When my husband decided to get serious about building bits and spurs, we had to invest a good chunk of money on materials and tools. After searching at several places, it was Home Depot that saved the day. We found every tool that we needed including the powerful Drill Press that we couldn’t find anywhere else! We spent well over an hour in there, not because we couldn’t find what we were looking for, but because we kept finding things we needed wanted.
So, with that said, I think a GREAT gift for anyone with a hobby like that, is the Home Depot Gift Card. And don’t forget the women either, there are so many things to buy at Home Depot that anyone would be thrilled with a gift like that! So many of us are do-it-yourself ers and if you’re not, you should try! It can be fun and rewarding.
They have some cool gift cards too I might add, in fact, I believe there are 17 to choose from so that you can find the perfect one that will suit the people on your gift list……check some of these out and scroll down:
OMG, how cute is that little bitty toolbox to put a gift card in?!!! You know you love it!
Well guess…..I happen to have a $100 Home Depot Gift Card today that you can enter to win. The Home Depot is absolutely generous folk and I was honored to be able to bring this to you courtesy of them.
How do you enter??
In the comments below, tell me your worse DIY story. Did you intend to build something cool only for it turn out completely wrong?? Did it rain on your project? Your story must consist of more than 2 sentences…if it does not, you will be disqualified.
I can’t wait to read your stories. Good luck to all.
*******For an additional entry, Tweet and/or Blog the giveaway!
Giveaway ends on Nov. 30th. Winner will be chosen and announced on Dec. 1st. One story entry per person.
Lori is the Owner and Founder of four blogs, a 4 year Problogger, a social media influencer, and tech nerd at heart. She's been married 18+ years and has 3 handsome boys; Tyler 17, Toby, 14, and Truett 4. 
I was repairing the tiolet and one of my girls got it in her mind to turn on the water valve! Water got everywhere, did I mention there is carpet in our bathroom? What kind of idiotic idea is that?!?!
I tweeted.
Username: wastebasket
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ME WIINN !!!
I tried to save mommy by purchasing one of those desks that you have to put together yourself. I read all of the instructions and had all my tools laid out neatly in front of me. When my husband offered help I shrugged him offer knowing that he would try to take over the project. Unforgettably once it was to late to ask for his assistance without injuring my pride I realized that it was a two person job. While balancing the keyboard drawer and two desk legs everything fell down on me. I had to go to the hospital and get stitches and explain to all of the doctors and nurses what happened. My husband just sat there with a look that screamed “I told you so.”.
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I decided to build a deck for my dad (adding it on to his house). I knew he wanted a new one, so I thought I would just demolish the old one and pop up a new one. I am a girlie girl with no construction experience – but the DIY tips email I received from HGTV made it sound so easy!! Long story short, wood is expensive, building a deck is hard, and it’s not a good idea to do this as a surprise for someone.
When my husband and I were first married, we got a used coffee table that needed some TLC and set to fixing it up. We picked the perfect stain and got the table nicely sanded. Since we were living in an apartment, we didn’t have a garage, so we took the table outside to put the stain on. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that it was the height of pollen season…until we went to check on the table and found hundreds of unwelcome pollen bits stuck into the stain. Yep, we had to move it up to my in-laws’ garage and start all over!
My husband complained about the bathroom needing cleaning and announced he was going to clean it. Yippee! I headed out for shopping and blew him a kiss as he stood in front of the sink with a toothbrush for “thorough cleaning.”
Two hours later, I come home. He’s in the floor. So is the faucet and both handles, some pipes and wrenches and what all I don’t know.
He had managed to tear up the faucet “cleaning”. He then tried to put in a new faucet, couldn’t. We had to call a plumber.
.. staining doors for my new home and the stain wasn’t exactly the same on each door when finished even though it was from the same lot/batch. Could’t figure that one out but it wasnt too noticeable so hung them anyways.
My husband is a notorious fixer and leaver. We bought an older home and have lived here for 6 years. Every room he has started on has not been finished and he has moved to each room of the house. The worst right now is the downstairs bathroom. He took everything out – drywall everything except the toliet..This was 8 months ago..and yes you guessed it..It is still like this! I guess I should be thankful that the toliet works but Its time to git r done! Thank you
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Last year I thought I’d spruce up my front porch steps with a fresh coat of paint. Somehow, I managed to find a paint which turned the steps into an ice rink whenever the temperature dropped to freezing. All winter, my mail carrier had to walk to my back door and deposit the mail there–she couldn’t navigate the slippery death-trap steps. I had to tape off the front porch completely so nobody would step onto them.
one year i planted tomatoes in pots on my patio but the squirrels ate every single tomato. so this past summer i decided to build a cage to put the tomato pots in. so i bought poultry netting & gathered long branches from the woods near my home. i cut & tied the poultry netting to the branches to make a cage. it was a lopsided mess that kept falling in on itself. so i ended up ditching the branches & using 4 foot long tomato stakes to make a frame that i tied the poulty netting to. this worked well.
