OK. Many times I have wanted to see Norms’ screw-ups, but I guess it will never happen. Or the bloopers on Home Time. So,…I figured everyone on this site is always helping me with a problem or offering me advice, (which has always been helpful I might add), But I don’t need advice this time. And I dont wanna hear about great job you have done before. I wanna hear bout the “BIG TIME SCREW UPS”. WHo has the balls to confess the big ones. I am not talking about mixing up paints either, (unless it was the whole house) Lets hear about hanging doors up-side down, or forgeting to shut the water off before you removed an upstairs valve,…
I will start since I created this monster. About six months ago,…..” I had friend“, (don’t you just love honesty) This friend wrote down the exact measurements for a huge fixed glass, insulated tinted window, about 8×8. ” He”, wrote down the measurements on the outside of the framing but when he called them out to his boss he reversed the numbers. 98 was 89 and 76 was 67. Now in my friends defense, I was really tired,..I mean HE was really tired after a hard week of sheetrocking. I still own that piece of glass…I mean HE .
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While I do enjoy watching "This Old House" and "Hometime" they sometimes cause me a pain. I love being called slow or incompetent because the guy on "Hometime rewired their house in just a few hours. These shows never show the complications and hard work going into a job. When thay pick a cabinet off the floor it always fits like a dream. Never mind the fitting job done off camera.
On the blunder side. A wire run was mismeasured causing the 3 - 500' runs of 500 MCM Copper, mucho denero, to be 10' too short and, mostly, wasted. A 12 man crew worked 6 hours to get it in and then came back the next day and spent 6 hours taking it out. It was a bear both ways.
To his credit the big boss man ate the cost without complaint. His take was " It happens" and "sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you." He retired to the trailer for fortification by strong drink. (Private executive stock kept in a locked file cabinet.) No one was fired and the boss was in a better mood the next day.
Try this one for size: We are building our own house from architect drawn plans. It started out as a three car garage that was going to act as an apartment while we built the rest of the house. The three openings for the doors were going to be framed in so that the framing could be knocked out and the doors fitted in. There was a stairwell up to the second level, where a bedroom and office space was going to exist permanently. Naturally, there were all sorts of changes as the structure was going up. One day I was working on the slab forms, and my wife innocently asks me "Where does the wall for the stairwell go?" I showed her, and she again innocently asks "Well what are we going to do about it being right in the center of the door opening you are working on? How will we drive around it to get a car in?" Concrete had not been poured, thankfully, but a bunch of vertical rebar was sticking up out of the footings to tie the slab and walls to them. All it took to fix it was a day long rental of a BIIIIIGGGGG Bosch hammer drill to place some rebar where it wasn't but was supposed to be.
Don
I forgot to explain in my post that the numbers were read upside down and got reversed. what an idiot! my friend, that is.
Okay, I'll wiegh in on this one. Whats worse than driving a drywall screw through a nail plate into a copper water supply line? Did I turn off the water at the meter and drain the line to relieve the 40 to 50 lbs. of pressure after I noticed the telltale drip, drip near the bottom plate? NO! I immediately removed the screw allowing all that water to shoot out that small hole into the room. What a mess. The client was not impressed, especially when I did it again at the end of the day. Not my most stellar moment.
Just recently, I ordered a set of trusses for an addition we were building. When they came in, the width was perfect, the height was perfect, but the center was off by 8 inches. Turned out the ridge of the existing roof was built off center to the house and I didn't catch it.TCW Specialists in Custom Remodeling.
Tim -
Hate when that happens. I tell people when they try to match trusses up with existing framing that they have about a 50-50 chance of being right. It's really hard to match them up.
I also have a truss matching story. May have told it on the old board, but.........
I once designed trusses for a job to add onto an existing dance club. The salesman had gone out and measured the existing trusses. He wrote down the measurements on the order sheet and it came to me to be designed and cut for the plant.
The trusses were about 70' long. The salesman wrote the overall height at the peak as 10 4 1/2". I figured the pitch out to be something like 3.32/12. I should have known that wasn't right but it didn't register.
So we built the trusses and shipped them out one morning. Didn't take long for them to call in and say the trusses were about 20" too tall. After reviewing the paperwork, I figured out the salesman had meant 104 1/2". But I had taken what he wrote to mean 10' 4 1/2".
So we re-built about $7,000 worth of trusses and brought the old ones back to the plant. Tried to sell them for a year or so, but ended up cutting them up for scrap.
