While we love a good DIY project, we’ve also seen what happens when things go south. In honor of Halloween, we’ve rounded up some home improvement horror stories that remind us that sometimes it’s better if we don’t do it ourselves. These might have you covering your eyes faster than you can say “haunted house.”
“When we moved into our house, it had wood paneling on the walls in the den. After 15 years of living with them, we decided we would replace them and put up textured walls. Well, we successfully took them down about two years ago. Still waiting for the motivation and money to put up those textured walls. For now, we have to live with our cardboard cave.”
— Pamela M.
“My roommates and I tried to upgrade our couch, but in order to do so, we needed to get it out of our apartment first. Unfortunately, we never made it past our living room. The couch was too big to fit through our doorframe, and we couldn’t for the life of us figure out how to get it into pieces without destroying it AND a few of the tools along the way.”
— Casey C.
“When my husband and I moved to our new apartment last year, the hanging light fixture in the living room was so ugly and made the room feel so small that I wanted to replace it immediately. We found a new one online and ordered it with full intentions of doing the replacement ourselves. For some reason, we decided that Friday night after a particularly long week of work was a great time to attempt this project. Taking down the current fixture was super easy, and we were pumped to get the new one up within the hour and then order dinner and relax the rest of the night.
“Three hours later, we were sweating, starving, and not speaking to each other — having completely failed at installing the new fixture. There was crumbled paint from the ceiling all over the floor where we had tried to secure it to no avail, and live wires hanging dubiously above our heads. We cleaned up the mess but weren’t able to get an electrician to come help us with the installation until Monday, so we had no light in the room the rest off the weekend while we prayed that the wires wouldn’t spontaneously spark and burn our apartment down.”
— Victoria H.
- More stressful than having a baby
- Couch through window frame don’t ask
- Horrible no fun very bad day
- UHaul backing up oh there’s garage.
- Shoved box spring up switchback stairs.
- One weekend two trips storage locked.
- Day prior vandals removed all the doorknobs!
- sheer disaster caused by DIY overconfidence
- Real life “Friends” moment – Pivot! Pivot!
- Reducing 2 bedroom to converted van.
“I was making a paper flower wreath and the flowers were white and yellow so I thought it would be nice to spray them with some golden paint just to have a small effect of golden paint over the flowers. The result was I RUINED IT because while the top of the spray can said gold (‘Oro’), the can said tobacco color.”
— Victoria L.
In over your head with a DIY project? Avoid the Pinterest fails with help from a seasoned Tasker.
