Home improvement disasters

[limabean]

I got a bee in my bonnet yesterday and decided I was sick of having bare walls and boring decor. We moved in about 6 months ago and still had zero pictures on the walls. So I got completely decorated for Christmas, hung up several pictures, and went to Home Depot for paint to redo the downstairs powder room, which had a horrid faux finish when we moved in. I hid the paint, thinking it'd be fun for DH to come home today to a beautiful new bathroom, but now that I'm in the middle of the painting project I'm sorry I started it! The room is tiny, so I figured it'd be no big deal, but there are all those tight spaces, fixtures to work around, weird angles on the ceiling, etc. -- it sucks! (Not to mention trying to wrangle my 2yo and keep her out of the paint tray during all of this.) Also, I kept messing up when trying to cut in around the ceiling, so I had the brilliant idea to just paint the ceiling too and it's like medieval torture -- my shoulders and neck hurt SO much, and I still need to do the second coat! What have I gotten myself into??? 

Okay, so I know that's not exactly a "disaster" story, but I figure some of you have good stories so I thought I'd have a good whine and then open up the floor to you. Whatcha got? It'll help me keep my sense of humor as I agonize through the second coat in a few minutes. 

[Irishmommy]

Well, my dh split a finger open with an electric mitre saw in August while we were laying a basement floor.  I can post pictures (of the finger AND the finished room :lol).  That was almost a disaster - he was very lucky he went in lengthways, he'd have lost a few fingers if he went a different angle.

[thtr4me]

We demolished our bathroom to redo it, while TTC.  We had not gotten pregnant in 18 months of trying, so figured it wouldn't happen anytime soon.  Well, we got preggo as soon as the bathroom was down to the studs (expect for the bathtub and surround), and 7 months later, it is still not done.  I am hoping to at least get a toilet in by next month.  On the plus side, at least we still have a working bathtub!

[amma_mama]

We also moved into our house about 6 months ago. Before we moved in, we decided to paint our bedrooms ourselves. I always wanted to paint a room and thought it would be relaxing. NOT. I stressed over weeks about the color choices, spend untold hours looking at paint swatches...then forgot to bring them to Home Depot when we went to buy the paint so had to choose on the fly. I was worried to get anything too dark, so ended up with both colors too light, but they are what they are for now. We bought cheapie plastic drop cloths that would not stay put. So we got stains over our brand new carpet (that we had to install before closing in order to get our loan - subfloor = unfinished house, loan was for "finished" house) and on DD's hardwood floor. Our outside water was not working, so DH cleaned the trays and brushes in the bathtub. Yikes, we had a ton of cleaning up to do after painting. Fortunately all the paint in wrong places came out and the rooms look nice enough. Needless to say, we abandoned painting any other rooms ourselves after that episode. Never again. We are such dorks when it comes to even the most basic home "remodeling".

[HeatherAtHome]

My advice when painting ceilings is to use a roller with one of those extension handle things. If you don't have one of those, a broomstick also works nicely. :)

I remember those pics Irishmommy! *shudder*. <==The finger, not the decor! ;)

Um... our best DIY horror stories? Let's see 1) we had to run all new plumbing in our house and DH insisted he could do it himself. He did. We just spend months without water. Believe me, I appreciated it SO MUCH when we finally got it in. 

2) thinking "oh, we'll just gut the inside of our addition, reinsulate and put up new drywall!" on DH's 2 week vacation. We ran into 2 bee nests, the outer wall was rotted right through and had to be rebuilt, and oh yeah, everything took longer than expected! After stalling for a couple months we're now trying to get it done for Christmas. 

Ah, I was looking for pictures and came across this lovely post:

This brings me to one of our many, lovely road blocks. You know our carport? It's crooked? Propped up somehow? Looks like it's falling down? Well, turns out it's semi-propped up on our house. On the wall that we wanted to take down. So we had to fool around with that, fool around with a million other things until I could almost laugh hysterically over the idea I had started out the day thinking that maybe, MAYBE our wall could be put up in one day. It wasn't meant to be. 

Later on:

We had to deal with this, we're shimming the shit out of things because a)it's all crooked and b)this thing was built back in the day when lumber was actually the size stated. A 2x4" was actually 2 inches by 4 inches instead of the 1.5 by 3.5 or whatever it is today. I don't know all the technical terms, but we got the sill plate in (?) and a long piece across all the 2x6's. I'm expecting today to go much quicker. 

