I’ve put up dozens of shelves and cabinets and stuff all over this house and others, and today I finally made the stupid mistake and drilled clean through a wall into the other room.

I’d just put up one shelf which was on an exterior wall, and I forgot that the other shelf on the adjacent wall was on a stud partition!

Coat hook other side?

never drill without it 😉

I’ve hit a few pipes over the years, best one was when I drilled when i moved in, took the blind down 17 years later, taking the screw out of the wall uncorked the pipe. Right pig to fix despite being push fit plastic, no space as it was behind plaster board dab and dot.

Never drilled through a wall but my father in law used to have one of those nail guns that used an explosive charge, forgot to change the charge and fired a nail straight through a brick internal wall narrowly missing his brother.

I was re-fitting a bathroom – despite knowing the shower pipes were buried on the other side of the block wall, I still managed to drill into it. The pipe had been capped-off as I still needed to fit a new shower. However I hadn’t isolated the supply or turned-off the shower pump – so the pressure drop actuated the pump and I got an absolute hosing.

A guy I used to work with was drilling a hole for a telephone cable from the customers hallway to outside, unfortunately he drilled into next doors instead who had just had the decorators in. Knocked a bloody great lump of the plaster off and ruined the paper as well.

I drilled through my first pipe this summer. A creaky board on the first floor was annoying me and while the carpets were up I thoughts “I’ll just pop a screw in that”.

After mopping up it was obvious why there were clear pencil lines on the chipboard floor… Oh how I laughed.

Only just got round to fixing and painting the plaster on the ceiling below. 🙄

Lol those two are great 🙂

My dad once fitted a socket into a friend’s bedroom using a surface mount box onto plasterboard. Turned out that the builders had done a cowboy job and the wall was a single piece of plasterboard. There were four screws sticking out into the other room.

I got told a story about a bloke putting new wall ties in an old house once and set the depth wrong on his SDS drill. Drilled all the holes on one side of the house before anyone realised. 😲

I drilled into a radiator pipe putting a screw through a first floor floorboard. Smartest thing I did was walk straight downstairs, drill a hole in the ceiling and stick a bucket under it. Polyfilla’d the hole after it all dried out 🙂

when our house was being renovated I stopped one of the workmen who was about to take a disk cutter to an old gas pipe and I asked if he had checked if the gas was disconnected first.  He hadn’t and the pipe was live.  Still makes me twitch about what would have happened if I hadn’t caught it in time 🙁

I am more idiotic than this. Bleeding through radiators last week and managed to unscrew the valve all the way. Fell on floor and took ages to find. Water pissing out of the side straight on to a power socket 😕

What length screws do you use for shelves? 😮

I put a screw through an under floor radiator pipe, while screwing down the plywood sheets pre tiling.

I’d previously marked a line in red spray paint, where the path of the pipe was, and there was this screw, dead centre of the line.

Luckily, it was one of the first screws I put in, not one of the last (probably close to 200 in a 8×4 sheet)

What length screws do you use for shelves? 😮

I think its normally that you expect brick so you put a little grunt into it.

The impact from you grunt and the first layer giving way combined with a spinny thing that has just lost all resistance and is specifically design for making holes means you just bury the whole lot into the wall.

On my crappy plaster on brick i have to do it in two stages no hammer to get the hoke through the plaster and key into the brick or the hole could end up 6inches away from where i started!

I can’t find the link to the story now, but my favourite was a cavity wall insulation installer using blown polystyrene beads who went straight through into next door, through the back of their wardrobe and filled their house with the beads, and was wondering why the job was using more material than expected!

a cavity wall insulation installer using blown polystyrene beads

I have seen first hand what happens when you try to core a hole for an extract fan through a wall insulated with these beads. it’s quite messy.

I also had an irate tenant who claimed that the guys installing a mast climbing work platform to a block of multi storey flats had drilled into his Jack Russell dog, which was lying sleeping up against the wall when the 600mm drill bit came through the skirting board. On subsequent inspection, the dog proved irate but unharmed.

The impact from you grunt and the first layer giving way combined with a spinny thing that has just lost all resistance and is specifically design for making holes means you just bury the whole lot into the wall.

Even then you’d be burying the entire chuck of the drill into the plasterboard surely?

Our landlord in 2nd year at uni came round to fix a leaking ground floor shower. 2 hours later he left having made 2 new holes in the pipe and having grabbed a couple of pallets out of the truck to to raise the floor level (by standing on the pallets while using the facilities) so the water was just below the level of the top of the pallets as the bathroom was 2 steps below the rest of the house level and there was a air vent to outside about 2 inches off the floor which allowed it to flow out into the street (luckily). Glad we weren’t on metered water as it was a proper gushing level of water for about 3 weeks before he got the courage to call a proper plumber.

Was happy to leave that house of horrors.

Last year after finishing our lounge I nailed on the last bit of skirting board using a borrowed nail gun.

One nail straight through the CH feed to the upstairs. And one straight through the return 6 inches away. Cue me cutting a massive hole in our freshly plastered & painted wall to sort it 🙄