is that I go and do some overtime (which is fine, as I actually enjoy committing anaesthesia) and use the money to pay someone who knows what they're doing.

This hasn't stopped the professionals plumbing a toilet cistern into the hot water.

Or, more recently, returning from work and being greeted by the roofer to be told there was a small problem, which was that the apprentice had inadvertently fallen through my daughter's bedroom ceiling...

I changed the brake pads on my car, put the new ones in backwards, then spent a week driving round wondering when they would 'bed in' and stop screeching 😳

Papa_Lazarou - Member

My mate was a fitter for British gas and when he was an apprentice, stuck his head through a gap in the floor boards to shout his mate who was getting something from the van. He couldn't get his head back through the gap and the family's labrador took a shine to it and basically shagged his head until the van mate came back and dragged it off.

Harry_the_Spider - Member
Undid 4 mystery bolts in my son's bedroom. Toilet cistern fell of the wall on the other side.
Not my finest hour.

Yep, that's the winner.

Been quite lucky over the years. No formal training, just an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to DIY. Used to make quite a lot of furniture. Quite early on in my woodworking days I lovingly hand-crafted a bespoke, built-in Welsh dresser thing for our dining room. Cupboards, drawers, shelves, lighting... all solid pine and beautifully joined, stained and finished. It was perfect. But I digest...

I fixed part of the framework to the floor with a few internal angle braces. Stupidly, I drilled directly through the carpet into the floor, and a thread (weft or warp? I dunno) instantly wrapped itself round the bit and chuck. I may have screamed as I watched a 6feet long thread of carpet unravel and/or get torn up.

Never drill through carpet, people. If you must do it, cut a flap first.

When I lived in Glasgow I was fitting a new bathroom in my flat. I lived on the first floor of a 3 floor block. I had the old toilet removed and was getting ready to install the new one. I did'nt realise that the soil stack was shared with the upstairs neighbour. The lassie upstairs went for a dump and I caught it on my lap.