Whats the worst DIY blunder you've made ? A man has been sentenced after being branded stupid for his DIY efforts that could have killed his family :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/3770939.stm

Hopefully you're not as bad. Are you ?! :P

getting cement powder in my eye and nearly losing my sight. as it was i was lucky and my eye recovered. not really that bad i suppose.

Basically starting any DIY at all! I turn into the grump monster from Hell and make everyones life a misery.

DIY = Don't Involve Yourself

(no relation to OP by the way, just another Gil fan) My late father re placing some castors on the bottom of their sofa. He had to drill new holes in the frame so decided to use electric drill. Of course he slipped with it and it went on to the bottom of the sofa, gathering the canvas bottom up with it . Didnt think to let go of switch of course, so he finished up with a huge candy floss of canvas wrapped round drill and my mum jumping up and down using language i was surprised she even knew. Bless him, he always tried his best !!but it always went wrong. My Oh best Diy disaster was the day I bought a very expensive waxed oak chest of drawers and came home to find that he had tried to polish it because" I thought it looked a bit dull when they delivered it"He had managed to remove the entire top surface of wax by the time I got home.aaarggh!!

Dont do do it yourself, there is only 24 letters in my alphabet, there is no B&Q

I cut my hand off whilst trying to cut through some wood.









Nah, only kidding. It wasn't as drastic as that, but I did cut my finger :roll:

Not so much a blunder as idleness. I painted a downstairs toilet concrete floor once which had a couple of minor damp issues. The paint just peeled up, despite it being the proper paint. Should have sorted the damp first.

Not very exciting I'm afraid!

Whats the worst DIY blunder you've made ? A man has been sentenced after being branded stupid for his DIY efforts that could have killed his family :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/leicestershire/3770939.stm

Hopefully you're not as bad. Are you ?! :P
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I'm dead good at DIY disasters!... Drill through pipes and lecky stuff all the time! If you want lessons in it I'm your man (thank God for hospitals - they should have a cordless drill department, circular saw dept and certainly a plastering dept ... I managed to get 35 litres of saline solution pumped through my eyes at the hospital after a contratemps with a ceiling and a bucket of plaster! :gag:

I'm just smart enough to know I'm dumb when it comes to DIY. Since I wouldn't know what I was doing, I don't do anything that involves electric wires, water pipes, or sawing through things. I don't know which bits of wood are taking the weight of the house, and I don't intend to find out the hard way. :hihi:

I was putting some extra nails in the floorboards on the landing, beause the idle beggars who fitted the central heating hadn't nailed them down properly and they woggling and squeaking.

Before I nailed each board, I pulled it up to make sure it wasn't over a pipe. Then there was this one really long board .... and I couldn't be bothered.

Banged in a nail and it went straight through a pipe and I suddenly had a water feature on the landing. I ripped up that floorboard in about 2 seconds flat and did my little boy with his finger in the dyke impression while my partner went to locate an emergency plumber. Despite my best efforts, the water leaked onto the living room ceiling and brought the wallpaper down in the corner. Luckily, the ceiling stayed where it was. :hihi:

DIY...Damage It Yourself.

A dangerous one (not happened to me though) but is worth mentioning as a warning. Cement burns by people putting in their own concrete foundations, without realising the danger. The burns can happen to feet not properly protected. By the time you feel the burn its already too late. In worst cases, skin grafts and amputation have to be done.

A dangerous one (not happened to me though) but is worth mentioning as a warning. Cement burns by people putting in their own concrete foundations, without realising the danger. The burns can happen to feet not properly protected. By the time you feel the burn its already too late. In worst cases, skin grafts and amputation have to be done.
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Yeah.. I've a friend who accidentally spilt hyhrochloric acid on his feet whilst trying to rebuild a fireplace.. It didn't hurt him as the acid burns through the nerves at the same time as everything else... he was off work for weeks :(

mine was drilling 4 holes in a wall to put an extracter fan above the cooker,
someone had put the cooker wire running diagonal up the wall, 30 amp lol,blew the drill bit to pieces dont know why but i was unscathed apart from bit shook up

I let my missus help me once.

My worst DIY disaster was the removal of a wasps nest from a drain pipe. The wasps were coming out of the spouting just below the roof, and I thought the best way to get rid would be to plug the top of the spouting by jamming an aerosol deicer in the top.

It worked a treat but after a couple of days it rained and the weight of water flushed the can down the pipe totally blocking it.

Not to be detered I poured a litre of sulphuric acid down the pipe hoping it would disolve the can. It did.

Unfortunately it also set fire to the contents causing a massive explosion. There was a huge fountain of fire, acid, wasps, and filth which landed on the roof of my car and went through the balanced flue on my central heating boiler. The car needed a respray and the boiler never worked properly again, giving up the ghost about 2 weeks later.

The wasps carried on as if nothing had happened.

[QUOTE=SHYTOT;5250491]My worst DIY disaster was the removal of a wasps nest from a drain pipe. The wasps were coming out of the spouting just below the roof, and I thought the best way to get rid would be to plug the top of the spouting by jamming an aerosol deicer in the top.

It worked a treat but after a couple of days it rained and the weight of water flushed the can down the pipe totally blocking it.

Not to be detered I poured a litre of sulphuric acid down the pipe hoping it would disolve the can. It did.

