The Most Disastrous Disasters of 2017

I know we’re not the only ones wondering how it suddenly became mid-December, but here we are! This is the time of year when other blogs are taking you on beautiful holiday home tours and doing year-end look backs on all the amazing projects they did this year. But here at Plaster & Disaster, we aren’t too great at decorating for the holidays and we like to do another kind of annual recap: fondly recalling our most disastrous disasters from the year behind us. If you missed our 2016 and 2015 recaps, do be sure to check them out since those were also disaster-filled years.

Here in 2017, we’ve had our fair share of things that made us cringe to share with the viewing public. Like Sage’s dining room table, which required using pretty much every finishing product known to humankind and had to be stripped and restained in the middle of the project.

The finished result looks…fine…but up close you can see all sorts of flaws because of the excessive sanding and the fact that Sage used poplar which isn’t really fit for staining because it gets so blotchy and uneven. You live and you learn, folks.

In the realm of home maintenance, readers were alarmed when we revealed the dilapidated and dangerous condition of some of the stairways in our homes. There’s Naomi’s very narrow and steep basement staircase that also threatens to give you a concussion if you don’t watch your head:

And Sage’s front steps that undoubtedly have the mail delivery person fearing for their life every time they bring a package to the front door (maybe that’s why they’ve started leaving things at the bottom of the steps):

Continuing Naomi’s tradition of basement flooding (a 2016 disaster), Sage managed to flood her own basement with a washer issue and then in the process of trying to fix it managed to break the water shutoff valve and order the wrong part to actually fix the washer.

Also in Sage’s basement, she managed to spill self-leveling, quick drying cement all over the floor. That was actually a triple disaster because not only did she do that, but then she was so panicked that she didn’t stop to take a photo for you, dear readers, nor did she manage to write a post for you about why she was trying to pour self-leveling cement in the first place. That’s coming in the New Year, we promise. In the meantime, just imagine her on her hands and knees covered with wet cement and using paper towels to clean the floor desperately before everything turned solid.

And then in a totally different vein, there was that time we both drafted the same post at the same time. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a real disaster, but when you have a hobby blog alongside full time jobs and other normal person responsibilities, discovering that you duplicated efforts on a post (about your dollhouse that you co-own as two grown adults who pretend to blog as a tiny married blogging couple but who in reality are just a single block of wood with a stick figure drawn on) is not the best feeling. However, discovering that your two versions of the post are approximately 78% identical is pretty entertaining.

So those are a few of the times things did not go according to plan this past year in our projects and houses. That’s part of what DIY is all about (when we do it at least), so we’re grateful that you seem to enjoy it all! And we’re sure that 2018 will be filled with just as many “learning opportunities” as 2017 was.