The bigger they come, the harder they... get stuck.
I should preface all of these tales with a blanket statement- I’m very good with tools, can fix or build just about anything I set my mind to, am a fanatic about doing things myself (which is why I’m also a good cook and can do all my own housework), and am generally very competent. Which is why when I make a mistake, it tends to be a beauty.

My parents’ house in the Adirondacks is a chalet type building, surrounded by lots of trees and overlooking a lake. (I’ll post pictures at some point.) They have taken pains to maintain the trees fairly close to the house and all the way to the shore so that their house isn’t very visible from the lake, and as this was a stand of mature forest when they bought it the trees tend to be enormous and old, consisting of birch, beech and hemlock with a few maples thrown in.

As I grew up there, we heated the house with wood. This means that I’m very used to operating a chainsaw and dropping trees, and in fact went to forestry school. Taking down a tree is old hat to me. So when Dad mentioned that there was a birch that was almost dead that he needed to take down sometime, my ears pricked up. He and Mom were going out of town for the day and my sisters and their husbands were around, so we all agreed that we should take out the tree for him. I had the know-how and plenty of willing muscle, so it should be easy.

We hooked up some ropes to it and winched it with two come-alongs to pull it in the direction we wanted it to go in, which was a good precaution as it was fairly close to the building and very large. I eyeballed the tree and saw that it was not quite leaning in the right direction, but I knew how to handle that- basically you cut the hinge wider on one side so it will fall in that direction. No problem, as it was leaning away from the building anyway.

I cut the notch, set aside the chainsaw and checked my aim- all looked fine. I started on the back cut, Dad’s Stihl roaring as it bit into the wood, my siblings pulling mightily on the ropes to add tension, and the tree starts moving in the right direction, so I step back-

-and the goddam thing got hung up between a beech and a maple.

Picture it. This tree is about two feet in diameter, green hardwood (weighs a fucking ton), sixty feet tall, leaning at about thirty degrees from upright, held at one end by a lot of tangled branches and at the other by a splintered strip of wood about three inches thick. Is it stable? Is it about to fall and smash someone flat? How the fuck can you tell?

We consulted, and decided that I should take a chunk off of the bottom of the tree. I started out by cutting up from the bottom about a third of the way, then started cutting down from the top. When it starts to pinch shut it should break off at that point, just as I had been taught. Only, of course, it didn’t- it pinched shut on the bar of the saw, hard.

Now I’ve got a potentially lethal tree hanging on by two narrow strips of wood at the bottom and branches at the top, and my father’s expensive chainsaw stuck in the middle.

Fuck.

So I went to the tool shed and got out a scissor jack and had by brothers-in-law bring some scrap lumber. I set up the jack to push up on the cut and began cranking, all the while picturing the thing abruptly giving way at the bottom so that the branches at the top push the trunk backward like God’s own battering ram and landing on a sister or two. Seldom have I sweated as I did then- but the saw finally slid out. I moved it out of the way and eased the jack back down and got it out of the way, then took a breath and started the chainsaw again. I went back to cutting from the bottom, tensed up and ready to spring back when it moved, and sure enough it worked- the bottom of the tree sprang loose, the stump end hitting the ground with a thud like T. Rex stomping a chihuahua, and I waited for the crash.

Which never came.

“Where’s the kaboom?” I said. “There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!”

Nope. Still hung up. FUCK!

I ordered everyone back out of the way and started cutting from the bottom again, about four feet up the log from the last one. This time I did the top cut first and went up from beneath, again sweating as I envisioned the remaining fifty feet of yellow birch landing on me- but again, I danced back as it slammed the ground, and saw that it was changing angle quickly so I leaped farther back as it hit the ground in a satisfying crunch.

I then shut off the saw and drank an entire beer in one breath.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 3 Apr 2008, 19:35, 3 replies)

My father and DIY
By all rights, my Dad should be the best DIY Dad in the business. He spent the fifties building and maintaining vacuum valve computers and radar gear, the sixties designing bits of military jets and the seventies/eighties designing parts of oil refineries, rigs and pharmaceutical plants. The Handley Page Victor, English Electric Lightning, BAC TSR2, Jodrell Bank, half the North Sea oil platforms and even Concorde contained bits my father had designed himself.