Unfortunately it also set fire to the contents causing a massive explosion. There was a huge fountain of fire, acid, wasps, and filth which landed on the roof of my car and went through the balanced flue on my central heating boiler. The car needed a respray and the boiler never worked properly again, giving up the ghost about 2 weeks later.
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Hey!... that sounds exactly like the kind of idiotic thing I'd do! I used to work with a mate of mine in Cambridge rebuilding sports cars. One night (Ok...and a couple of pints later) we decided to see what would happen when you chucked a 25 litre can of cellulose thinners on a bonfire!
When the emergency services arrived to put out the inferno and office and surrounding sports cars....... (you can guess the rest) Didn't stop us from trying it again though! This time with cans of aerosol paint ... we both suffered from shrapnel wounds and I got ticked off by the doctor at the hospital for being stupid! :hihi:

My worst DIY disaster was the removal of a wasps nest from a drain pipe. The wasps were coming out of the spouting just below the roof, and I thought the best way to get rid would be to plug the top of the spouting by jamming an aerosol deicer in the top.

It worked a treat but after a couple of days it rained and the weight of water flushed the can down the pipe totally blocking it.

Not to be detered I poured a litre of sulphuric acid down the pipe hoping it would disolve the can. It did.

Unfortunately it also set fire to the contents causing a massive explosion. There was a huge fountain of fire, acid, wasps, and filth which landed on the roof of my car and went through the balanced flue on my central heating boiler. The car needed a respray and the boiler never worked properly again, giving up the ghost about 2 weeks later.

The wasps carried on as if nothing had happened.

That's brilliant! I'm bloody glad I don't live next door like. :o :hihi:

I've learnt never to carry out DIY at 9pm on a Sunday night after a knackering weekend of bathroom decorating!
The room was almost finished and just required me to put back up a set of shelves in an awkward corner, this involved me holding them about 2 feet off the floor and screwing it into the wall. One of the screws was a pain to put back in so I was part hammering it, part screwing it in with quite a bit of force. Next thing I know I've got this waterfall of boiling hot water raining down on me and the bathroom, then through the floor and into the kitchen cupboards below...
Move forwards a few hours and there we are at 2am, with an emergency plumber charging us huge amount of money to fix the hole I'd put in the central heating pipe and fill it all back up!!
I actually managed to stay awake all that Monday at work too, I was quite impressed... :hihi:

I've learnt never to carry out DIY at 9pm on a Sunday night after a knackering weekend of bathroom decorating!
The room was almost finished and just required me to put back up a set of shelves in an awkward corner, this involved me holding them about 2 feet off the floor and screwing it into the wall. One of the screws was a pain to put back in so I was part hammering it, part screwing it in with quite a bit of force. Next thing I know I've got this waterfall of boiling hot water raining down on me and the bathroom, then through the floor and into the kitchen cupboards below...
Move forwards a few hours and there we are at 2am, with an emergency plumber charging us huge amount of money to fix the hole I'd put in the central heating pipe and fill it all back up!!
I actually managed to stay awake all that Monday at work too, I was quite impressed... :hihi:
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Who dares to lay ceramic tiles on a bathroom floor when you've just done all the plumbing and can't be arsed to comission it because it's Sunday afternoon and you've just come back from the pub and want to keep her indoors pleased? ... New kitchen please! Been there... seen it... done it! (they don't half hurt.. them diamond wheel tile cutters! Good job you've just had 4 pints of Theakstons OP as it numbs the pain!) There's a lot to be said for the Blood transfusion service- I've donated quite a lot over the years and they normally come and mop it up off the floor !:hihi:

Oh, how could I have forgotten this one?

Angle grinding a piece of stone on a workmate. (The stand, not a friend...)

Whilst wearing shorts...well, it was a hot day.

Which got hotter when the crotch of me shorts started smoldering due to the sparks flying off...

done the nail through the central heating pipe thing myself when we moved to a new (to us) house with squeaky floors. Checked all of them except the middle of the upstairs landing cos there was no way a plumber would have needed to run the pipes there . . .

recent near miss was replacng all the light switches, tripped breaker for upstairs (but left downstairs on) and took upstairs landing switch apart - kept getting this wierd tingling in my hand when I was prodding the wires. It stopped when I turned off the power properly. Never did understand these new fangles two way switching circuits


Not sure if this counts as DIY, A mate of mine sawed a bunch of fingers off with a Dremel when he was sharpeing his sword - each one popped out of the way when it was nearly through cos the tension in the tendons

1. One Bank Holiday Monday, I was trying to sort out low water flow at my house. I accidently screwed the tap top off the outside stop tap and couldn't get it back on because of the pressure of the water that was shooting out.

I had to call out Yorkshire Water. They tried to dig down to the tap to try and fix it with the water running, which didn't work - leading to a grumpy looking YW man standing up to his waist in cold muddy water. The next stop tap back was the one that turned off the water for the whole area. They had to turn this off, and so sent a van around the whole area with a loudspeaker system announcing that the area's water would be turned off for a length of time. I hid in the house for the rest of the day. :blush::blush::blush:

2. Trying to level the attic floor, I took up all the floorboards so that I could put levelling shims on the joists before laying new floorboards. I lost balance when standing on the joists, put my foot through the ceiling of the bedroom below and filled the bedroom (and to some extent the rest of the house) with black ash plaster dust. :gag: