S/O Kitchen Disasters-Household Disasters

[Outdoor Girl]

This dates to the 1970s. A friend bought a new water bed. He got it home, but didn't have a way to fill it with water. We figured out that his kitchen faucet would take a standard garden hose. I lived in an old house converted to apartments and my landlady had a collection of garden hoses stored in the basement. So I figured I could borrow one for a few hours.

I showed up. We connected the hose to the kitchen faucet and to the water bed. The hose wandered through the living room & down a hall. My friend, in the bedroom, calls out to me in the kitchen that he's ready and turn on the water.

An immediate shriek of a number of colorful obscentiies.

Honestly, I didn't know that I had brought a sprinkler hose. Imagine this in your apartment.

Oh, my.  LOL.

This happened to a coworker:  She and her husband were away for a few days.  They came home to a house with a toilet that had let go on an upper floor and had been spewing water practically the whole time.  Most of the house had to be taken back to the studs and it was almost a year before they were back in.

But at least they got to redesign it and pick all new finishings and basically have their dream house now.

[Seraphia]

This dates to the 1970s. A friend bought a new water bed. He got it home, but didn't have a way to fill it with water. We figured out that his kitchen faucet would take a standard garden hose. I lived in an old house converted to apartments and my landlady had a collection of garden hoses stored in the basement. So I figured I could borrow one for a few hours.

I showed up. We connected the hose to the kitchen faucet and to the water bed. The hose wandered through the living room & down a hall. My friend, in the bedroom, calls out to me in the kitchen that he's ready and turn on the water.

An immediate shriek of a number of colorful obscentiies.

Honestly, I didn't know that I had brought a sprinkler hose.

Nutrax, that's hysterical! I'm in fits of giggles here, which I desperately needed. Thank you.

[zyrs]

The sprinkler hose reminded me:

A friend's boyfriend was a very large man with a temper problem.  He never hit anyone, but inanimate objects felt his fury.  He was also not very handy.  My friend is a small woman.

My friend bought a waterbed.  The frame was the standard waterbed style, a box of 4 sides that 3 large flat boards laid on to form a flat base for the mattress, then the four sides of the frame attached to the flat base.  My friend had splurged for a nice waveless mattress, a top of the line liner and a set of drawers for under the bed storage.  I had helped her put it together because I had a waterbed and knew how.  She decided to keep her drain/repair kit in her bedside table.

Fast forward a few months.  My friend's boyfriend needs his pants hemmed.  Friend does so and boyfriend sits on the corner of the bed to put them on.  His weight is such that the base boards the waterbed frame is attached to break right at the storage drawers about a foot in each direction so now the water filled mattress is resting on pointed, jagged wood that it's sagging over and the whole side of the waterbed is now sloping towards the floor.

He decides it will take too long to drain the mattress and he can fix it by detaching the frame sides, moving the brackets and re-attaching them and he doesn't need to drain it to do that.  However, because waterbeds are full of liquid which wants to spread out, ever time he goes to push the mattress away so he can get to a screw, the mattress oozes back to it's normal place.  This keeps happening and he gets more and more irritated until...

He stabs the mattress with the screwdriver a few times.

So now the mattress (full of water) has holes in it.  Luckily, they are on top so as long as you hold the mattress top off the water, it won't leak.  Because of the high-end liner, nothing is getting on the floor.  So now, the smart thing to do would be for one person to hold the mattress off the top of the water while the other hooks up the drain kit and removes the water so that you can then repair the base board and fix the mattress, right?

I get a frantic phone call at 8:15 PM.  My friend is calling me with one hand from her bedroom phone while holding the mattress off the water with her other hand.  Her boyfriend, citing how tired he is and how this is all her fault, has left because this is her problem not his.  So she is stuck holding the mattress off the water so it doesn't leak by herself.  Because she is so small, she had to kick the phone off the beside table to get it close enough for her to reach with her hand.

I drive over and she runs to the door and lets me in then runs back to grab the mattress.  I hook up the drain kit and take over holding the mattress as she's been doing it for over an hour.  In a while I can move the mattress around so none of the holes are near water and it can finish draining.  I can now look at the damage and she needs a new base board, as this one is totally messed up.  Luckily the liner kept her mattress from being harmed by the splintered wood.

The next day I get some wood and fix the bed base and luckily the repair kit worked so she can refill the mattress, but she decided to sell it a few months later because it stressed her out thinking he might damage it again.

[stitchygreyanonymouse]

I think your friend got rid of the wrong thing, zyrs

[magicdomino]

I think your friend got rid of the wrong thing, zyrs

I agree.

[zyrs]

I think your friend got rid of the wrong thing, zyrs

I agree.

I think your friend got rid of the wrong thing, zyrs

Well, she finally got rid of him too.  Married a great guy and seems very happy.  She called a couple weeks ago to chat.

[magicdomino]

One of the great recent home improvement inventions has been the sample can of paint.  You used to have to buy a quart to test out a color in the real world of your home -- maybe even a gallon if it was a very pale color.  I greatly recommend slopping a little can of paint on your walls before slopping on the big can.  (Voice of experience?  What voice of experience?) 

While I didn't have to go that far when I painted the basement, I thought I would.  Now, basements are dark, especially if there are only a few windows.  That means pale colors, right?  Whites, off-whites, the palest shades of blue or green.  So, I picked up a brochure of "white" paint samples.  Noted some pretty ones, took the brochure downstairs, and danged if every one of those samples looked dirty and dingy.  I already had dirty, dingy walls; painting them a different dirty, dingy color wouldn't help. 

Turns out that the best shade was a bright mid-level one with little or no gray or yellow tones.  Conversely, the green that was so pretty in the basement was screaming green when I tested it in a bedroom.   

Paint is not for wimps.   

[ica171]

One of the great recent home improvement inventions has been the sample can of paint.  You used to have to buy a quart to test out a color in the real world of your home -- maybe even a gallon if it was a very pale color.  I greatly recommend slopping a little can of paint on your walls before slopping on the big can.  (Voice of experience?  What voice of experience?) 

While I didn't have to go that far when I painted the basement, I thought I would.  Now, basements are dark, especially if there are only a few windows.  That means pale colors, right?  Whites, off-whites, the palest shades of blue or green.  So, I picked up a brochure of "white" paint samples.  Noted some pretty ones, took the brochure downstairs, and danged if every one of those samples looked dirty and dingy.  I already had dirty, dingy walls; painting them a different dirty, dingy color wouldn't help. 

Turns out that the best shade was a bright mid-level one with little or no gray or yellow tones.  Conversely, the green that was so pretty in the basement was screaming green when I tested it in a bedroom.   

Paint is not for wimps.   

Light definitely makes a difference, as does the undertone of the color. A blue can go gray, purple or green; beige can go orange or pink, etc.

I had some pale greens that I had used on my kitchen cabinets and loved, but I forgot that the Formica counter had green flecks in it that the green cabinets accented. So I had a little over a gallon total of pretty vintage jadeite-type greens. A few years later, we were redoing a wall in the basement and needed to paint, but we had so much paint and were on a strict budget, I thought we could kill two birds with one stone, mix the greens and paint. The walls turned what I like to call "mental hospital green." Guess that'll teach me to take decorating shortcuts. (Except that a few weeks ago I saw two gallons of a nice creamy very pale yellow on the oops table and bought them for the basement instead of the other, also creamy very pale yellow but a bit more tan, color I had planned on; let's hope that turns out better than the green because I really don't want to paint again.)

[Outdoor Girl]

I redid my bathrooms a few years ago.  I like white fixtures and pale wall colours.  The colour I chose for both bathrooms was white with a hint of lilac purple in it.  It doesn't look purple but it must reflect well because the first time one friend was at my place, she asked me, 'Where'd you get the purple throne?'

To her, the toilet looked purple from the paint reflection.

[Moray]

I think your friend got rid of the wrong thing, zyrs

I agree.

Yeah, living in fear of a HULK SMASH!!! moment is still living in fear.

That said, you're an awesome friend for helping her out like that.

[Julian]

My last house had a very pale grey wall colour throughout.  It sounds dreadful, but was great in reality.  I noticed early on that the grey picked up and reflected the colour of the curtains in each room, so all I needed to do to change the 'colour scheme' was to change the curtains.

The current house, Chez Backwater, I've gone a bit nutz with colour.  And I love it.  So far, no real mistakes, and all the internal painting is done.  Each bedroom is a different scheme, the living parts of the house are tonal in the same colour, and the loungeroom is different again.  The hardest part has been painting over the riot of paint that was here before I started.

As an example - my lovely lilac loungeroom started off 'Plastic Bucket Yellow', with a fire-engine red external door frame, a Violent Grape purple window frame, and terracotta orange internal door frame.  With an orange pine feature wall behind the wood heater, yellow-orange curtains and bright blue carpet.  Barf inducing.  It is now a soothing light lilac, white trim, bare floorboards and pale cream curtains.  The orange pine doesn't look quite so bad now, and I'm still debating whether to paint it white or not. the same orange pine in the kitchen to dado height is now white and it looks great.  But the wood heater sits on a brick base and backboard in front of the pine, and painting the pine will accentuate the bricks so I'm just not sure!

Anyway, back to the household disasters...  when I painted the spare bedroom I used painters tape to make a sharp edge between the feature wall and the adjoining walls.  Apparently you need to take it off fairly promptly after painting.  Otherwise it takes the paint off with it.  Who knew?     So I still need to finish up and tidy the join area.  Sigh. 