Armed with this experience, you'd think that getting my Dad to hang a shelf would be like asking Stephen Hawking to help with your maths homework, right?

Wrong.

My father is blessed with the sort of self confidence akin to a herd of elephants, the patience of a small child and the easy going nature of Basil Fawlty. As a result, such trivialities as a set of instructions or even a cursory moment to check his calculations were frequently skipped, much to the hilarity of the neighbourhood.

I cringe looking back, neighbours must have been regularly regaled with the frenzied cry of "Oh SHIT!!!" being bellowed from inside sheds, under car bonnets or in the general vicinity of our tormented Black & Decker Workmate.

Boiler Room Rage:

Incident number one occurred when I was about nine years old. Dad decided that the unsightly hexagonal key used to gain entry to our central heating boiler under the stairs just wouldn't do.

I recall being scooped out of bed by my nervous mother and bundled into the back of the family car for the four mile trip to our local Marleys at some ungodly hour of a Saturday morning. After a thrilling thirty minutes, I was ordered to assist Dad with his project.

Four hours later and after being slapped twice for various misdemeanours (ie "not holding the wood properly") Dad has finished drilling into the metal door and is installing a proper handle.

"Wha... Wha... You BASTARD!"

Oh dear. I sense rage building...

I looked at the door and I looked at my dad. He wore an expression on his face that was midway between rage and utter confusion and befuddlement. His hand rested on the door handle he'd just fitted and he tried again, perhaps hoping his initial assessment was wrong.

Then Mount Etna erupted.

"They've sold me the wrong BLOODY handle. SHIT!" he yelled.

Yep, to open the boiler cupboard door, you had to pull the handle *up*.

Kitchen Fiasco:

Six months later, Dad decided that mum needed a new kitchen. MFI? Not a chance.

Dad meticulously planned the operation in his own brain. The thing that amazed me at the time was that not a single drawing or blueprint was used. It was all sketched out in his head.

We'd need tiles. Lots and lots of tiles. Saws, drills and spirit levels of some considerable vintage were produced. Lengths of wood were retrieved from the shed and I was ordered to patiently sit on the wood, hold screwdrivers and saws while absolutely not saying a word while my father intermittently sketched marks on the wood with a pencil, sawed and ranted at the neighbours' children for being too noisy. A bewildering range of aged, rusting tools were dangled in front of my face with the faint promise that I too might get to use them if I was quiet enough and concentrated long enough. Failure to concentrate to my father's satisfaction was rewarded with cold rage and a slap if I wasn't careful.

My mother kept her distance, she'd be told to "sod off!" when Dad got fed up of her nervously dispensed advice like "Oh, I think you need to put a screw in there" uttered at a hushed volume.

I guess she was desperately trying to contain his rage and placate him. Paradoxically, she was great at dispensing useless and rage inducing advice though, even a mild mannered soul like me cannot undertake any DIY while my mother is around, for being told "You need a phillips screwdriver for that" in hushed faux-knowledgeable tones usually has me grinding my teeth within seconds. Eventually, she resorted to her last line of defence - topping up cups of tea.

By lunchtime, our kitchen resembled the aftermath of Krakatoa crossed with a Greek Wedding. Bits of broken ceramic lay everywhere, in the middle stood a portly, red faced swearing man.

"The BLOODY walls aren't straight! SHIT!" yelled a voice kneeling on the floor, with three inches of arse-cleavage peek-a-booing up from the beltline of his jeans as he was attempting to tile from floor to ceiling. How he guessed from this altitude I'll never know.

"Shit! SHIT! You BASTARD!" he bellowed as another tile broke.

"These BLOODY tiles!"

