By its very nature, DIY gets you into some unpredictable situations. That’s part of the fun of it: you start a project and see where it takes you. Sometimes you run into a situation that you didn’t anticipate, so you improvise.
We talk a lot about disaster on the blog, but we don’t often highlight the times when things don’t go wrong exactly, but they do go sideways. We’ve done some pretty ridiculous things to finish projects. Here are just a few:
That time Naomi built a scary furniture tower in her dining room
When Naomi went to swap out the light in her dining room for her new chandelier, she was confronted by an unexpected surprise: a giant hole in the ceiling that the previous light had covered.
But no worry, it could be covered up with a ceiling medallion! In a post that she actually had the gall to call a tutorial, she described her method for keeping the medallion pressed tight against the ceiling while the adhesive caulk dried. Use tiny screws like everyone else? Absolutely not!
Instead, she built an extremely precarious furniture tower in the middle of the dining room. The top was even wedged with odd bits of paper to get a tight seal.
But in the end, it worked pretty well! The ceiling medallion is safely attached, and with no tiny holes left by screws.
We’ll call it a victory, although certainly not an elegant one.
That time Sage swept – er, painted – her hallway
Sage doesn’t exactly have towering ceilings, but the stairwell did present a minor challenge to paint given that the corners were out of reach and it would have been challenging to, say, balance a chair on the stairs.
They make paintbrushes on extension poles, but why pay for that when you could just tape a paintbrush to the end of a broom?
Worked like a charm.
That’s totally how professionals get their perfect results, right?
That time Naomi used a dremel instead of a screwdriver
Novels could be have been written about everything that went wrong when Naomi opted to install hanger bolts into her cabinet legs herself rather than pay someone about $2 each to do it for her.
What seemed like a DIY adventure quickly turned into a DIY horror story as those. darn. bolts. just. wouldn’t. go. in. all. the. way.
That tiny quarter inch would be a big problem for the project, because the cabinets wouldn’t be straight and sturdy on their legs.
Instead of figuring out how to fix the problem the correct way, Naomi did what any frustrated DIYer would do – just cut the damn things off.
She screwed the leg hardware on, and then used a dremel with a metal cutting attachment to cut off the excess.
Overkill? Maybe. But it worked!
That time Sage was a totally competent plumber
As part of her kitchen renovation, Sage replaced the double basin sink with a single basin, literally the best decision of the entire project. But it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing when it came to removing the garbage disposal — the pipe fittings attaching the sink to disposal just wouldn’t budge, so Sage eventually resorted to a highly technical process:
Yes, she sawed the pipes right in half. Of course that left her with a pipe remnant still clinging to dear life on the disposal:
So she designed a super impressive system of clamps and channel lock pliers to twist the pipe fitting in the right direction and loosen it.
Yes she’s a genius, but we definitely aren’t going to claim she’s a professional plumber.
That time we decapitated cutlery
As extremely competitive people who also keep a rigorous schedule of DIY projects and posts for fun, the allure of a DIY competition is irresistible.
It’s led us down some ridiculous paths which we pretty much never talk about (sarcasm) – like that time that we made an award winning table out of a plastic cactus that was featured on Apartment Therapy or that time we won $5000 on a national reality TV show. Not that we’re bragging, or anything.
But the ridiculous DIY competition that we rarely talk about, for obvious reasons, is that time we ended up competing over who could make the best project out of cutlery.
You read that right. Cutlery.
After much brainstorming (escargot tong earrings, anyone?) we decided the only approach to making silverware palatable as a decor item was to remove the part that looks like silverware.
Naturally, this led to us decapitating a bunch of spoons:
Which ended up leaving one of the saddest/creepiest piles of DIY scraps that we ever saw (until the Popsicle stick fingernails, of course).
Even though we pulled together the project into a halfway decent mirror in the end, we have to just consider this whole experiment ridiculous.
That time the Tiny Bloggers followed the wrong advice
Finally, we hoped that the Tiny Bloggers would bring a breath of fresh air and sanity to this blog, but apparently the influence is rubbing off the other way. They’ve proven that they are just as ridiculous as we are.
Take their recent room reveal:
Think that overhead light looks nice? Well, how do you think they got it up there?
That’s right, they followed Naomi’s advice and decided it would be a good idea to simply glob on some glue and then build a precarious tower of furniture and books to hold it up while the glue dried.
We bet that’s super secure for a little kid’s room, guys.
Well, we guess that shatters any illusion of expertise that we may have built up over the years by accident! Now that we’ve shared ours, tell us your most ridiculous DIY approach in the comments! (Or better yet, send photos.)
Those towers of furniture/books have made my day. Big Belly Laughs!
(I wish you’d angled the book titles more to the camera so nosy people could know what you read!)
Thanks, Bonnie! Maybe we’ll do a blog post on our top books sometime!
DIY is not always glamorous, but I think you’ve proven that it still gets the job done! My DIY fail was trying to spray paint furniture in 40 weather. It just turned into a lot of little bubbles on the paint because it was freezing instead of drying. Oops! Luckily I brought it inside and it dried pretty much normal.
Yikes! Glad it worked out Hayley!
Our house has an A frame roof. The load bearing wall runs length way through the house with rooms to either side. Every room is almost 10 feet high at the center wall and 7 1/2 feet at the outer wall. We gutted the non-load bearing walls between the kitchen, dining room and den to create a great room. I hand scraped all of the popcorn ceiling texture off and mudded, patched and primed the ceiling. But I discovered a large, deep divot by the ceiling molding….on the ten foot tall wall of course. Too big and deep to spackle, too big and deep to mud. After sitting on the floor and staring up at the problem for a couple of days, I decided to wedge popsicle sticks above the molding, then shims gluing them to the ceiling with liquid nails until I had it filled in enough to mud over it all. I’m pretty sure that’s NOT how the professionals do it, lol! But it worked!
Haha, I feel like I’ve done that myself.. I think I used some random pieces of balsa wood to “rebuild” trim, and then used wood patch to “sculpt” it. Sounds like it worked for you so congrats on figuring it out!
There was that time I carefully measured and marked vertical lines to paint stripes on a wall and put the tape on the wrong side so they didn’t come out the same size, but we don’t talk about that here at home.
Ahh, that would make me so frustrated! I totally see how that would happen, though, because it is not intuitive. I always look at others’ blog posts where they’ve taped something off and think it looks totally wonky, then of course it comes out right.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who uses unconventional methods and makeshift tools for DIY projects!
Happy to help, Danielle!