Finally:

So we left it like this for the day. Thank God we invested in a large tarp. 

[lifeguard]

When we bought this house we got it for a great price because the kitchen was basically unusable. We had a friend take his vacation time & dh took his for 2 weeks to do the renos. We figured a couple days to demo & then the rest of the time to build. Yeah, we got only the demoing done in the two weeks. For the first year we lived here the kitchen was a room you walked through to get to the house & we had the fridge & stove in the diningroom. Then we went 6 months with a sink, stove, fridge & two saw horses with a board between them as our kitchen. We finally got cupboards & counters the week before we moved out & turned the house over to renters.

[sapphire_chan]

When we moved into our old house, we painted the bedroom. Took like a week going in everyday after work/school, huge hassle.

Painted a slightly (very very) slightly smaller room in 3 hours when we were prepping to move out. That time included:

Starting to touch up smudges in room.

Realizing color is not right and is going to be worse than smudges

Pouring that paint, and the leftover paint from touching up two other rooms (all in blue/green shades) into a baking dish to use as a roller tray

Finding, and laying out a big plastic tarp (purchased to put over a leaking tent during a week of camping, thing cost like $20 and still had enough to blanket the entire room, AFTER throwing away the part that had gone over the tent)

Taking down all the socket plates and taping up the window and trim

Painting.

So my painting advice is to have the short person be the one using the roller, and get the taller person to solve the ceiling.

(Oh, and the color definitely wasn't neutral, but half the people who came to look at the house said they liked the color, and no one said they didn't.)

[Peony]

Almost of our projects have gone smoothly. We build our first house with my father (contractor), remodeled our second, and then have done some small projects in this one. The one that failed miserably was last year we hired a friend's hubby to tear our our kitchen ceiling and put in a new one. It was awful. They ripped out far more then they should of, left everything just hanging, broke our glass top stove in the process and and vanished for weeks. We finally arranged for my dad to come over and help us finish, only that very day the guy called to come over, needless to say we didn't want him setting foot in our house again. It turned nasty. We will never hire a friend ever again! 

Our next project after some minor painting is the upstairs bathroom needs to be redone. I envision DH dragging this one out for months because it is out of sight. 

[sapphire_chan]

Originally Posted by Peony 

Almost of our projects have gone smoothly. We build our first house with my father (contractor), remodeled our second, and then have done some small projects in this one. The one that failed miserably was last year we hired a friend's hubby to tear our our kitchen ceiling and put in a new one. It was awful. They ripped out far more then they should of, left everything just hanging, broke our glass top stove in the process and and vanished for weeks. We finally arranged for my dad to come over and help us finish, only that very day the guy called to come over, needless to say we didn't want him setting foot in our house again. It turned nasty. We will never hire a friend ever again! 

Our next project after some minor painting is the upstairs bathroom needs to be redone. I envision DH dragging this one out for months because it is out of sight. 

Block off the other bathroom until the upstairs bathroom is done. Then the upstairs remodeling'll be done in a week.
 

[Eyelet]

We we first bought our house, our kitchen had a drop ceiling that was stained and needed badly to be replaced. We removed it, only to find that the real ceiling above it had extensive water damage from the bathroom above. It eventually took 3,000 dollars and 4 months to repair everything. 

[amma_mama]

Originally Posted by limabean 

I got a bee in my bonnet yesterday and decided I was sick of having bare walls and boring decor. We moved in about 6 months ago and still had zero pictures on the walls. So I got completely decorated for Christmas, hung up several pictures, and went to Home Depot for paint to redo the downstairs powder room, which had a horrid faux finish when we moved in. I hid the paint, thinking it'd be fun for DH to come home today to a beautiful new bathroom, but now that I'm in the middle of the painting project I'm sorry I started it! The room is tiny, so I figured it'd be no big deal, but there are all those tight spaces, fixtures to work around, weird angles on the ceiling, etc. -- it sucks! (Not to mention trying to wrangle my 2yo and keep her out of the paint tray during all of this.) Also, I kept messing up when trying to cut in around the ceiling, so I had the brilliant idea to just paint the ceiling too and it's like medieval torture -- my shoulders and neck hurt SO much, and I still need to do the second coat! What have I gotten myself into??? 