I used to go sunbbathing on the beach a lot - But people from Greenpeace kept trying to push me back into the water.
Boss, I just saw a good one on the way home.i don't know if you do prefab walls or not, but I am sure the same thing has happened with trusses.
A tractor trailer hauling someones prefab walls just lost about a third of its' load on the interstate about an hour ago. The two guys on the truck looked a little sick when I went by them. Luckily it must have happened right before the afternoon rush hour starts. No other vehilces were involve, so knowone got hurt. Sure was a nice stack of firewood and blocking laying there.
Have you all ever lost a load like that?
"Oops"
is a four letter word.
Prospero needs to adjust it's ****Excellence is its own reward!
Dave -
It's never happened to me personally, but it certainly has happened.
We've had a couple of loads of wall panels collapse from the vibrations going down the road if they weren't braced right. Once had a driver just kick one of the bundles off the side of the interstate and take off when it happened. (Nice guy, huh?)
Another one was a cousin of mine going around I-270 north of St. Louis. A bundle of roof trusses fell off the trailer during rush hour. Before he could even back up alongside the trusses to re-load them with the crane, he heard one of those traffic copters announcing it over the radio in his truck.
I bought this house. What more do I need to say? ;-)
-- J.S.
Last summer working on a small addition on a home built circa 1825, had to install a block wall on the existing house side of addition to lock in place existing rubble wall foundation. Backfilled wall about halfway with dirt and gravel, mason decides we are going to do "the right thing" and finish the backfill with a concrete pour. So the concrete truck comes, while mason is floating out the basement floor, I am standing on the block wall directing the backfill pour...'easy does it...a little at a time..." When the concrete driver lets it rip...the weght of the concrete topples the block wall with me on top. Down into the fresh basement floor me, a couple of yards of concrete and about 40-50 cement blocks tumble. Fortunately the mason jumps out of the way and I land relatively unhurt. The concrete driver looks on befuddled while the mason and I scramble like maniacs to throw the busted and concrete loaded blocks out of the basement and over the foundation wall before the concrete on the floor starts to set up. Amazingly we recover with only a small dip in the floor and the retaining wall is eventually rebuilt and filled to within 3 inches with gravel and then capped with concrete. Tough lesson to learn but no one was hurt and the cost was manageable.
Last time I help the mason though!
Bill
Single form freebee retaining wall for a friend. Four yard pour, form blows with three yards in place and me on top. Number four rebar right in the arse. No real seriouse damage to me, but now the truck has lost his air and can't move. Ninety degree Saturday morning and all of the neighbors are out watching. Thankfully a couple jumped in and help reset the forms and shovel as much as we could from the driveway and under the truck. The dispatcher finally tells the driver how to get his air back up enough to get out of the driveway. Only ended up with two to three inches of rebar sticking out of the top of the wall. Needless to say no one on that street ever had any use for my services. No money and almost total em-bear-ass-ment.
It was back in '80 and helping my dad and brother put up a 40 foot monterey dome home. Precut, predrilled, color coded, so I think he breezed thru the directions. We erect the skeleton but directions later said to complete the framing all around in layers up to the top. We start going at it connecting colors having a good ol time going several layers up before continuing around. Then we get to the top and the last piece to be bolted in wouldn't line up. I vaguely remember my dad on his tractor with a chain hooked to the top framing members trying to pull the dome into line before finally giving it up and custom fitting the last piece.
I am so far fortunate that I havent made a really expensive mistake. LOADS of smaller ones. The worst of those was to drive the point of a finish nail up through a formica bench top. Only 300 bucks worth.
One I saw though was a job that was nearing completion. the plumbers and boilermakers had installed new pipes to all the radiators etc. Weeks of work. They went out to turn on the hot water and test it, while the carpet layers kept on laying an awful lot of new wool carpet.
There was a 'gurgly' noise from one wall, then a LOT of very very hot water started coming out of it. That wool carpet shrunk at a rate I would not of imagined. The drywall on the wall in question was hot enough that you didnt want to leave your hand on it.
The heating guys hadnt disconnected the old pipe from the boiler after removing the old fittings. I was very pleased I got to just go home at the end of my day.
