Home repair Howlers

[Mickwhitt 4,187]

OK, the title says it all.... we've all been there, either we had someone in to do a job of work or we did it ourselves, and the results were decidedly suboptimal shall we say.

I will put my hand up to a few tiny miscalculations and lift the lid on a few "Professional" cock ups I've witnessed over the years.

What prompted me to start this thread? Well, today I was asked by a friend to fit a kitchen base unit and sink in her newly built utility room. I trundled along to see how things were and plan what I might need for the job. The building company who did all the work had fitted a fuse board to the wall with circuit breakers for all the house. It wasn't where I would have put it, but that's not the issue.

Whilst chatting to my friend it transpired that the outdoor courtesy light had stopped working, curiously since the utility room had been plaster boarded and plastered. 

The breaker was on but no power to the switch. I rang and spoke to the electrician who had done the wiring. "There is an isolator switch, it will be that" he confidently declared. Nope, I don't see an isolator said I. "Yes, it's right there, at the side of the fuse board, I remember fitting it myself." Nope, not there, you must be thinking of another house quoth I. 

" Definitely at the left hand side of the fuse board, inches away"

At this point I abandoned the conversation with the ape like sparky and took a decent sized hole saw to the dry wall, where the aforementioned dimwit swore the switch had been placed.

And there it was, buried under the newly plastered wall, turned off. 

To cap it all, the switch was actually a 30 amp double pole fused appliance plate so completely unsuitable for the light circuit AND it was only 10 inches away from the MCB fuse so totally unnecessary. I removed it and made permanent connections so that the wall can be replastered. 

 

I will reveal some of my jobs that ended up on the cutting room floor, but which sometimes get screened like an episode of "it'll be alright on the night" when Mrs W cares to remind me of my bloopers. 

I'm sure others will have the courage to admit their mistakes and share them with the group, purely in the interests of personal advancement.  We will be laughing with you, not at you....Honest. 

Mick..

[lynnmor 6,814]

I have my fill of the dimwits installing my sheet vinyl flooring.  The vinyl square in the bathroom is obviously at an angle to the hallway causing the vinyl to buckle up at one side of the doorway and it is torn at the other side.  The boss came out several times and refuses to hear me out, he only wants to hear his own lips flap.  The installer will not make it right, the selling company points his finger at the wall that he mistakenly says it is at an angle.  Today I snapped chalk lines on the simulated grout lines down the hall and down the center of the bathroom, sure enough the lines are out of parallel about 1.5".  But it doesn't matter and my only recourse has to be legal action where more dimwits will cash in, but first I might try contacting the credit card company to see if I can get the money back.

 

Here is just one of the issues and this is after three tries to get it right by rolling and gluing instead of aligning the vinyl properly::

 

[oliver2-44 8,877]

14 minutes ago, lynnmor said:

I have my fill of the dimwits installing my sheet vinyl flooring.  The vinyl square in the bathroom is obviously at an angle to the hallway causing the vinyl to buckle up at one side of the doorway and it is torn at the other side.  The boss came out several times and refuses to hear me out, he only wants to hear his own lips flap.  The installer will not make it right, the selling company points his finger at the wall that he mistakenly says it is at an angle.  Today I snapped chalk lines on the simulated grout lines down the hall and down the center of the bathroom, sure enough the lines are out of parallel about 1.5".  But it doesn't matter and my only recourse has to be legal action where more dimwits will cash in, but first I might try contacting the credit card company to see if I can get the money back.

 

Here is just one of the issues and this is after three tries to get it right by rolling and gluing instead of aligning the vinyl properly::

 

I installed flooring part time in high school and college with a family friends company. He always said everyone makes mistakes……but your good when you can fix your mistakes so no one can find them. 
After 40+ years I still remember the easy fix for that bubble since it’s right at a grout line I the vinyl. Use a straight edge and cut a line on the bubble side of the grout line. Use the edge of the square to work the bubble flat so the excess material overlaps the grout line. Trim the excess off aligning the cut with the initial cut at the grout line. Gently use a low temp test gun if needed to slightly soften the final. 
They were a lazy installer if they couldn’t fix this-in a few minutes. The rooms in a majority of houses are slightly out of square so this happens all the time. 