Okay, so I know that's not exactly a "disaster" story, but I figure some of you have good stories so I thought I'd have a good whine and then open up the floor to you. Whatcha got? It'll help me keep my sense of humor as I agonize through the second coat in a few minutes. 

So, how did it come out in the end? I remember my neck and shoulders killing me for a week after trying to do DD's ceiling!
 

[limabean]

Originally Posted by amma_mama 

I was worried to get anything too dark, so ended up with both colors too light, but they are what they are for now.

That's how I usually am too, and then I hate how light the color ends up looking! After painting many rooms in pastel colors by accident, I've finally learned to choose the color I like and then go 1 to 2 shades darker on the color swatch. It's freaky because it looks so dark on the swatch, but it always comes out looking great -- no more baby-blue rooms! 

Originally Posted by amma_mama 

So, how did it come out in the end? I remember my neck and shoulders killing me for a week after trying to do DD's ceiling!

It looks awesome!!  DH had no idea I was doing it, so he was surprised and happy when he got home from work, which was really fun. It blends so much better with the rest of our house. I did kind of a bad job on the 2nd coat of the ceiling because it hurt my neck so much, so DH will have to do a 3rd coat, but other than that it looks really nice and I'm so glad to not have a terrible faux finish -- I was embarrassed thinking people would think that's how I wanted my bathroom to look! And my neck actually isn't that bad today, thank goodness. DH and I have a cocktail party to go to in a couple of hours and I was worried that I'd be a miserable guest because of neck pain. 

[AtYourCervices]

Many years ago my dad was painting the kitchen at his house. He started working on the ceiling... however he forgot the ceiling fan was still on. The ceiling fan blade sliced him right across the forehead and he ended up with 9 stitches. Not pretty. But everybody got a good laugh at his expense.

Every summer my father worked on cleaning out and organizing the garage. He'd drag out his motorcycles & tools and give the garage a thorough cleaning before putting things back in. When he picked up the snowblower, however, he grabbed it from underneath... right on the blades. He ended up going to the hospital needing several stitches. Yeah, you try explaining to the ER doc how you cut your hand on a snowblower in the middle of July. Oh, and the funniest thing is HE DID IT AGAIN THE NEXT SUMMER! He had to get stitches YET AGAIN for grabbing the snowblower from underneath. Thankfully my dad has a great sense of humor about it all, as he was the butt of many jokes.

Oh, did I tell you my dad is a machinist? The guy fixes up  and moves heavy duty factory equipment every day, and he ends up getting injured doing stupid stuff around the house. 

[mommaof3boz]

My dh took the boys to his parents lake house for the weekend.   My bff and I decided to paint my kitchen while they were gone.  We are both experienced at painting and should have realized this huge err before we started.  My kitchen at the time was a orange color and we were going to a bright yellow.  We went thru a gallon in no time (paint store is 25 miles away) with little coverage.  Three coats later and 2plus gallons of expensive paint later we got it done.  We painted for like ten hours because I have a ton of trimming that has to be done.  We finally after the second coat broke out the alcohol LOL

[Ellp]

We moved into this house 7 years ago and for the first 3 years we suffered through freezing temps in our living room because the existing fireplace didn't work and the room only had 1 forced air vent.  The room is rather large, 18ft x 15ft and the front door is right next to it.  In the wintertime no one would want to spend any time in the room because it was so cold.  The "decorative" fireplace actually leaked cold air in from the outside.

So after 3 years we decided to bite the bullet and put in a gas fireplace.  We got quotes and went with the one that was most reasonable.  Even then it was going to cost us roughly $2500.  So we get the guy in, he takes out the decorative fireplace and realizes that whoever built the house didn't do it to code, and that there was no fire break between the floors.  Also, the wall that the fireplace would have gone into was an outside wall and that entire side of the house wasn't insulated as far as he could tell.  He wasn't about to touch it.

So its up to Dh to install insulation, build a firewall break between the floors before getting the fireplace guy in again.  The guy then realizes that the opening in the wall of the fireplace is larger than the actual fireplace itself and that we'd need a faceplate to cover it.  Oh, and that the metal cap at the chimney needed replacing.  At this point we'd invested so much into it money and time- wise (3 weeks had gone by with our bare wall exposed to the elements) that there wasn't much we could do.

