DIY disasters confession room

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.
I remember you posting about that one aaaaaages ago.

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 *KER_BANG* – 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.
Given the right neighbour, that could be a useful feature to keep quiet about…. 8)

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.
Sorry but that really is funny 😀

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.