Also when I installed the main shower head over the spa tub (there are two heads, a hand held and the main 'rain shower' one) I sort of did it wrong.  It was fine for a few days, then the water pressure blew it off while I was showering.  The darn thing whacked me in the head, fell into the tub (and took a chunk off the surface) then the water spray hit the opposite wall of the bathroom, soaking everything! 

And I grouted the bathroom floor tiles on the hottest day of the year.  The grout is now all crumbling away, and three of the tiles have cracked.  I am also having major doubts about the tiles I used anyway (they are very slippery when even just bathroom-misty damp) so I'm debating whether it's worthwhile re-grouting or just retiling the darn lot. 

I probably should mention that until I bought this house, I've never tiled, plumbed, painted or anything 'handyman', so it has all been quite a learning curve.  Disasters'R'Me!   

[mmswm]

I'm laughing so hard at some of these.  I find myself cheering up just a bit whenever I see a new post to this thread!

All the painting stories reminded me of another painting story.  Again, this was in the aftermath of hurricane Andrew.  We were painting the outside of one of the rentals.  It was me, my father, my cousin, his wife, one of my uncles and two of my sisters.  My cousin-in-law's father had been been a professional house painter.  During lunch, we were joking about how her father would always say that you could tell how good a paint job was done by how much paint was on the person doing the painting.  More paint = better job. So, there I am on a 16 foot extension ladder, painting the soffits by hand (at the time my father only had one spray gun).  The ladder wobbled.  I fell.  A 5 gallon bucket of paint fell on top of me.  I walked around the corner of the house dripping from head to toe in grey paint.  My cousin-in-law took one look, fell to the ground laughing and said "that must be one he** of a paint job"!

[mbbored]

3 in the last 24 hours:

1) My bathroom sink was draining slowly, so I poured some bleach down the drain, let it sit for a few minutes, then ran the hot water. I promptly forgot about the hot water, went to walk the dog and came back to a flooded bathroom.

2) After I mopped up the bathroom, I headed to my friend's house where I'm cat and chicken sitting. I promptly broke the litterbox, forcing me to disassemble it, dump the contents, clean it out, reassemble and refill.

3) This morning I went back to to let the chicken's out of their coop and feed them. In an effort to reach something outside of the coop so I bent back a portion of the coop covering. This evening I came back to close the chickens into their coop and found them waiting for me by the backdoor.

Remind me to never attempt to fix the plumbing or take care of pets while running a fever.

[heyyoume]

This wasn't so much a disaster as amateur hour on the repair front leading to chaos and mayhem.   Our bathroom sink blocked and we had to remove the S-bend to clear it.   It turned out that the person who put the sink in had used a drain that was a size too small for the sink hole so removing the S-bend dislodged the putty and the sink started leaking. 

We took it apart to reinstall with new putty but the putty we brought early last year had been left with the lid not properly on and so had hardened, so we had working taps but no drain  and it was after six so also no way of getting more until the next day.  I threw a towel over the sink hole and reminded my partner and my sister who was staying with us not to use the sink until I had been to the hardware store.  About five minutes later I went to wash my hands and flooded the cupboards beneath the sink to the great amusement of and much teasing from the others.   I had only just got it cleaned up when I heard and oh **** from the bathroom and partner had again flooded the cupboards.  Between us I think we absent-mindedly turned on that tap about fives times in the fourteen hours it took me to get to the hardware store and get the sink put back together again.   Those cupboards are REALLY clean.

What makes it worse is that we have a working sink in the lavatory next door to the bathroom... there was no excuse...

[KimberlyM]

I have horrible luck with sink drains...

I plugged up the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink with potato peels for the 1200th time and decided I didn't want the lecture from my husband about not running them down the disposal since it would clog every time.  I figured I'd watched him do it enough times I could manage.  So I got a bucket took the pipe apart and cleared the clog.  For some reason I decided I should check to make sure it was clear before putting everything back together again.  I don't know what I was thinking, but with the pipes apart, I stood up, turned on the water, hit the disposal switch and proceeded to shoot dirty water and potato peels at high speed in every direction.  Took me hours to clean up.


Next one is kinda gross, so I'll white out part:

A few years ago my teenage son got sick in the middle of the night.  He didn't quite make it to the toilet and threw up in the bathroom since.  He had eaten several steak sandwiches that night and as a typical teenage boy he inhaled rather than chewed his food so there were large chunks of steak mixed in it.  When I got up in the morning I tried to rinse it down the drain and it backed up.  So I dumped a bottle of draino down it and came back an hour or so later to check, it still was backed up so I dumped in another bottle....still didn't clear.  Husband decided to go buy a drain snake and began clearing it that way.  But apparently over time the pipe underneath had loosened some because as he got to the U in the pipe it popped of spraying 2 bottles of draino and the contents of my kids stomach all over the cupboard.  I had to throw EVERYTHING away.  The draino ate through several sponges and a couple pairs of latex gloves during the clean up process.  It was horrible!