The tiling was eventually comlete at long last. However, in a manner akin to one of those geometric illusion type drawings, if you traced the line of tiles along the top of the longest wall, the ceiling appeared to have been installed at an angle of two degrees off the horizontal.

By 9pm Saturday night, worktops were being sawn. I was attempting to watch "Dad's Army" above the sound of someone bellowing "Shit!" at the top of their voice before coming in to tell me I was lazy and useless for not helping him.

By 5pm Sunday he was attempting to mount doors onto new cupboards. Yep, a sturdy looking framework and new worktops were fitted. Not bad.

"Oh SHIT! BLOODY HELL!"

Due to a minor miscalculation of cupboard space, it tanspired that we suddenly had three previously unaccounted for inches between the cooker and a cupboard.

Dad stared at this intesnely for a few minutes, with the usual blend of befuddlement and barely contained rage.

Ingenuity eventually saved the day however. Dad wandered off with a saw and produced a cupboard door three and a half feet high by three inches wide. My mother was instructed to keep her baking trays there.

Record Cabinet Disaster:

Mum managed to win a small amount of money on the Football Pools. Yay mum! However, instead of treating herself to something nice, she pre-empted a Dad-rage by buying him some chipboard. Why?

Well Dad expressed a desire to make a record cabinet a few weeks previously. Hoping that giving him what he wanted would soothe his oft volcanic temper, mum did something truly daft thanks to an ill conceived moment of kindness.

It was a bright summer weekend, I sat on my bedroom floor assembling the Forth Bridge from Lego (again, without instructions). By 11am I was retrieved from my room and sat outside on bits of chipboard as Dad intermittently sawed and ranted.

"SIT STILL! Hold the bloody screwdriver properly, you won't be able to do any of this when you grow up if you don't pay attention!"

Yep. I was the walking toolbox, however at least I'd reached an age when he stopped slapping me around when things went pears. I think it goes some way to explaining why to this very day, I find the sound of someone drilling into a wall utterly terrifying.

By late afternoon, the job seemed nearly complete. Despite the lack of plans, the cabinet was cuboid in shape. I was confident, had my super dad managed to snatch a daring victory? It would appear so.

Takeaway that Saturday afternoon was almost a jovial affair. My mum wasn't a bag of nerves and things looked promising.

Sunday morning, my own construction was coming along nicely. I hummed along to the music coming from my brother's bedroom. I remain grateful for the sanity gifted to me from the Human League, Luther Vandross, Gary Numan and the Boomtown Rats courtesy of my brother's Realistic (read Tandy own brand) Hi Fi.

"SHIT!!!"

*sound of needle abruptly scratching across vinyl*

A blood curdling scream of rage and anguish pierced the air. Birds stopped singing outside.

"You BLOODY BASTARD!"

Then I recall hearing a loud banging noise, the type you might hear if someone kicks a chipboard record cabinet hard.

"SHIT!" *bang* "SHIT!" *thump* "SHIT" *splinter*

Startled I walked to the window, fearful that Dad might look up and take his rage out on me.

I was rewarded with the sight of a grown man toe-punting the rapidly disintegrating remains of a record cabinet around the garden. The wood, tools and everything else in earshot were excrementally denounced.

The reason for the destruction? Turned out that Dad had lost his temper attempting to take a plane to chipboard...
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Thu 3 Apr 2008, 19:25, 11 replies)

If - as it seems- DIY sex is the order of the day.
I once decided to fuck one of those pots of ready to eat jelly.

I didn't take the laws of displacement into account, so on the first thrust the jelly shot out all over the bed.

I was staying in a hotel at the time.

Fucksocks.
( The Awful Puppy Bakery is still bored, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 19:24, Reply)

For the sake of getting on the 1st page
My house is a DIY disaster as I haven't bothered to do any.
( Mrs Entity is in hiding., Thu 3 Apr 2008, 19:24, Reply)

My girlfriend was saved by a shit computer
I put up some shelves in our home office - the mechanno sort where you nail a few runners to the wall and then slot in the supports for the shelves.

