Sorry to the subsequent owners
My first house was a little 2-up 2-down terraced house which needed lots of decorating and general sorting out, and this was my first experience of DIY (at least without parents around to help). The decorating was easy and, feeling confident, I decided to have a go at plumbing, so I bought a new bathroom sink, sitting inside an antique-style cabinet.

Fitting the sink and the cabinet was easy-peasy, but when I came to connect up the pipes I found that they were a different size to the connections on the taps (probably imperial to metric difference).

First I tried swearing, but that didn't help. Then I ran out to B&Q (luckily only 500 m up the road) and got some fancy little push-fit connectors to join pipes of different sizes. But they leaked, so I bought some metal ones instead. They needed soldering, and I'd done metalwork at school, so I thought I could do this, but the only heat source I had was a camping stove. So I tried to solder these things together by waving a camping stove at them. The only thing I succeeded in doing was partially melting the plastic pipe taking waste water to the drain...

So I ran back to B&Q (the people there must know when you're having a DIY disaster as you keep going back, each time more sweaty and red-faced) and bought a huge tube of leak-o-stop or whatever it's called - it's some resiny stuff mean to temporarily block holes in pipes. I squirted the entire tube onto the joints, leaving walnut-sized growths of white resin around the pipes. But they didn't leak any more!

Luckily I could close the cabinet door and forget all about this abomination, but I know the people who bought that house off me must have laughed when they saw that crap job.
(Smale is stuffed, Fri 4 Apr 2008, 13:33, Reply)