Home Improvement Project Gone Bad

Doing your own home improvements is supposed to be a way to save some money, but sometimes things can end up completely out of hand and you may wind up wishing you had hired someone to do the job. My husband knows his way around remodeling a home. He does it for a living, so when we decided to remodel our home we didn’t expect too many problems. But remodeling our bathroom proved to be a complete home remodeling horror story.

The only thing that needed done in the bathroom was that a small section of the floor needed replaced, or so we thought. We have only been in our home for two years and some repairs were done by the previous occupants. My husband had to take the toilet up as the piece of the floor that needed replaced ran up under the toilet also. He set the toilet aside and tore up the section of the floor he intended to replace. He then found out the studs under the floor were bad so he also had to put in new studs. He was standing on what we thought was the good section the floor bending down to put a stud in and the section he was standing on gave through.

There was carpet underneath the floor, whoever had put a floor in at one time had simply laid it on top of the old floor and the carpet which caused all the wood to rot. Before we knew it most of the floor had fallen through and while he was making repairs and hammering on a board all of the sudden the toilet fell over and busted from the vibration of his hammering.

So now not only were we replacing the whole bathroom floor but we now needed a toilet. This happened at about 10 P.M on a Saturday night. This meant we had to wait till Monday when the hardware stores were open to get a commode. This disaster also meant going to our neighbors to use her bathroom, running into town to a public restroom or for desperate times dashing into the woods; it was a very long weekend. Plus just another expense we hadn’t planned on and more time spent on what was to be a small quick job.

My husband also needed to remove the bathtub to replace the floor under it but once again someone had tried home remodeling a way that can cause problems. They had liquid nailed the tub to the wall. I have no idea why someone thought this would be a good idea. Anyway, my husband had to yank the tub out with all his might bringing a section of the tile board with him and breaking the drain inside the tub. So we then ended up with the expense of replacing the wall and buying a new bathtub which ran us $200 for the cheapest we could find. Our home improvement project gone bad ended up costing us over $1,000.00 and left us without a place to use the bathroom or take a bath for what seemed like forever and also an expensive lesson to always plan ahead for expenses when remodeling that you may not count on beforehand, especially when you do not know what repairs have been done or how they were done before.