We had just finished painting the inside of the house when a pipe started leaking in the bathroom. We wound up having to repaint a bedroom and the bathroom!
When we bought our house, all of the rooms needed to be painted because the walls were ugly colors. We bought a power paint sprayer to save time on the big areas. Well…um…yeah. Didn’t work out so well. The paint cup that screwed onto the bottom just fell off in the middle of painting. When it hit the floor, paint splashed everywhere. Soooo, we also had to replace the carpet after that incident. Grrrr.
I am embarrassed to say this but a year ago I was attempting to make a small chair for a neighbor. I had the DIY guide for it and when asked if I needed help, I refused bragging about how I never get anything wrong. Well the chair was built and painted beautifully but when my neighbor’s wife tried it out, she went straight through it. She blamed her weight but when I got home I read back in the manual and read I had missed 3 steps which would have secured the seat better. What a disaster!
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I’d make my grandma a pond.
I helped my brother make a boat out of scrap wood. He was so proud of it but as soon as we put in the river it sank. How wood can sink I will never know but it sank to just below the surface and we could not reach it. By the time I got a net the current had carried it away. My brother who was 5 was so upset
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We painted a dark red accent wall in our family room on top of the standard white base without using a primer or anything else. Well, 5 coats later we have yet to get the color even and still even see
a little white coming through. We just added some wall hangings and gave up!
The latest would be when I decided to repaint and rearrange our bedroom!! When we were moving the Armoire, the TV fell out and broke!! So much for saving money!!
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I was cleaning the gutters on the side of the house near the road. Unfortunately my kooky neightbor across the road saw me. He put a fire cracker on the road, as close to my property as he could, and set it off. The noise scared me almost to death. Fortunately I wasn’t on a ladder!!
Duct Tape! The best invention in the world. My family fixes EVERYTHING with it. We seal the windows in the winter, broken car parts, kids costumes, ect. You name it, it’s fixed with duct tape.
I tried to build myself a king-size platform bed frame. It was a nice idea in theory – I thought I would get what I wanted exactly and it would cost less. Um, wrong. I had to keep buying more tools and more wood and I felt like I had to keep going because I had already spent so much time and money. Ugh, I never did end up finishing it, it was just looking ugly and not turning out at all. I still haven’t bought myself a new bed frame. I think I was traumatized!
I had wallpapered a couple of times and it came out well, so I decided to get some really nice wallpaper and do another room. It was a pattern that had to be matched up and obviously I wasn’t skilled enough to do it right. Ruined the expensive wallpaper and I was devastated at my clumsiness.
So sometimes I get really lazy. I had this mirror sitting around forever and decided to hang it one day, but realized there wasn’t much of a way to hang it. Instead of actually doing the work to figure it out I thought it would be great to just duct tape a hanger thingee on it. Needless to say it only lasted about half a day, in which it fell and shattered all over the floor. My lazy ass has propped over what is left and left it there until I find something else :)
My husband and I tried to be frugal by installing our own sprinkler system in the backyard. We had to make a million trips to Home Depot to find each piece we needed as we went along and then after a whole week of work and digging up our backyard, we ended up flooding the basement the first week we turned them on!
I met my husband on the internet long ago and one time while I was gone visiting him I left my sister in charge. Needless to say her and her friends destroyed my place. Holes in the wall etc. Well my husband was coming over to marry me (he lived in Europe) and I was so embarrassed about the state of my place that I started ripping down all the broken drywall, thinking it would be easy to replace. Same w/ the carpeting! Well.. he arrived many months later and my little project stayed unfinished for another year. As it turns out my husband is not a handy-man. But hey, at least it was a learning experience for me. Now we’ve down-graded into my grandma’s house since we have a new baby and need to save, and it’s sooo old and outdated! Everywhere I look I find something I want to fix.
Thanks for the chance to enter the giveaway. Home Depot rocks.
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My hubby was installing a bathroom vent and it was too small for the opening so he went back to the store to get something to make it work. He came home and saw he needed some other piece so went back. He came home, put that piece in and saw he needed another item. He went back again. He finally had everything he needed but the vent wouldn’t stay in the hole anyhow so he ended up taking everything back and we’re back to needing a new vent.