The shelves were very fucking load-bearing - boxes of books, magazines, photos - that sort of crap - about 18 A3 boxes of the fuckers - each one weighing about a stone.

Now, our computer at the time was on it's last legs. We'd loaded up Creative Suite, which had quite frankly completely fucked any chance of doing any multi-tasking on it, and any sensible programs lidderally took about 5 minutes to load We soon realised that the method to operate the machine was to double-click on the icon, and to go and make and enjoy a cup of tea, and when one came back it would be dressed and ready to play.

One day The Wife (TM) was home alone, and working on her portfolio.

Having done the most of it in InDesign, she opened tatty chop, and went for her tea. Just as she was about to come back, the entire shelving unit came crashing to the floor, killing our computer, smashing our computer desk, and ripping holes of several inches into the wall.

There is absolutely no doubt that had she been under those shelves at the very least she'd be eating through a straw today.

And thus single, obviously.

You love me for my length.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 19:23, 2 replies)

erm.....
I was once caught wanking - does that count?
( KISS.ME.WHERE.I.POO Signed the sex offenders register on, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 19:10, 3 replies)

My DIY disaster
Was when I got wallpaper-paste all over my keyboard.
( mistaspakkaman and the inedible shifting caterpillars, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 19:00, 2 replies)

diy
i HATE having to deal with other peoples bodges, but my solutions are probably shocking bodges that would offend others.
Decorating a house for my sister, i came to one bedroom which had a layer of woodchip, which had been gloss painted a few times, then covered with another layer of woodchip, which had been painted plenty of times too. No amount of scraping, use of a steamer or any other method could get that shit off without destroying the plaster underneath. In the end I clad the entire room in 3mm hardboard then decorated over that. Probably a bit of a bodge on its own, but it was the easiest solution I could think of.
The floors in this house would make a tradesman cry. The house had a subsidence problem decades ago and as a result, the whole house sits at a noticeable angle. Some previous owner had attempted to "level" the floors by putting battens of varying sizes down over the floor boards and re-doing the flooring in thin chipboard. It was a complete nightmare and was falling to bits, so I started ripping it up to do a proper replacement floor, then noticed that whoever had fitted the gas central heating had run all the water and gas pipes between the original floor and the chipboard overlay. I replaced the chipboard with decent plywood and left it at that.

I once rented a flat where the bathroom had wood panelling up to a dado rail and wallpaper above that. Fine, except the numpty landlord had fixed the sink to the wood paneling and not the wall behind it. First morning in the new flat and I leaned on the sink while brushing my teeth and pulled the fucker off the wall.

oh, and if you ever need to know where your water pipe is in a wall or under a floor, get me round to hammer in a nail. I will hit the fecking pipe, guaranteed. Ive done this on 4 seperate occasions now.
(dave likes cheese, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:59, Reply)

Friend's loft
When converting a friend's loft (or attic if that so takes your fancy), plasterboard needed to be cut to size to fill in all the gaps. A lot of plasterboard, since the room had a hexagonal end profile which messed with my head.

So after cutting quite a few pieces of plasterboard, and some of them even fitting perfectly first time, I may have been getting a bit cocky. It was at this point that I noticed a sharp pain just as I finished cutting yet another piece.

Upon looking, I discovered a large rip in my trousers, but no blood or cuts on my leg.

"That's strange," thinks I, "I wonder why it was sore?"

It was about half a second later that I discovered the inch long cut in my finger, which had been previously unnoticed due to the large amounts of plaster dust that had filled it.

Part of me thought I should have get it checked out, due to all the plaster in my blood. The other, lazier, part of me, did not agree.

The lazy part won, and I'm not dead yet.