…..Then again theirs that canary we once layed under some new carpet.  That bump smoothed right out with a hammer.  

[Mickwhitt 4,187]

Flooring and tiling could have their own category.

I wanted a small porch area tiled with expensive quarry tiles in a fancy pattern.

We bought the tiles with the pattern ready to lay, all the way from France.

The showroom we bought them from recommended a brilliant tiler to do the work as I wasn't confident I could do it myself. 

He turned up while I was at work and laid most of the tiles, leaving before I got home.

I don't know if you are familiar with quarry tiles, they are bomb proof and usually seen around fuel pumps at gas stations these days.  They are smooth surfaced and the obverse side has a textured pattern moulded into it to grip the adhesive. 

My "brilliant" tiler laid them textured side up, which looked ridiculous as well as being wrong. I called him, pretty miffed that he had ruined several boxes of very expensive tiles. He tried to tell me I was wrong and that they had to go that way up, otherwise you would slip on the smooth tiles. Jeez Louise!  I had to get an email from the French company to prove him wrong (they were confused not only because of the language barrier but because no one had ever tried to lay their product upside down before).

I ripped up his work and relaid it myself, taking my time to get it right (I was a cop, not a tradesman). Nearly thirty years later they are still there and good as the day they went down. 

 

[lynnmor 6,814]

10 hours ago, oliver2-44 said:

After 40+ years I still remember the easy fix for that bubble since it’s right at a grout line I the vinyl. Use a straight edge and cut a line on the bubble side of the grout line. Use the edge of the square to work the bubble flat so the excess material overlaps the grout line. Trim the excess off aligning the cut with the initial cut at the grout line. Gently use a low temp test gun if needed to slightly soften the final. 
They were a lazy installer if they couldn’t fix this-in a few minutes. The rooms in a majority of houses are slightly out of square so this happens all the time. 
 

There is more going on than just the pictured bubble.  More bubbles, tears and pattern not matched.  I didn't want to bore you folks with all of the gory details.  Bottom line is that a reputable business shouldn't blame the building, the materials and the customer for extremely sloppy workmanship.  I couldn't talk to dimwits with their condescending attitudes.  Bottom line, if the job is something that you cannot do, then don't take the job.  It ain't rocket science to lay vinyl in a hall and parallel it in the bathroom, but that was way beyond their abilities.  The old vinyl that they removed was done 26 years ago by my daughter and son-in-law and they did a good job.  They felt bad that they were no longer physically able to do it again.

 

[953 nut 51,928]

One of my coworkers bought a house at auction that had been confiscated from a drug dealer who went to prison. I helped him replace the locks on the doors and do a few other repairs to the kitchen cabinets. The woodwork throughout the house was scratched and chewed up by the previous owner's dog and we were replacing it a little at a time. When we got to the small bedroom the baseboard on one wall was newer and only held in place by a couple of small finish nails. the wall had some cheap imitation wood paneling that he wanted to get rid of.so we began to remove it too. The paneling was also held in place by a few nails and came right off. Behind that was a newly framed wall concealing a combination locked safe.

Since the house had belonged to a drug dealer and had been auctioned by the DEA my friend asked them if anything found in the house was his, free and clear. They assured him that they had no further claim to the contents of the house. Not knowing if anyone else knew about the safe I came back after dark and we loaded the safe into my truck and took it to my shop. We hammered and drilled and used up a bunch of cut-off wheels but couldn't get it open. We turned it upside down figuring any combustible contents would fall toward the top and I proceeded to cut the bottom open with a torch. The concrete liner in a safe dissipates a lot of heat so this didn't go too well either but we finally had an opening.     We rolled the safe onto its side to reach in to pull the contents out,  it was empty,  all that effort for nothing!