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Home Depot is my favorite store. When I was living in Florida I decided to take the sliding glass doors out and install French doors. I knew that I could handle the project alone with the advise from my Home Depot guys. I had no problem taking the doors out but didn’t realize that the space to put the French doors in was not a standard size since the house was older. I had these beautiful French doors sitting in a box in my house and the opening wasn’t big enough. My neighbor came to my rescue and cut the walls to get my doors to fit. I bit off quite more than I could handle but certainly learned much about proper measuring with that experience. In the end, it looked perfect. However, it would have been much cheaper as well as easier to just replace the sliding doors.
We are in the middle of a kitchen project. It just keeps going and going. This 100 dollar Home Depot card would be a real blessing.
Thanks
I bought a fixer-upper at the beginning of the year. We moved all of our tools into a storage pod at the house. About 2 months later we arrived at the house to put in another weekend of work only to find that our storage pod had been wiped out. We have not recovered from that loss and are stuck paying the mortgage, insurance and taxes on a house that we cannot live in plus rent and utilites on a closet sized apartment in the same neighborhood.
Our worst DYI nightmare was when a pipe burst in the thick wall of our 150 year old house; had to solder the joints around a corner, using a mirror. And then it leaked. After about 3 more tries, got it to hold. Thanks for the giveaway.
One weekend, I decided to remove the ivy that was covering half the back yard and starting to choke the tree in the back of the house we rent. One month later, after breaking both a lawnmower and a shrub whacker, I finished by using a roto-tiller with an axe to chop the vines that would bunch up. Then I was ready for the next step – lots and lots of Round-Up to kill all the little tendrils that kept trying to grow. After waiting the required time for the weed killer to dissapate, I was able to reseed and finish my ‘weekend’ job.
I am living in my worst DYI nightmare now. Over a year ago we decided to put down hardwood floors. Well, here we are over year later and the trim has still not been completed. Between each room is big gaps where the trim should be!
Installing a toilet with the wax ring and the bolts attaching the H20 and realizing leaving a towel in the hole…
Our dryer broke. I called the repairman – $72 service charge.
The last time we called him to our home was because the laundry room was holding condensation- we checked everything we could think of. Turned out the outside vent was clogged. It was really hard to write the guy a check for $72 for removing a thick piece of dryer lent from the outside vent.
So after the lent experience I decided to fix it myself. I called the parts shop and explained the symptoms of my poor dryer. The man said it was either the heating element, or the thermostat. He said it was probably the heating element, so I started there.
To take the back off of the dryer, I had to take the top off first. Already thinking I bit off more than I could chew. I forged on and found the element – taking it out was pretty easy. Putting the new one in was a nightmare – hard to explain (evil little clamp things)but trust me. Finally after intense focus that caused major sweating, I got the piece in. I put everything back together & pluged the thing in. I turn it on and go to have a drink & a seat while it heats up.
After a too short break, I go to check & no heat!!!! Then I’m thinking what if I didn’t get everything put back properly! So I call the guy and tell him my troubles. He tells me that if all the connections came together it must be the thermostat. Why didn’t I start with the thermostat?! I run and get the part before they close.
Back home I start feeling really stupid for putting the whole thing back together. Yes all the way. Back to square one and what a horrible square it is. I finally find the darn thing and it is really awkward to get to. I finally get it on – it wasn’t too bad. This time I put things back together enough, but not totally. I turn the *^$^^%(* thing back on and retire to the living room.
I come back and there is heat!!!! I put everything back – all the screws & clamps – finally done! Phew – an all day event.
My hubby comes home and I spill all over about how hard it is to be a dryer repair lady. He seems impressed with my skills and offers to order in so I can skip cooking.
Later in the evening I notice that the dryer has been running forever. Wow. I did something bad and I have to open that beast up again.
Next day I go back to the shop to return the heating element and maybe find out why it won’t shut off. They refund me for the part and tell me there is a small chip sensor under the dial. That I probably put it in backwards when reassembling the darn thing. He says it will be no problem, just flip it around. Is he crazy!!!
Hubby comes home – I tell him it’s his turn. He tells me I shouldn’t have taken the heating element back, that we should have left the new one on. UGGG!
In conclusion I decided that next time I would call the repairman & I learned that $72 is nothin. He is worth it – every penny. Even to remove some lent. ~ sorry for the long wind
I subbed in google reader :) Thanks for offering.
When we redid the living room the floor was such a mess we had to repair and then use KILZ to kill the mold (from I guess open windows) before we could put in the tile.
Not so bad except that I have 5 dogs and this is the central location.
You guessed it they got it everywhere.
Then, they stepped in the paint when we did the walls. Now that was cute and I still have a teal pawprint on my snuggly blanket. Imagine having to explain that since I needed it when I was in the hospital and all the nurses asked. ;)
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One goof-up that comes to mind is similar to another poster’s. Some years ago, my husband & I purchased a very large bookcase/entertainment center type of unit, that was ready-to-assemble. We intended to put it in our bedroom, but decided to assemble it in the living room, as there was more space to move around, lay out all the pieces, etc. The unit itself was not designed as well as it could have been, and we had to re-drill some of the holes that weren’t in quite the right place, replace some broken anchors, etc. FINALLY we got the durn thing together properly & breathed a huge sigh of relief. But then we started to move it to the bedroom and yep, you guessed it – it was far too large to maneuver around the corners in the hallway. While trying to disassemble it, one of the main boards split while we were removing screws. We ultimately decided that we had learned our lesson about buying cheap-quality “boxed” furniture, trying to “save money”. The unit went in the scrap pile & we saved up for a decent quality item for the bedroom.
I was going to put ceramic tile in the entryway. The house came with white carpet in the entryway. I pulled up the carpet, only to find VAT (vinyl asbestos tiles) tiles. Yikes. I had already cut the carpet, so there was no going back. I had to buy an expensive respirator, seal off the room, and remove the tiles. I did a lot of reading about it and made sure the tiles were wet. Anyway, it looks great now. But I was not expecting all that work.
My worst DIY experience was landscaping the backyard. I was a little too ambitious with my plans, and didn’t really figure out ahead of time how long it would take us. We also started out doing a lot of exploratory digging to find the existing sprinkler lines so that we could move them and make room for a pond. By the end of the summer, we had trenches dug up all over the yard, and 2ft high grass growing in between them. Like I said, not very well thought out. It was almost the end of my marriage, but after 2-1/2 summers, it is finally done!
When I first moved in with my husband I decided to take on painting the bathroom by myself. I picked out a nice rose color and was going to sponge paint it with white on top. The color turned out to be Pepto Bismol pink!
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The worst DIY story is unfolding before my eyes! My mother has torn her kitchen apart, and it’s nowhere near being redone! It’s bad enough my house burnt to the ground this past May, but now that I’m semi-living at my mothers while working on my mess, her kitchen is in parts and she has no idea how she is going to finish what she started!
Our DIY nightmare was when my husband and I decided to install an above ground pool 3 feet into the groud. We did some reseach and knew it could be done, but I guess we didn’t reseach enough. We should have put gravel around the entire pool, all the way to groud level. Instead we just back fill the hole with the exisiting dirt.
Well needless to say we enjoyed our swimming pool only one time. After a heavy rain and not having adaquite drainage our entire pool collapsed. We were the talk of the neighborhood. We had more people stopping by to see our disaster! Everyone but us had a great laugh!
We’re not the handiest people but I come from DIY stock so when we moved into our new rental WE HAD to fix the bathroom situation. There is a window in the bathtub that had a mini blind on it! FULL OF MOLD. The vanity went right up to the tub- completely water logged and molded! DISGUSTING… We tore out the vanity, replaced the flooring, fixed the window- repainted… All before we could move in… Having a baby in tow there was NO WAY we could move into a mess like that!
I had a rental house that was left in shambles when the tenants abandoned it in the middle of the night. Drains were clogged, and faucets were dripping, ending up with water throughout the entire house. Walls had to be replaced, kitchen cabinets torn out and replaced, bathroom vanity was trashed and the carpeting was totally ruined. All in all it didn’t turn out too bad. We laid laminate flooring and had the carpeting professionally replaced. I bought a new bathroom vanity that was too deep so we cut it down to the right size. The worst thing was the kitchen cabinets. By the time I was ready to get them I had mislaid the measurement and relied on the sales person at the cabinet shop to steer me in the right direction. I ended up with several top cabinets that are far too short and look very odd.
Had a company install sliding glass doors. They left gaps in the sides!
We had a 1200 ft club house to remodel. We had bought all our supplies 3 months before. We made sure we ordered the carpet from the same lot, but unfortionly the last cut did not match. We tried looking for a match but no luck. So we tried another option used hardwood flooring to finish it off. We had bought it on clearance and it was just the amount we needed. After putting the flooring down we had miss calculated the size and was short 2 inches on one side. :( . So we had to pull all the flooring up to move it 2 inches. Anyway after all that it turned out beautiful.
We built our house 2 years ago, I decided to repaint the living room. I put the paint on and it all peeled off, like plastic, right off the primer.. uggh, now I would love to win this to buy more paint!
I spent 2 days painting my cabinets only to find out that there was something wrong with the paint. You so much as touched it and it rubbed off. I was ticked. I had to sand them all down and start over…