Also, we managed to build a squint door frame, and then couldn't find any door that would fit in it :(

It has beads hanging in it now.
(PenguinOfDeath is Scottish, and most likely angry, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:55, 2 replies)

How to avoid some DIY diasters before you find them
Folks if you are looking for a house and the lady says "my husband`s a builder" even if not with an irish accent, RUN LIKE FURY! I saw a loft conversion once, it was converted into an exclusion on the house insurance.
(tootired Is searching for a funny sig, nothing good so far, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:54, Reply)

"I am downstairs, and I can see your legs"
I bought a new house 5 years ago that needed a fair amount of work doing to it. Two bathrooms and a kitchen to refit, carpeting, tiling, plumbing, radiators... It's fine - I'm used to it and can cope.

Half ten at night, I've got the floor up in the main bathroom. Previous owner had some aiming issues and the floorboards were pisswarped so badly that the toilet was on the wonk. Whole bathroom is now stripped out and I'm putting new boards in.

I'm tired, hungry, and in a rush.

And that's when I stepped on the upper side of the platerboard ceiling of the floor below. Legs either side of a joist made me soprano for a day or two.

My missus' father, who was there at the time, refuses to let me forget it. In retaliation, I never let him forget the fact that he only has three toes on his left foot because he dropped the engine block of a 4-tonner Army truck on it.
(Guizmeaux, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:51, 2 replies)

I may have the wrong end of the stick here....
.. but I was at a party when a very attractive girl in a short skirt caused me to get the urge to retire to the water closet to unload my pods.

Imagine my horror when just after I'd gurned my way to the vinegar strokes, some friend of mine burst into the room to be confronted with the vista of me holding my rapidly deflating member in one hand, and with a pool of rapidly cooling ejaculate cupped in the other.

What a disaster.
(Vic Flange, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:47, 2 replies)

my first house
If i am ever able to buy my own house. The first thing I will do will be to seal a skeleton dressed as a builder in the wall.
( willenium Fist bump for verification, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:42, 4 replies)

Not me, someone who didn`t listen to me and a tale of two kango`s
I cast the runes, advised sensibly but was not heeded. a mate i worked with was as intelligent as i am, but differently, the practical bit had never stuck. I gave sterling advice on removing tiles in the bathroom which was do it with a brick bolster and a club hammer It`s a 1930`s place with shitblock walls in places. If you must use any sort of mechanical stuff, get the fartiest you can to limit damage and and put a wide chisel in. Saw one in the hire cat that would be safe and said so.

Having been told this the hire place had none returned , But he could have this lovely monster one at no extra charge.......

Tiles on the window reveals ..Zip through the window, otherside? Zip.. through the window. Patition wall ( shitblock) zip through tile, shit block and you could see the neighbours brown plaster.

I didn`t witness this, but a mutual friend spilled the beans crying with laughter, I didn`t know, all I asked was did you get those tiles off? " Oh yes absolutely" and a very odd look.
(tootired Is searching for a funny sig, nothing good so far, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:41, Reply)

Some people are strange.....
Dad and I have renovated a few houses in our time. But our place in Wellington was the product of some misguided fool that thought he was an interior decorator par excellence.
Just a few examples:

1/ In the lounge there were 2x 2 metre lengths of coiled ship's rope screwed to the ceiling and painted. God knows why.

2/ There were alcoves in the walls **everywhere**, the smallest being 5cm by 5cm.

3/ There was a narrow room 1m wide and 5m long. Again, God knows why.

4/ The fireplace in the dining room was a faux-Romanesque plaster monstrosity with doric columns and ledges. I took to it with a crowbar. A hefty swing into the left column and THUD! the crowbar disppeared into it. Hollow it was! Not only that, it was made of 3 pieces of kindling (yes, the stuff you put on fires) surrounded by chicken mesh, surrounded by old lino, then painted 20 or 30 times. The ledges were made of every scrappy bit of wood he had left over.

5/ When widening the entrance to the wardrobe (double wardrobe, narrow single door - go figure...) we found that one of the main door supports was too short and he had rested it on top of a beer bottle lying on its side in a special compartment made to fit it....

In later life, I wonder if he went into construction - that might explain all the leaky buildings we have here.

