Sweet Jesus! – Tell me your home improvement tales of woe.

We are having our kitchen renovated and a new kitchen fitted. The builder has just phoned to tell me that on removing the wall units he found they were hiding a seriously skee-wiff wall. It was so bad the units had been ‘customised’ to fit. Then on removing the old plaster with a view to rectifying this he has found the brickwork in a terrible, and probably unsafe condition.

Plus I have to figure out how to get a 95kg oven up 40 stairs.

Make me feel better!

£170 for a days rental. Maybe the delivery company have one they can bring with them?

http://www.hss.com/g/70492/Powered-Stairclimber.html

I nearly forgot to water the newly turfed lawn last night. I managed to get he sprinkler out just in time as it started raining. I nearly got soaked!

DIY woe? Try being forced to put up shelves by your wife and then putting a screw through the central heating pipe. Twice.

She still won’t let me forget it and has barred me from house-based DIY since.

So it’s not all bad.

Our first house – Removed wall paper in bedroom to find a massive hole (about 1ftx1ft and about 4 inches deep) in the wall patched up with newspaper and paste. That was a fun surprise.

Have my suspicions the extension is mostly held together with luck and string.

95kg oven? Two or three strongish blokes shouldn’t have a problem with that unless it’s particularly narrow or tight.

Paging bearnecessities!

£170 for a days rental. Maybe the delivery company have one they can bring with them?

http://www.hss.com/g/70492/Powered-Stairclimber.html
I reckon a number of burly folk will be considerably cheaper

‘Customising’* the side of a built-in dishwasher to accommodate the overlapping edge of a sink and its waste.

This action was required because I gave the worktop firm the wrong measurements for the position of the sink. Sink ended up more central to the window, though, so a triumph in my eyes!

In the same kitchen (and the same worktop fitting) I gouged a couple of inches-deep strip out of a wall to keep the worktop flush to the wall rather than cut the worktop itself.

I like to think I’ve got more sensible with age.

*Removing a large chunk of the metal case and some struts with a jigsaw. Safety first!

When we moved into our first flat, the previous owners had fitted a 2nd hand kitchen in there just for show, the tops of the cabinets were screwed straight to wall through the chipboard rear and the bottom was secured by metal L- shaped shelving brackets, i could pull the units off the wall using my thumb and finger.

We then tried to remove the tiles to find that they had used No More Nails instead of tiling adhesive so great chunks of the wall came away as you chipped them off.

They had an electric over, but the old gas pipe in hadn’t been capped off correctly and finally on adding some electric sockets my father in law drilled straight through the kitchen wall into the hall nicking my arm!

And that was just the kitchen..

😀

Most recently, I’ve discovered the kitchen extension is so shonky, it needs to be demolished & rebuilt.

It’s not at the top of my list, right now.

First house I bought, woke to water dripping on my face during a heavy storm. Went into the attic to discover lots of plastic sheets and buckets. Rather than fix the leaking chimney the previous owners used said buckets to catch water, which ‘worked’ until a heavy downpour caused them to overflow…

I reckon a number of burly folk will be considerably cheaper

Rather OT but to put that into perspective…………… 2 ambulance staff need to lift that sort of weight and more on a regular basis! And they wonder why so many staff retire early with bad backs!

£170??? No danger. Current plan is manpower and lifting straps.

This thread is already having the desired effect. Keep going!

helped a friend remove a brick wall above a former doorway into his daughters’ bedrooms. it was held up with a piece of weakened 2×2….

2003, I was renovating one of the spare bedrooms. Had spent weeks getting the room complete, including renovation of an antique nursing chair I had had in storage for years.

Room and chair complete, all that was left was to install the new ceiling chandelier – up in the roof, boarding gave way and i fell through the ceiling, not only catching forearm on nail and tearing a 4 inch hole in my arm on the way through but falling directly on top of the recently renovated nursing chair and smashing it to pieces.

