Anyone have any funny home improvement horror stories?

[wickerwoman]

I'm trying to find some good ones for my ESL class but all I can find on the web are tragically stupid letters to local papers.

I know DU can do better. So hit me up with your best home repair/improvement stories.

The best one I know is my grandmother who against the advice of all sane people hired her cousins to redo the bathroom. They showed up drunk at two in the morning, tinkered around until dawn and left her a bathroom where you had to step over four pipes of various sizes just to get to the toilet.

[On the Road]

1. Well, There's the Guy Who Had a Hole in His Living Room Wall

He cut a square out to put in a new piece of drwall and deciced to use a circular saw. The first cut went fine. The second cut through hot and cold water lines like a knife through butter.

[Bertha Venation]

2. Other than the one where Mrs. V. laughed at me

because I was afraid of the drill I was trying to use, no. Sorry.

The words "Baby, you can't do butch" will echo in my ears forever. :cry:

[finecraft]

3. Pull down attic stairs story

My friend and her boyfriend were installing a set of pull-down attic stairs in the ceiling of her garage. They cut the opening for the stair frame, then her boyfriend climbed up into the attic so he could nail the stair frame to the ceiling joists to secure the stairs. My friend stayed down on the garage floor so she could stand on a ladder and hold the stair frame unit in place while he nailed the frame to the joists inside the attic. The got the stair frame into place, and he nailed the frame all the way around to secure it. They did all this with the stair unit closed. After he nailed the unit in place, he yelled down from the attic and told her to pull on the cord so the unit would open and the stairs could be folded down so he could get out of the attic. She pulled on the cord, but the unit would not open up. She started looking at the door on the unit and saw that it had been nailed shut to the frame, so the unit would not move around in shipping. She did not have another hammer to remove the nails from the cover........her boyfriend was stuck in the attic with no way out since the door was nailed shut from the opposite side from where he was, and he had the only hammer with which to remove the nails! After about an hour of trying to figure out ways to get him down from the attic, she called 911 for assistance. The 911 operator thought she was kidding. After 3 calls to 911, they finally sent a rescue unit to her house. The rescue workers had to use a chainsaw to cut a hole in another part of the garage ceiling so he could get out.

[4morewars]

8. DUH !!!

Why didn't he bust a hole through the ceiling and give her the hammer ??

[Xithras]

4. My dad had a horrible bathroom accident about 4 years ago

The house I grew up in was originally a 4/2, which my dad lives in today with my little sister and his second wife. My dad is an all around intelligent guy, and even though he had NO carpentry or plumbing experience, he decided to turn one of the upstairs bedrooms into a new master bath. He bought books, ripped the room apart, and pulled in plumbing from the neighboring hall bath to pipe his fixtures. He tossed in dual pedestal sinks, a tile shower, and an awesome two person jacuzzi bathtub.

The whole thing looked great when he finished it, and he was filling his new tub to break it in when the "break" in the floor joists below happened. The floor beams in his 75 year old house simply weren't strong enough to support the weight of the filled tub, and it shattered the sub-floor, six of the beams, and completely caved in the ceiling in the dining room below. The tub itself never fell through but it was CLOSE.

To this day, my stepmother won't even let him replace a FUSE in the house without yelling at him to "CALL A DAMNED PROFESSIONAL!" :)

[TNDemo]

5. Uncle Al.

My husband's uncle considered himself a fix-it man but it was always like bad yard art. One time he decided to build an addition on to his house. He added a den or something. He decided he wanted to get a loan on the house. The appraiser came out and gave him a low appraisal and then told him he would bump the appraisal up if he would tear down the addition. So he did.

[SarahB]

6. How every project is 90% finished

For example, nearly everything inside is done by me (painting, removed carpets, etc.) and I finish. However, (sorry to bitch about hubby again), he likes to do 90% of a job and then leave it....for years! The biggest, most obvious example is the one shutter in the garage. We painted our house almost 5 years ago and put on new shutters. The drill bit broke when he was putting in the last shutter and it was never put on (we have new drill bits). Every time I say I'll just go ahead and do it, he gets upset and says, "I'll get to it if you give me a chance!" :eyes:

[OneBlueSky]

7. when I owned a two-family some years back . . .

I decided to be a good landlord and re-do my tenant's bath . . . I pretty much gutted the room (except for the tub), put up new wallboard and wall coverings, a new sink and toilet, an exhaust fan, a new vanity, etc. . . . and the place looked pretty good, if I do say so myself . . . near the end of the project, when everything was pretty well done, I was ready to test the plumbing and asked my tenant's son to go down to the basement to turn the water back on . . . when he did, I was hit square in the face by a strong stream of water emanating from the wall above the toilet! . . . turns out that after running some new water pipes, I had managed to hammer a sheetrock nail right into the center of one of them . . . had to take the toilet back out, remove a section of the wall, repair the pipe, and then fix everything for the second time . . . not to mention having to listen to my tenants repeating the story to anyone who would listen for the next month or two . . . never again! . . .