The final cost?  Close to $5000 by the time everything was finished.  We're just so glad to have everything done though, and we cringe at the thought of any other renos needed around the house.

[CCJWGM]

We ripped out the carpet and linoleum in our great room and set to put in the hardwood floors ourselves.  We were selling the house and were scheduled to have an open house in two days.  Not within the life of us could we figure out how to install the floor.  And DH has put in floors before so who knows what gives.  I had to call around and see who could install a floor literally the next day.  Let me tell you, we payed the price for it too.  It took a few calls to find someone to do it.  They even openly laughed at me but came and took my money and put in a beautiful floor. 

[JD5351]

Me and my uncle used to share a house before I had kiddo. We had an older very loved dog named Barnie who had bladder problems. She could not hold her pee no matter what. So after 10 years of this, the carpet stunk miserably. So we went off to the carpet store, and picked new carpet.

2 days before they were scheduled to come to install, I decided it was too embarassing to have the carpet guys pull up the carpet, so I started doing it myself. OMG the subfloor was soooooo ruined. It was warped and flaking away. There was no way we could put new carpet over that subfloor. So we had to call my other uncle, who is pretty much awesome at everything and he came out and tore the floor out and replaced it. While he was doing that, we went and bought a huge baby gate to block off the kitchen-The kitchen was large, linoleum floor and in the back of the house. No carpet beyond the kitchen. Dogs were then banned from the carpeted area of the house unless they were directly supervised.

[doctormom]

When I was 8 months pregnant, I suddenly became obsessed with the idea of having new tile floors installed in both our bathrooms.  (The master bathroom floor was carpeted, and the carpet was old and vile, and I didn't want my homebirth to take place on a nasty dirty bathroom carpet)

DH is a talented DIYer, and he gamely got to work ripping out the flooring.  He tackled both bathrooms simultaneously, because - we reasoned - it would be easier to just mix grout once.  The rooms were stripped down to the subflooring when my water broke 3 weeks early.  We lived with subflooring - in BOTH bathrooms - for several months after that before DH eventuall had time to finish the tile.  Looked real classy.  I blame pregnancy hormones for launching that ill-fated project.

[cappuccinosmom]

This is my moms...

She had this whole kitchen full of wooden cupboards with moulding on them.  First, she painted them white.  But she still didn't like them.  So one day she up and took them *all* off the cupboards.  Doors and drawer fronts, this was 30+ boards.  She thought she would strip them, pull off the moulding, and repaint them.  Cheap DIY project.  Easy peasy.

My dad came home to find her in tears.  She'd tried prying the moulding off, and it destroyed the whole cupboard door.  There was no way she was going to be able to repaint it and use it again.  They just weren't put together the way she'd assumed they were, so her idea to take them apart didn't work the way she'd thought it was.

The kitchen had no cupboard doors for about 2 years. They just finished a whole kitchen makeover upwards of $10K. 

[Mosaic]

Sounds like me. Back in ~2001, my mom had the 1967 ORIGINAL wallpaper in her kitchen, a daisy-like print with brown, olive, burnt orange, and BM-poo yellow. She'd hated it for decades and bought new wallpaper but left it sitting in the basement for years.

I come home for Christmas break from college and decide that my Christmas present to her would be to re-wallpaper her kitchen. It has lots of cabinets, and some areas that are painted, so REALLY there wasn't that much wall space to re-paper. We could even take off the plastic wood-like wallcovering on one side of the kitchen and paper that, too. And then painting the little bits that remain with a brighter color wouldn't be hard, right?

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

First I learned that taking down the old paper is ridiculously hard. The scoring tools left dents in the drywall, which then had to be spackled and fixed up. We then scraped off the paper, but it left behind 40+yo glue, which also needed to be scraped off, without damaging the wall somehow. Then the preglued paper was anything but, so we got glue and followed the directions. But gosh darnitall, everytime I cut the piece JUST PERFECT to match the pattern, the gluey paper got soggy and my thumb would punch right through it.

AND all the times up and down the ladder, I split a big rip in my jeans, giving me the daisy duke look on my right butt cheek, which I then proceeded to flash to the 86yo neighbor because I was trying so hard to just get the stupid stuff on the dkljds wall!

My dad and sis helped me out, and the "weekend project" took a solid 2 weeks. It looks good though, now.