It's been said that necessity is the mother of invention, but I suspect it's stubbornness.
I don't think I've ever met a committed do-it-yourselfer who wasn't convinced he or she could do a job just as well as the pros -at the outset, anyhow. And when those DIYers don't know quite how to do something, they figure out a way.
Sometimes it works out. Sometimes the results are pretty hilarious.
Take Angela Gmerek's dad, for example. Seems her father, Bernie Gmerek of Jackson Township, Ohio, approaches fix-it projects with more of a can-do attitude than a sense of esthetics. Once, he left a mark on the living room ceiling while practising his golf swing and covered it with Wite-Out, "which, of course, was not the right match and stood out like a sore thumb whenever the light hit it just right," she wrote.
Angela Gmerek's favourite story had to do with his attempt to fix her car's leaking windshield. She was in college at the time and had left her car behind, so Dad decided to surprise her by fixing the leak before she came home for a visit. Afterward, he announced to her mother that the windshield had been fixed.
"Much to her horror, she looked out of the window to see that his solution was to caulk around the outside of the entire windshield with WHITE CAULK!!!" Gmerek related. "I never got a chance to see it, because she asked him if he wanted his daughter to drop dead on the driveway from embarrassment when she arrived home from school."
Ralph Singleton's experience was similarly misguided. As his wife, Susan, recalled, he ran into problems trying to install a new outdoor light fixture by the patio door of their Wadsworth, Ohio, home.
When she went to investigate the source of his frustrated rumblings, she found him struggling with the glass panels that were supposed to slide into place after the fixture was attached.
"These *!@#? panels keep falling out when I slide them in. They won't stay put," he complained. "It looks just like the picture on the box! Look at it!"
She did -and discovered the box was upside down. Michael L. Kelly donned his best do-it-yourself attitude when he and his wife, Sue, set out to remodel the bathroom of an apartment in their basement in New Franklin, Ohio. They ripped out a wall, expanded the room, moved the sink and added a tub with a shower.
When he started to put up the drywall, he realized the old wall framing was an inch-and-a-half out of plumb. Since he already had the plumbing in, he decided to use furring strips to build out the frame so the drywall would hang properly. But when he finished the drywall and tried to hook up the plumbing fixtures, he realized those fixtures were now too short.
"Needless to say, me being Irish, I get angry at the drop of a hat," he wrote. "However, my wife said she would fix the plumbing, so my anger was short-lived."
Kelly grabbed his reciprocating saw and started cutting into the wall above the shower fixtures, just where he claims his wife told him to. (I suspect a little shifting of the blame here, but I'll let the Kellys fight that one out.) He cut right through three waterlines.
After they got the pipes fixed and the mess cleaned up, they removed the protective liner from the new tub, only to find a 15-centimetre crack in it. They returned it to the store and exchanged it for a steel tub, because Kelly figured steel wouldn't crack. But when he got it home, the fixtures didn't match up to the openings in the new tub.
"I am getting madder by the minute," he recalled. Again he grabbed his reciprocating saw. Again he cut where his wife directed him to. Again he cut right through the waterlines.
Finally they got the plumbing fixed and the drywall finished, albeit with a few unsavoury utterances. They rented out the apartment and its newly remodelled bathroom.
Three weeks after their tenant moved in, she mentioned the bathroom ceiling had been leaking -for three weeks. She didn't think it was a problem, since the water was dripping into a sink.
When Kelly investigated, he discovered the ceiling was leaking around a drywall screw.
"When I reached up to touch it, the whole ceiling and about 40 gallons of water came crashing down on my head," he said. "Yes, I ran a drywall screw right into the plumbing."
He fixed the plumbing and installed drywall on the ceiling yet again. But before he left the repaired room, he said a little prayer.
"Because if I die and somehow wind up in hell," he explained, "it will be that bathroom."
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