Length - it took 4 years to completely renovate and improve that place.
(Sebulba continues to fight evil with evil....., Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:38, 1 reply)

I'm not in the least bit DIY minded.
And therefore, by society's standards, not a 'proper' man. I strongly believe that if you can afford to get someone to do it, then pay the buggers to do it - my time is precious enough, plus I'm helping the local economy in my own small way. Keep the small-time business alive, I say...

However, my mum's bloke of the time used to be a signwriter, and to my mum's evident displeasure would do this in the front room, and on the floor - it was a particularly big front room, about 20 feet long. Most of the signs he hand-painted were about 15 feet long, and there was a time when nearly every pub sign in Northumberland originated in our front room. Some of them are still there 20 years later. Outside the pubs, that is, not in our front room - that would be silly as the house was sold years ago.

An offshoot of this was tools and stuff being left about. Including, one day, a stanley knife. With the blade out. Which he knelt on crawling across the carpet to get a pencil...

Not long after that, he rented a garage for this activity...
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:36, 4 replies)

Approaching levels of Darwin Award stupidity
Cut through a live AC cable with a stanley knife - blacked out the house

Got high as a kite stripping paint with some industrial solvents, a defective filter-mask and a pack of Red Stripe - found drooling incoherently on floor according to witness accounts. Smelt like a full-time glue sniffer for a while.

Smashed in the mouth with a pry-bar when lifting flooring

Sliced all the skin clean off the top of my knuckle with a stanley while cutting some lead flashing - tip: if this happens, don't stand up, you'll faint and roll of the roof like a sack of spuds
(mymilkshakebringsallthemongstotheyard poison hearts, poison minds - joining hate, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:34, Reply)

RTFM
When we bought out first house, I got a hot air paint stripper from the hire shop to strip the paint off the internal doors. They'd been covered over with hardboard and painted - sacrilege!

Showing complete disdain for the heading, I plugged the thing in, and got started (having first ripped off the hardboard of course).

Now, academically, I knew it was going to get hot. Very hot. If I'd read the instructions and realised how hot, I could have avoided two tiny little problems.

A singed fringe (on my head!).

A burnt carpet.

I was waving the gun around trying not to burn the wood when I caught my hair in the blast. Thank goodness for 80s perms - the damage was largely hidden. The only reason on earth to be glad of a perm.

I also neglected to cover the carpet, not realising that the previous owner's nasty nylon carpet would melt when the hot paint I was scraping off landed on it.

I realised the carpet was beginning to burn after about five minutes. Still, a large glass of water took care of that!

That would have been a good one for the insurance company - we'd taken out cover the day before, but decided not to claim as a new carpet had already been ordered, and they'd only have shoved the next year's premiums up.
(TheWeeWitch hasn't been here much recently .., Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:32, Reply)

A friend of mine
Was trying to drill some holes in a wall to put some shelves up, with a cordless drill.

I went round there, and he asked me if I knew how to sharpen a drill bit.
I said it's not really worth it, and wondered why he asked.

It turned out that this poor man had spent an hour trying to drill into a concrete wall with a wood drill-bit, the drill set to lowest ratchet setting, and the spin set to reverse.

Took all of five minutes once he knew what to do...

Appologies for lack of funny, I'll make up with a good one tomorrow.
( Cawl, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:29, 3 replies)

It's not that I'm particularly bad at DIY...
I just have a habit of starting a job and abandoning it halfway through.

Case in point - the Volkswagen Scirocco that ended up with no carpets or dashboard, as I intended to replace them but couldn't be bothered.

The wall that's half-white and half-pink.

The fact that every vehicle I've ever had has had at least one cable tie added by me.

Oh, and I've just installed a lock on the back gate. Not without drilling 30 holes in the wrong places first. It now looks like a tea-strainer.
(Half of Stephen Fry's right buttock pissed on your dog on, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:21, 1 reply)

I pray that my prevoius landlord dosent look to hard at the walls.
Otherwise they may find that large sections of plasterboard are in fact bran flakes boxes, held in place by plaster and paint.
( willenium Fist bump for verification, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:20, 2 replies)

Duct tape solves everything
Wonky tables
Lose shelves
Leaky toilets ( Actually works to a bodged extent)
( epiphany coming live from sweden, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:11, 3 replies)

On my street my sister and I were known as...
Bodge-it and badge-it.

