insulating a loft or stripping ancient wallpaper.

The job I've least enjoyed in recent months is cleaning out the drains for our downstairs toilet - I've had to attack it 3 times before I could finally get to the bottom of the problem, each attempt taking me to new levels of grossness.

The most soul destroying job I've done in the last year was to move what turned out to be about 6 tons of topsoil by hand/barrow from our back garden. It rained the entire weekend I spent doing it - filling the barrow, taking it round to the trailer, shovelling it into the trailer, taking trailer to local tip, shovelling out trailer... home and repeat ad infinitum.

I'd badly underestimated how much earth I was going to have to move to make space for our deck, and by the time I'd realised, it was too late to hire a skip, which would have cut down the amount of work involved considerably.

Not far behind would be flooring the loft in our last house. I'm a large chap and it was pretty tight between the various trusses - by the time I'd finished, I had to relearn how to walk upright again!

get to the bottom of the problem

Well that made me laugh. Am I juvenile?

Re-Insulating a loft - removing all the old insulation, thick with slate tile dust from when the roof had been replaced, was the pits. Two massively unpleasant days.

Pulling down a lath and plaster ceiling (below an attic - so attic filth and insulation mixed in with lath and plaster).

Stripping wood chip wallpaper painted with silk emulsion. Evil stuff.

I once had to strip paint off an ornate ceiling made of some sort of metal, which made stripping wood chip seem easy.

Stripping that external paint from the house - the stuff you get flyers through the door that promise no more painting it...
bought the house with it already on but soon realiseed it was cracked and starting to **** the render. None if the local trades would touch it so I spent the summer doing it by hand.

It was worse than stripping the interior walls which had generations of woodchip that had then been painted over, then woodchip, then paint...

Since that house I've realised that DIY = time off the bike / games console / 'puter = not worth it!

Glossing....

Cos you do one little bit to tidy something up which then makes some other white woodwork look dirty so you think..... I'll just do that bit and so it goes on......

I'm half way through stripping 100years worth of paint of my stairs. Nitromores is nowhere near as good as it makes out on the tin, but 100 times better than all the alternative I've tried.

Hateful job, don't recommend it. Wish I'd just decided to carpet instead.

Stripping back floorboards.

It should be fun and really satisfying. Instead it is hot, noisy, dirty and frustrating.

Carpet is the way forward.

Stripping ancient wall paper is always a PITA.

Sanding the decking wasn't a lot of fun but made bearable by wearing my Race Face kneepads while doing it!

I love other peoples diy, i get paid for it 😉

The more they hate it the more they pay me!

Clearing over 9000 tonnes of knotted up hair from my old student digs previous tenants which had blocked the shower drain.
There were manky old plasters and various other items mixed in with it.

The smell caused my housemate and I to get into this sort of wretching 'conversation' which culminated in him doing this sort of projectile vomit hiccup. Good times. 😆

Good thread.

Pulling bags and bags of old insulation out of the loft, full suit, gloves mask and googles, but still got covered in crap. Hateful. The upside is the new stuff is so much more efficient, and the house is much warmer in the cold weather.

I will never, ever, ever strip the paint from banisters ever again. If you don't like them, pull them out and put new ones in, or just bloody paint over the top of them and leave them for the next person to deal with. If the wife is insistent, divorce will be less painful.

Oh, and blocked drains I'm not doing anymore. I'll call someone out next time.

bailing out a cess pit with a bucket. Leaky gloves. Nuff said.

Removing wattle & daub plaster from a ceiling, however a rake is very handy.

For stripping stuff off stairs / floorboards, belt sander FTW

Insulation multiplied by cramped loft raised to the power of summer equals hate.

Anything that involves going "beyond the plughole"

most stuff is just mind numbingly boring, papering is what gets me, short drops I can manage but the 10ft+ I have to do for most rooms in my house I go mental, when paper won't go on straight and I rip it all down have a paddy and storm out. First time I did this infront of my mrs she was quite surprised - I'm normally quite mild mannered.

bagpuss72 - Member

Glossing....

Cos you do one little bit

Worst was also removing old loose insulation from the loft on what seemed like the hottest day of the year.

painting bannisters is a far longer job than you imagine.

Running cables in the crawl space under the ground floor is fairly unpleasant too.

Removing Artex.

Removing lino glued to concrete floors.

Removing glass wool insulation.

Living with women with long curly hair, and having to dismantle a shower unit, remove the tray and unblock the waste pipe which has burst causing a flood. Then having to deal with irate women who claim the blockage caused by their hair is nothing to do with them, oh no....

+1 for loft insulation.

Hot, sweaty, itchy job - in fact just like some girls i know 😳

Cleaning up 60m2 of reclaimed parquet flooring
Funfunfun 🙁

Cleaning a year's worth of Mrs Gti's long hair out of the shower drain makes me heave; it's always mixed up with scum, grease, black stuff and all kinds of nasties.

Crawling under the floor and rearranging the plastic soil pipes when I wanted to move the downstairs bog was grim, I was working in a 12" space with my head right next to the open drain inhaling the fine odours rising from the street sewer. Floor is concrete on beams so I couldn't do the job from above.

Removing very old wallpaper.
Sanding floorboards from ye olde days when the carpet/rug went in the middle and the edges were painted/stained.

any DIY!!

the inlaws gave us the money to stick a conservatory on the back of the house 5 months before the new baby was due....

had to paint the conservatory (one side was a wall)the same colour as the living room and stairs. of course **** here goes to b&q and buys matt paint not silk!!!

so that turned into re-doing the living room aswell, then the stairs, then the landing! i nearly went insane.

but the worst part, as im an idiot, when we first moved in i used the sh*te that is 'Polystyrene coving'!! the father in law got me to take this off so he could put on 'proper' stuff!!

by the end of the 2 weeks i booked off work i was hardly talking to the in-laws but what could i say as they gave us the cash... i still have the nightmares!