Wood Hoon
I was a carp on a condo job in Colorado. Three story, twelve unit buildings, wood frame with TJI floor trusses and regular roof trusses spanning about thirty six feet at two/twelve. One day the frame crew had the crane set all the trusses up on the plates in bundles - if think think you know where this story is going, you're wrong - and then went to lunch. There were about thirty or so of us that had just sat down on a walkway just a stones throw away from the building. Some of the laborers were complaining about all the refrigerators and other appliances they had just had to unload into the lower floor of that building, knowing that they'd have to be moving them again into another as soon as the flooring and painters were done with it.
All of a sudden, a gust of wind swept down off the mountain and was gone in a minute but we had watched those TJIs act like a box kite. The whole building lifted up about three feet and settled back again. when it came down, it kept on coming. Those appliances never got used anyplace.
Roll call quickly - nobody hurt. One of the framers had stayed on the third floor to nap thru lunch and rode it down. He got the rest of the day off but nobody envied him.
That's the biggest whoops I ever saw on site.
My own personnal whoops that I remember - I stillllll have those french doors I ordered at 2'4" - misread my own writing where it said 24"W.
Excellence is its own reward!
Gee, I just spent my weekend cutting rafter tails in the air. Half a brain might have had them cut right before they were up and sheathed.
Damn my arms hurt. I think I will pay attention to the weight next time I read a sawzall review...
I am curious though. How do they always get the scribe cuts right on the first try on those shows? Maybe they sell their souls to Satan's cabinetmaker...
It's not Satans cabitnet maker, they just have a small army of very clever dudes out back who pre make everything when the camera isnt looking. Kinda like those cooking shows that say...'now I just happen to have one in the oven already done...'
Some poor soul would have laboured for over an hour to get it there. :)
Wind......I worked in a place once that had WIND. Everyday we wore earmuffs all day. had to cos the screaming in your ears was deafening. Took 3 people to put on tyvek.
We had a truckload of roofing iron turn up on day. 2 guys plus the truckie got it off 2 sheets at a time, while I lay on the pile. When they were ready with 2 more I would roll to one side while they slid them in, then I would roll back. This seemed to work well, until a gust lifted a few about a foot. I dived headlong onto it and managed to wrestle the things back down. I had a mental image of a few sheets of iron zooming round at head height.............
Wood Hoon
I thought those cooking shows contracted with Satan for their clean up.
Every time my wife tries a recipe from one of those shows, I go looking for his number. She thinks the kitchen will clean itself up just like on the show.
I was a junior engineer doing a water treatment system install. Hadn't used the boom-crane truck much at that point. By myself (to save project $). And the regulator/inspector came out to watch the installation. I rig up slings around a 3000-pound activated carbon vessel, cost = $4,600. No one has told me about chokers. Chokers are the pieces of ropes that you use to fix the position of the slings - so the object can't tip over and slip out between the slings.
I swing the crane around and the carbon vessel slips out of the slings and falls 6 feet to the ground. The good news is that nobody get squashed and that it is polyethylene and quite tough and bouncible. The bad news is that as it rolls across the parking lot, it runs against the sharp corner of the plate-steel oil-water separator, cutting a gouge in it. The fluidized carbon granules pour out into the parking lot.
More bad news back at the shop. You can't weld XLPE like you can LDPE and HDPE. Months later we cobbled together a patch involving SS bolts and a lot of chaulk. Found a very low pressure application for it.
David Thomas Overlooking Cook Inlet in Kenai, Alaska
Is there room for an amateur's post in this hall of shame? Nothing so spectacular as flying trusses, but...
I had just spent several days (my glacial pace is one reason I am an amateur) drywalling a bedroom and replacing its window. My latest FHB lay on the bedside table unread; I had saved it as my reward for finishing this stage of the project.
That night I opened it up to an article by a building inspector in the neighboring town. He wrote that two of the most common code violations in this state were inadequate drywall thickness over flammable rigid foam insulation, and inadequate window opening for fire egress.
I got this kind of simultaneous cold and hot sensation in my stomach as I read the requirements and realized that my newly installed window and drywall were both in the "inadequate" column.
I remembered a quote from a previous FHB saying that the difference between an amateur and a professional was that when the pro makes a mistake (which I see from this thread does happen), he spends less time agonizing and instead accepts it, fixes it, and moves on. The next weekend I replaced the window (13 years later, I still have the first one) and stayed up all Sunday night putting up another layer of drywall.
And since then, I go through FHB the day it arrives.
lj
I dont make mistakes.........just errors.