Duck tape was our bestest friend.
( girlinthehole, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:06, 4 replies)

DIY
I'm normally fantastic at DIY. My only problem, and my partner tells me this a lot, is that I never fin
( I have run out of coke is a little sweaty, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:06, Reply)

We don't need a carpet fitter
it was only a bathroom carpet - and a very small bathroom.

It seemed a really straightforward thing to do - lift the old carpet, use it as a template to cut out the new one, lay the new one.

Easy

Except we put the two carpets "face to face" and cut the wrong shape out. It would have fitted perfectly, but upside down!

We got round it by cutting the carpet into two bits, but that join annoyed me every time I looked at it.

The carpet (why did I even think carpet was a good idea in a bathroom?) was eventually replaced with easy clean vinyl. Which was cut into the correct shapes.

Lesson learned.
(TheWeeWitch hasn't been here much recently .., Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:04, 2 replies)

the previous owner of my house
felt that he could best channel his inner Lawrence Llewelyn‐Bowen by painting the skirting boards dark green, the bedrooms peachy-salmon and the kitchen a vile toilet paper blue. This is how I know that the one-coat paint doesn't always work.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:03, 12 replies)

One of my proudest moments was when...
I converted a chest of draws into a desk by removing the draws, that was a proud moment!

The post above reminds me of the old house I used to live in. The guy that we bought it off saw himself as some sort of DIY demi god and thus built everything himself.

For example, he built a pond but in his infinite wisdom decided to build half of it outside the house and half of it inside the conservatory (which he also built) this resulted in frogs leaping round the house. How they got upstairs I will never know.

As mentioned he also built the conservatory which was watertight akin to that of a sieve. On a rainy day there where about 7 buckets dotted around the place trying to catch the pesky liquid that is sky water.

I feel sorry for whoever owns that house now!
(Rt Hon Quargflax, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:01, 4 replies)

Countdown
To the first post amusingly 'mistaking' this as a wanking QOTW.

I'd give it oooh about an hour?
(osok Rebel without a clue, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:00, 4 replies)

Expanding foam
Bad stuff.

I used some to fill a gap in a wall once. Being a man, I obviously ignored all the entreaties on the can to wear gloves, safety goggles, etc. How much harm can it possibly do?

Well, if you put too much in, and it expands too far and falls out of the wall, and you catch it in your bare hands, a lot.

The stuff doesn't wash off. At all. Ever.

Soap won't shift it. Scrubbing won't shift it. Hot water won't shift it. And, worse of all, washing your hands just means you're spreading it over more of your skin.

I had to let it dry (took about 15 minutes for my hands to stop being sticky), and then just leave it until it flaked off along with the underlying skin.

Unfortunately, once it had dried, it went quite hard. This mean that my hands looked all rough and leathery and about 50 years older than the rest of me. Also, it cracked when the skin stretched. And, yes, the skin cracked with it, so I ended up looking like a pensioner with dermatitis.

Always wear safety gear. Better yet, don't use expanding foam.

Length? About a week to get rid of it.
( le brian, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 18:00, 8 replies)

1st two weeks in a row!
A quick story now, more to follow.

I currently work for a furniture company, in the office, but I've helped out on the factory floor many a time, so wood-based DIY holds no fear for me.

Electrial things on the other hand, defeat me every time...

Some time ago, I was at my parents house, while they were away on holiday, and the fuse to the whole downstairs of the house went.

I tried changing it, and in the end decided to take the fusebox apart.

This was a bad idea, as I woke up an hour later, with a massively painful arm, and a bruised head.

I called it a day then, and decided never again to venture into the world of electrics.
( Cawl, Thu 3 Apr 2008, 17:58, 2 replies)