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

Not DIY as such, meant to be professional! My Dad used to own a kitchen firm. He sent one of his fitters out to a house to install a very expensive new brass sink. Client was on holiday so had arranged for neighbour to let him in. Fitter goes round, gets access, has a grumble about the fact that the sink was full of washing up, tears out existing sink, fits new one, does washing up, jobs a goodun.

Turns out neighbour has let him into the wrong house…

I then overflowed the bath and nearly wrecked a £1200 freshly plastered kitchen ceiling – water pouring out of the new light fittings.
Same night I then screwed through a central heating pipe in the main bedroom and did the same thing to the living room ceiling.

At least the power was off 🙂

Turns out neighbour has let him into the wrong house…

Wins

as a yoof we went on holiday to Crete on a 18/30 piss up. There was a small ‘incident’ in our apartment that resulted in some fire damage to a whitewashed wall. Perfectly acceptable repair made by applying liberal amounts of toothpaste over the scorch marks.

Wins

concur

Mrs Ed decided to bleed the radiators while I’m bathing the kids (the youngest was about 6 months at the time so needed physical proximity, the eldest is 3) and promptly unscrewed the radiator nut in our bedroom so it pings into the room and the rad starts spewing boiling water into the bedroom… it then becomes my job to replace it :-/ burnt hands from the boiling radiator

previous house (previous G/F), had a victorian toilet with the high level flush but the pan had a crack in it, needed an external flush pipe connector pan which are £200+ from an antique salvage (sod that!). After weeks of searching I spy one in the garden of a house in another road with a load of junk. I went back one night, jumped the front garden wall, lifted it (it stank 🙁 ) and as I’m making off with said skanky toilet pan the house owners hall light goes on and I hear footsteps and raised voices – so I’m running down the road trying not to drop it and also trying not to hurl

Perfectly acceptable repair made by applying liberal amounts of toothpaste over the scorch marks.

That sounds like the ‘toothpaste on lovebites’ trick taken to a whole new level…

Forgive me for the link – but I used to be a regular poster on b3ta and this post springs to mind:

Here for DIY fail

Had bathroom redone in 2011, finally finished this year.
New dropped T&G limewaxed ceiling – unfortunately this was installed before the walls had been finished and tiled, and it was also on the piss.
The toilet wasn’t fixed to the floor, or the SVP outlet, shame as when I discovered this I’d had a jobby and flushed the loo.
The shaver socket was wired up wrong, so it was live, and not actually earthed.
The main stopcock wasn’t fitted correctly and brought down downstairs bathroom ceiling, also the floor was chipboard and changed shape somewhat due to water leaks, this also meant that the expensive cork floor tiles that we’d had laid all came up and were damaged beyond repair.
The walls were not made good when the 1930s tiles were hacked off, but unfortunately the bathroom suite had been installed by then so we ended up getting lining boards installed to give us a good finish (obviously these were installed incorrectly, and the walls weren’t straight.
Because the walls weren’t straight, and the ceiling was on the cock, the floor to ceiling mosaics took an age and our tiler also managed to crack both the wash hand basin and pedestal, and snap a cold water feed pipe.
Coming home one night I found the towel radiator had been installed with the brackets at the 1/3rd location so it couldn’t be used to hang towels on. We now have two drill holes in the mosaics – for which we also ended up spending over £400 in specialist grout, so to fix these will cost a minimum of £45 for one tub of grout.
Once we’d properly had enough and sacked our fitter, we had a bit of a rest, then got another in.
We managed to get the majority of the work fixed up over the next fortnight or so, then, one night we heard a chunk, the sudden sound of a waterfall and the combi boiler went bang. Turned off the stopcock, and started mopping up. As a result the bathroom suite all had to come out and sit in the back garden for two weeks while the floor was taken up again, and the bathroom filler connection was fixed correctly as it had blown off the fitting due to not being tightened enough. At this point we also discovered that no1 man had also both not connected the radiator feed correctly so that it was leaking, but also put 4 nails through it. Unfortunately no2 man found this out as the water hit him in the eye as he pulled up some boards.
The bathroom suite all eventually went back in, we then decided that we’d have to get another bathroom tap as no1 builder had done something painful to the first one so that the water came out at funny angles, and mostly onto the floor.
Nothing happened for about 12 months, then we got increasing miserable about the ceiling on the cock, so had that ripped out and a new one put in. Because the walls were so shonky I had to design a new detail for the builder to make so that the ceiling edging looked halfway decent. Whilst he was doing this he discovered that the reason we were burning out 2 or 3 £70 LED lamps every couple of months was because they were wired up wrong, and the shaver socket also wasn’t earthed (or wired up anywhere near correctly). We then though it’d be nice to have a bathroom door as we hadn’t had one for 2 years – this had to be a special order, and the door ironmongery I’d ordered from a factory in Walsall took 3 and a half months to arrive (nice when it did though).
I am not even going to commit to how much that bathroom cost, suffice it to say it makes me ever so slightly upset when I think about it.

Jesus

straying off the ‘DIY’ route and back into ‘dodgy professionals’ territory;

we’d just bought our first flat – one bed and in need of some serious work. Saved up for a new kitchen and made the mistake of getting professionals (company beginning with M, not sure if they’re still about) round. The two fitters turned up and got on with things; they were scheduled to finish on the Friday afternoon. I would be coming home and my wife and I were going down to Devon to my parents for the w/e.

I was on the train home looking forward to seeing our new shiny kitchen when got hysterical phone call from my wife. Clouds of smoke coming from the airing cupboard. Luckily the flats still had a live-in janitor who happened to be passing and as I was on the phone he ran in and saved the day.

To cut a long story short (involving professional surveyors etc):

– They’d not replaced the original early 1960’s 4 circuit consumer unit (old-school wire job) as they should have done (that only had 3 working circuits it turns out).
– Instead, rather than a new shiny box with enough capacity they’d just jammed the new, range oven, the kitchen plugs and the main plug circuit into one.
– My wife’d turned the hoover on and it’d overloaded but as they’d pretty much bridged the fuse with the thickest wire they could find the whole box had caught fire.
– None of the new plug sockets in the kitchen had been earthed, all four of them were wired incorrectly.
– When drilling out the new plug socket boxes they’d actually gone right through the wall in a couple of places. We only discovered this when we moved the christmas tree in January and noticed some wallpaper that had been glued down / moved a chest of drawers in the bedroom to find a hole through to the kitchen.

Thank god there was no gas in the kitchen for them to mess up. Had we gone away without it overloading with us in the flat the surveyor reckoned it’d have slowly caught fire whilst we were away.

The company were a complete shower afterwards; suddenly their sales pitch line of ‘we employee ALL our fitters ourselves’ changed to ‘they are subcontractors, not our problem’. Needless to say their offer of sending the same chaps back to make good was refused…