It's not who's right, it's who's left ~ http://CLIFFORDRENOVATIONS.COM
put up crown samples, #1, #2, #3 (upside down), #4.....
lady picks #3......
nail up #3 as shown as sample, down hall, two bedrooms,
architect walks in, "THAT CROWN IS UPSIDE DOWN."
@$#%^&#$@%*($*#%&)($@
no turn left unstoned
Cutawooda,
I mostly work on commercial jobs, and have made my share of mistakes on them,but nothing is as embarassing as screwing up inside someone's home.Whenever I work with a residential upgrader I always ask the same question you've asked "What was your biggest goof up on the job?"One guy said he missed an outlet in a foyer so when he went back to cut it in,he layed it out(perfectly) from the basement,drilled up and was suprised to see light.He said by the time he got upstairs to see a hole in about the center of the foyer's oak tongue and groove flooring the homeowner was already on the phone.Another guy told me he didn't realize the cherry beams he had drilled and pulled romex through were going to be EXPOSED.
My biggest f.u. was with a 55 ft. bucket truck.My foreman gave me and my apprentice the job of mounting some metal halide light fixtures over truck dock doors at a manufacturing plant.The kid was a little green so I gave him the 28 ft. truck and set him up in a dock with nothing around him.I took the 55 footer into another dock that had a tractor trailer on one side and a deep ditch on the other.I was so careful watching the mirrors back and forth on the sides and took my eye off the bucket for a few seconds,just long enough to send it through the overhead fiberglass door.Unfortunately the general foreman and the plant manager were standing on the other side of the door.
I remember a sat. job for an architect who was trying to save money.
He employed us as moon lighters and wanted to pour footers on sat.
In Fla the only conc. co. that operate on sat. are the fly be nights.
Well we get the forms ready and wait and wait and wait 3 hours late the truck shows up he pulls up next to the site and comes to a grinding halt. The motor had seized up. Upon further inspection it was determined that the drain plug in the oil pan was gone. No oil no run. Forunatly the hopper had stopped with hatch on the up side towards the house. So we popped the hatch and in I went with a 5 gal. bucket. We poured the footers from a wheelbarrow. When we were done we stuck a garden hose in the hopper turned on the water and went home. The driver said that he had noticed the oil pressure dropping on the way to the job but what do you do? Just gratful the truck stopped where it did. Never again trying to cheap out on sat.
Not sure if this qualifies but........years ago...in my very early twenties (I'm 51 now)....I moved up top of a mountain in the Blue Ridge Foothills of Virginia (Nelson County) on a property owned by a 75 year old woman (Bessy Terry). Lived there her whole life. I was real intrigued witht he remote lifestyle so one long cold winter I wrote her from my NY residence and asked if she'd like me to come up and spend the winter on her property and help her out. When I met her she was complaining of being too old to go down the mtn to her mailbox.....was a real long steep way down. Probably about two miles. Anyway, of course she said yes so I loaded up my VW car with blankets and pillows...I had ordered a TiPi a few months prior from a book I read on tipis. The thing was twenty two feet across and over twenty feet high.....with a liner. All I had to do was to cut twenty something lodge poles....Dead straight ones! Spent about a month or more collecting the poles up top the mtn.......using a drawknife I peeled all the bark and stubs off. Got the thing up finally...Most drop dead beautiful thing you could ever imagine...Way atop a mtn in the Blue Ridge Mtns. I dug a trench around it with a small path leading down hill for drainage..last thing I needed to do was to ancor all the lodge poles to the ground with steel anchors....MAde a fire in the center of the tipi that night...Looking back at the tipi..it glowed like gods gift to earth..went out to the outhouse to do my business and there was a hugeeeeeeee storm......blew the metal roof offa Bessies barn and took my tipis up and over the mtn.....In the morning Bessie said" thats why people live in cabins"......grrrrrr
Be well
Namaste'
Andy
It's not who's right, it's who's left ~ http://CLIFFORDRENOVATIONS.COM
Andy- That was rich.
This one I heard about, but didn't see.
A sheetrock crew were rocking a new house, everything was going along just fine, even a little quicker than usual. Then somebody noticed that the reason it was going so quick was that they weren't making cutouts for electrical stuff. Then they noticed that the reason they weren't making those cutouts was because the electricians hadn't been there yet...... They were rocking a house with no electrical in it at all. GC's turn to say "Oops."
-- J.S.