[Mickwhitt 4,187]

Part 2 of the utility room installation. 

 

I plumbed innthe new sink unit, all looked great....cold water check,  hot water....you gotta be kidding me! Not connected up or isolated somewhere.

The boys who did this work must have turned up on horseback as they were true cowboys. 

[Mickwhitt 4,187]

So I promised to share some of my bloopers didn't I?

So here is one from my early days of DIY when I was preparing out coal cellar for conversion into a workshop.

A company was coming in to dig out the floor and tank it out to waterproof it.

So I had to remove a wall, tidy some wiring and there was the little matter of a lead pipe running along one wall. 

Now, we used to use lead for both water and gas pipes over here. I knew that my water main was copper so I was confident it wasn't that. Our gas also came in from the opposite side of the house, so I was confident it wasn't that.

We did have an outdoor toilet, which all houses had in the olden days. But it had been replaced by a modern bathroom. 

So the question was, is this lump of pipe redundant? If so there was a pretty penny in scrap value.

But I was smart enough not to just rip it out without a bit of investigation. 

So, I took a hand powered drill (smart eh? No problem if it's water or gas) and with a tiny bit I drilled into the pipe, fully expecting nothing to happen.....

WRONG! It was the water main which fed my attached neighbours house. 

A jet of high pressure water shot across the cellar and all I could do was hold my finger over it to stem the flow a little. I felt like an extra in a submarine movie when depth charges make the thing leak like a sieve.

Now I know you know why plumbing is called plumbing, right? Because lead is plumbum in Latin. But have you ever trued to repair lead pipe? It is an artwork not something to be attempted lightly. Usually lead pipes look like a snake that's swallowed a rat where repairs or fittings are let into it, wiped joints making a bulge in the lead.

How the hell do I fix this? Plumbers in those days had no idea how to fix lead pipe, it had been copper for years.

My solution, arrived at whilst trying to stop the cellar flooding, was to hammer a copper roof nail into the hole I drilled. 

I peened the lead around it with a hammer and finally used hose clips to secure a thin lead patch over the whole thing. It never leaked and was bricked up behind the new tanked wall.

I thought I was being smart, but it turned out I was being pretty dumb. 

Fingers burned, lesson learned as we say. 

 

[953 nut 51,928]

At one house I owned there was an old Boxwood bush (tree) behind the house that a previous owner had let get out of control. It was so big and misshapen that when I pruned it back to size there wasn't much hope of it becoming an attractive addition to the landscape so I decided to pull it out and replace it with a new shrub. I tied a rope to it and yanked it out with my truck, one good tug and it was uprooted. When I went to untie the rope I saw a piece of clay sewer pipe imbedded in the roots. Did I mention that the Boxwood was right outside the bathroom? After a considerable amount of digging, a couple of Hubless Couplings and some 4" PVC I decided not to plant ANYTHING in that freshly turned soil.

[Mickwhitt 4,187]

On 2/4/2024 at 6:20 PM, Mickwhitt said:

Part 2 of the utility room installation. 

 

I plumbed innthe new sink unit, all looked great....cold water check,  hot water....you gotta be kidding me! Not connected up or isolated somewhere.

The boys who did this work must have turned up on horseback as they were true cowboys. 

Had a look in the roof space yesterday, it's a bungalow by the way.

The boiler is fitted in a broom cupboard and the hot water feed was split between an underfloor pipe to the bathroom and an in the roof pipe to the kitchen. 

The kitchen pipe feed was connected to the boiler output with an elbow joint. Less than a foot away was a loose length of plastic pipe. Blowing down it forced water out of the utility hot tap, so we have the other end of our pipe, just not connected to anything.

I put a tee piece in the feed pipe and hey presto! A functional hot water feed, now why didn't the contractor do that? Two minutes of a job and he just couldn't be bothered.  English tradesmen must be among the worst on the planet, lazy and sloppy.