Shouldn’t laugh but… Hope you were ok…

Spent a year renovating our cottage to an impecible finish. Finished just in time for xmas to invite both parents and her grandparents for xmas dinner and the grand unveiling. Had a few days spare befiore so went to see a mate in brum. SPent a couple of days getting tanked them came home at 9pm on xmas eve. After three days binging and a long drive wasn’t feeling my best so when orderd/gently requested to put up door curtain rail as the final coup de gras on our immacualte new home I may have been somewhat ungracious. I then, in a fit of pique, forgot to take the due care and attention and stuck the drill through the light cable in the front room. Cue knocking off (a little bit of)plaster, lifting carpets and floor boards moving furniture etc to get new spur in. 3am finish. Not exactly Mr Popular.

We moved into our current place 4 years ago..
Within the first week one of the patio doors had fallen out, and a 6′ high concrete wall in the garden collapsed as I lent against it.

The wiring was hideous, additional sockets with no grounding and bare live wires in the loft.

The garden was nothing more than an overgrown jungle, with a huge hawthorn bush almost 6′ deep in places.

Yeah sorry LHS I laughed too. 😳

Not me, a friend (seriously), had decorated a bedroom in anticipation of the arrival of a new child. Almost finished, him and his wife were getting ready to go out for the evening, when he noticed a loose varnished floor board in the room. Quick repair he thought, whacked a nail in and straight through the central heating pipe. Water pouring out everwhere, he called a plumber mate who suggested as a temp repair, screw a screw into the hole. This worked. However he then heard a shout from his misses that there was water pouring from the light switch downstairs, so he ran down, and flicked the light on, queue big bang and massive electric shock for him.

Soaked and electrocuted within 15 mins of each other.

Dug 42mtrs of foundations in the rainiest week i have ever known in solid clay, discovered three land drains which had to be rerouted and had to spend a fortune on 18mm ply to shore up the sides. On the day the two lorry loads of concrete turned up with 12 cubic meters on, i was told i would need at least 5 blokes to pour it, there was just me and my 70 year old dad.
Came close to killing the poor old sod that day.
I can’t convey in words how bad that week was.

Yeah sorry LHS I laughed too.

I hope he’s over it, cos it is pretty funny. 😆

yes another one who laughed

We’ve nearly eradicated all the old bodges left in our house, which was built by a bloke who is a former British hill climb champion and now lives 50 yards away. Just got the kitchen to do now, then it will be time to start redecorating all the stuff we did ten years ago….

There have been many many bodges that we’ve uncovered, crimped-over pipes, shoddy wiring, leaking showers, crumbling timber, I think the best was the downstairs WC soil pipe, which exited the pan and turned 180 degrees then went down through the floor alongside the pan, encased in a big box. All he had to do was make a hole behind the pan and use a 90 degree bend. However doing that meant I had to crawl under the floor into a tapering 14″ space and wrestle with a collection of soil pipe joints in order to rejoin the outgoing soil pipe to the sewer, all the time being gassed by the smells coming out of the open soil pipe.

My first place had wood block floors that needed re-sanding, so before moving in properly I decided to sand them all back & re-finish. Only trouble was there was a strip under the double rad in the hall that I couldn’t reach with the machines, so I dropped off the rad to get to it.

Once it was all done I decided to put the rad back on before varnishing and managed to cross thread the valve so gungy black rad water spurted out all over the bare wood floor, soaking in and staining it permanently.

A timely thread… I’ve just drilled through a plastic heating pipe on my 1 week old house. Water everywhere and a hole chiseled out of a brand new wall to fix it… 🙁

I drilled through a gas pipe in our kitchen, was quite pleased as it wasn’t the water pipe as I could have been electrocuted – the gas fitter found it quite amusing, unlike Mrs W.

Not one of our DIY bodges – the taps on our bath were live due to bad earth

all of the above ^^^ just goes to show how pointless buyers surveys are, I guess we all know that deep down anyway, and they write in all sorts of caveats and disclaimers, but for the naive, the inexperienced and first time buyers, they rely on those surveys.