One that I have to do myself 😕

here goes to b&q and buys matt paint not silk!!!

Given the subsequent work involved, would it not have been easier to go back to B&Q for the right paint?

Any DIY I did for my ex-wife. Analysed, picked at, criticised, moaned about.......

I gave up trying to remove the stranges patches of old woodchip in the bedroom when I realised that it wasn't just painted over, it was glossed over and partially skimmed over too. I just hacked the plaster off and drylined the lot.

Removing kitchen floor tiles that were stuck down with the most powerful adhesive ever known to man which also took lumps of asphalt with it.

Re-instaling new loft hatch that the 'professional' couldn't seem to do very well, he made up some crap excuse about a hospital appointment (at half seven at night!) and disappeared leaving me to finish the job. We didn't pay him and the next day his boss comes round to enquire why!!

Removing loose fill insulation from a roof space that faced the prevailing wind. The soot from the upwind power station had been covered by the insulation. I was extremely black by the time it was done, plus there was a huge amount of birds nest materials to be removed. It was a vile couple of days!
Putting the rock wool in was a relief by comparison.

Top Hate List

1. Laying carpet - hate it more than anything else.
2. Stripping gloss painted wallpaper - 4 days to do a room.
3. Laying laminate flooring
4. Anything invlolving cutting that isn't a carpet

Don't mind tiling though

i hate chiseling out for back boxes. cant stand it.

hacking off old plaster - dust everywhere 🙁

unblocking drains.
i can only do this if i wear one of those waterproof disposable ponchos in case it splashes onto me , ugh 😐

another one i hate, even though its quite straightforward, is removing the dirty sealant from round the bath and re-doing it. it never seems to last more than 6mths before it needs doing again.

not the worst but just 10min ago im trying to scrape yellowed silicone from the kitchen window surround
and the damn stuff aint coming off, its the little streaks where you end up scratching it with your fingernail, actually,,,, wait let me pick my fingernails clean, they're mingin

Taking down an old ceiling which had god knows how many years of rats pee, droppings and old nests mixed with ancient disintegrating insulation. Only way to do it was to stand underneath and get covered in it whilst wearing head to toe protective clothing and a breating mask.

Having spent 4 years renovating an old cottage only to have to put it on the market as soon as it's finished for no profit has made me conclude that I am never, ever going to do major renovations / diy again - riding bikes is a far better use of my time!

[i]Removing lino glued to concrete floors.[/i]

This one. Removing the actual tiles that come up is easy and actually quite fun. Then you get the tiles that leave bits of themselves behind, it's like chipping away at jelly with a screwdriver. Each strip you remove, leaves two behind. The most soul destrying part of the whole job is clearing say a square metre after about 3 hours and standing up, stretching your back and seeing the remaining 20 metres to go.

Give me a backed up bog any time. Shit washes off in a couple of minutes.

Then you get the tiles that leave bits of themselves behind

It's a joyous moment when a 6 inch square comes up intact!

Laying paving slabs isn't on my 'fun' list of DIY jobs. Grouting tiles isn't on that list either, don't mind the tiling bit but grouting - no thanks (just finished the kitchen tiles tonight).

Grouting's quite therapeutic, I find.

You should see my neighbour's pointing on the new garden wall he's building. Exquisite.

renovations . <--- that's a full stop there for effect.

Managed to get a full monty of:
complete house (wooden house, GIB walls) with beautiful anaglypta (? sp) wallpaper and gloss paint in places, probably went on in '61 when it was built. Either reGIB every wall as you couldn't get it off without borking the board. So one full round of oil based primer everywhere. Crossed fingers, skim plaster the whole house, sand, fixup any dodgy bits, paint with sealer, undercoat, 2 coats of paint. Took firkin ages, gf got back and said "theres a bubble there"
Had to build a patio to hide her body ...

Some proper horror stories on this thread. OP - that does sound nasty, but nothing beats unclagging drains.

Our toilet started backing up (rented house, years ago) and the back yard began filling with sewage. Phoned the landlord and his wife told me to come round and borrow their telescopic unclagging rod thing.

I lifted a manhole cover in the back yard and was faced with a two metre deep pool of raw sewage. I was instantly and wretchedly sick, which only made things worse, as I now had to kneel in the pool of sick to get near the pool of shite.

Half an hour of ramming this pole up the drain running toward the house passed before it dawned on me that the blockage might be in the drain running away from the house. By this time I had nothing left to puke (it was a very hot Summers' day). My method was; run out into the back lane, take a deep breath, run back in and shove the pole in, run out of air, take a deep breath, retch bile into the very pool I sought to diminish, repeat ad nauseum (literally).

Finally, the reason behind the blockage became clear - it seems it's common practice round these parts to place a roof tile over the entrance to the main sewer system to stop rats jumping out of your toilet. The tile had slipped and completely blocked the outflow.

Took weeks for the stench to clear and my mind has never been right since.

I was a bit sick in my mouth there reading that. Our bog back up and the dude who came to fix it was about to unscrew the plastic cap when he slammed his foot on it and said that last time he did that he created a sh1t fountain and that there was a fair amount of pressure in there already !!

43derryroad - Member

Removing kitchen floor tiles that were stuck down with the most powerful adhesive ever known to man which also took lumps of asphalt with it.

snap! Mine were big and sort of enamelled on top. I wore my knee pads (as in DH ones) chunky gloves and goggles, still ended up with a few little cuts on my face and neck from flying splinters of tile: some I had to destroy cm by cm just to get off the floor. 👿