A friend who’s a plumber is currently working (re-configuring) a barn conversion my Dad’s best friend did (for himself) about 10 – 12 years ago, the things he’s told me are unbelievable for such a relatively young project! Worst bit is I now work for the building regs. department who oversaw it…….

Laugh about it now, still have the scar.

Laugh about it now, still have the scar.

Mental or Physical?

I suspect I can win this……

So, I found roof bodge with batons and had to to be taken off and a new roof put on, leaking microbore central heating that had caused most of the upstairs joists to rot to the point they took the wall plates with them, so when you took the floorboards up you could push through the end of joist + wall plate and push the render off the outside of the house.

Chimney stacks rotten in roof space, so you could pick through bricks with your hands and put them into the chimney.

rotten ceiling joists hidden by plasterboard being put over old plaster and and lathe and reskimmed however plasterboard then tore small flat roof down.

sewer pipes ~ 3 inches down and cracked. Sewer Manhole cover in garden removed and left to overgrow with weeds etc to the point it was choked up with plants for 6 feet in both directions, once direction having a lot of sewage built up (months)

electrical wiring spurs created with normal kettle flex.

old plumbing pipes still in walls and with water in and broken so they slowly seeped water into walls causing interesting patterns.

lost track of small things I found.

Had a number of tradesmen walk away from the jobs, as they were too much hassle which also helped.

Wasn’t there a bloke on here whose canopy porch thing sheared off the front of his new build house just after he’d passed under it?
The builders had secured the whole porch assembly on with 5 wood screws or something.

A few years ago we had the drive dug out at our old house. We lived on a hill and digging the drive out meant a 3-4 foot drop was exposed. My wife was pregnant at the time and had to (very carefully) drop down to get out onto the road. The builder assured us this would only be like this for a day or two. However, he failed to show up for nearly 2 weeks. As you can imagine i was a bit cross.
Turns out he was in court during this time for various crimes. Needless to say we got someone else to finish the job.
To top it off the muppet turned up 3 months after the work was completed demanding payment and threatening violence.
Git. 😕

Last house, we put new heating system in. Workmen were away 10 minutes when I went to nail down a loose floorboard, right through the newly installed gas pipe. Luckily he had left his mobile number and was back with the hou, after turning off the gas.

At our last place – we’d moved out for the final weeks of an extension project and the builder had inadvertently left a bleed nipple in the attic room fully open after earlier messing with the water supply.

This was on a Friday so for the full weekend water had been squirting out of the radiator and had soaked right through the ceiling into our bedroom, through our bed, through the floor and into the kitchen.

And when we went to investigate his mess, it turned out he’d made an attempt at salvaging things and that included emptying the contents of the drawers in the divan base – one of which included a selection of toys and other such things.

My wife was not amused, especially as she worked with the builder’s wife 🙂

one of which included a selection of toys and other such things.

Bloody hell. Took me a minute to get that.

8)

When I was a teenager and still at home, my father decided to do a diy conversion of the two downstairs rooms into one big one, in our terraced house.
So it got to the bit where he had to knock the holes in the walls to house the RSJ, he’d done the one side and was working on the other, when he exclaims” bugger,I’ve knocked through into next doors” followed by” I think we’ll get away with it, there’s only a tiny chink of light coming through”
A couple of hours later when next door came home, knock on our door, neighbour says” I think you’d better come and have a look at this”, so in we goes.
The old man was right, there was only a tiny hole, the trouble was about 3 square foot of plaster had come off and pulled the wallpaper all the way to the floor.
We still have a giggle about that every now and then.

Many years ago, my uncle Denis slipped off a joist in his loft and went through the ceiling of my cousin’s bedroom. On account of him being a big chap and the house evidently having shite floorboards, he also went through the floor and ended up in the dining room below.

Top to bottom of the house in one fall, barely a scratch on him, but rather a lot of remedial work required on the house.