What’s Your “Easy” Project That Went Sideways?

[ODB]

If you ever decide to start a publishing company and think the big publishers like St Martin’s, HarperCollins, Penguin, et al, will actually return phone calls or emails in less than 18 months...

think again...

 

[Ridge Runner]

For me it's anything to do with Plumbing, but I'm too darn cheap to pay someone.

 

[WiscoHoundsman]

I use to have an early 2000’s Toyota Corolla that burned a quart of oil for every tank of gas.

Onetime I went to change the oil and in a rush wasn’t paying attention to what drain plug I was removing until the fluid coming out was red…. Luckily I was at my parents house and dad give me a ride to the nearest auto parts store to get some transmission fluid. That 20 min oil change took 2+ hours.

 

[Cashcropper]

Same here with plumbing.,we have several rent houses. Plumbing problems never happen at an opportune time. I learned the hard way that when working on old plumbing the first thing to do is fill up your truck with gas cause youre gonna need it. Over the years we have replaced all water lines with pex and all sewer lines with new PVC

 

[CorbLand]

If you ever decide to start a publishing company and think the big publishers like St Martin’s, HarperCollins, Penguin, et al, will actually return phone calls or emails in less than 18 months...

think again...

I feel this but it’s all within the same company. I once got asked how long it generally took to get answers from other departments. I responded with something like “I had to start operating in the business months, not days, timelines.”

 

[rtkbowhunter]

Not me, but my son. I bought a 2004 Jeep Wrangler in 2017. I figured it would be a good vehicle for him to learn to wrench on. Plus, I've wante a Jeep. Most stuff is fairly accessible and with a little effort and forethought, fixable. We did most of the front end steering stuff, control arms, tie rods, and a few others. Replaced O2 sensors and entire exhaust. No problem.

Shocks need replaced. Fronts aren't too bad. Knock that out in an evening. Now the rears, let's just say who ever designed a replaceable item, with damn near impossible parts to reach, needs a kick in the balls. The upper mounts are waaaaay up inside the body. I mentioned I'd probably take it to a local 4WD place that specializes in this. Nope, dad I can do it. I'd probably take it to the shop. If those bolts snap, you're gonna play hell fixing it. Nope, dad, it'll be fine. 3 of the 4 snapped. Now what dad? Well, we can try to drill out the hardened bolts, tap the next size up....OR we can take it to the shop and they'll weld two nice little clevises in, just pop a pin in and out, easy peasy shock replacement. So after trying to drill and tap, he decided we should take it to the shop. Best $250 I ever spent.

 

[timberland]

Changed out a leaky water pump on a 94 dodge durango. Easy, peasy, cause I can see it and had plenty of room to work. I took out a fan cover, removed the five bolts, got the new one in place and hand started all five bolts. As I am starting to tighten the bolts one of them still has a half inch to go but starts getting hard to turn. I figured that the pump was a little cockeyed and would settle into place. I heard a clunk, then the bolt easily turned and tightened into place. I made sure all the bolts were tight, replace the fan cover and gave it a crank.

A HORRIBLE sound comes from under the hood and it won't fire. Towed it to the shop, where 2 days and $1,700 later I find out that 2 of the 5 bolts are a little longer than the others, and IF you put a long bolt into a short bolt hole, it lands on the timing gear. If you break that gear, you bend rods, break chains, etc. etc. It could have been a lot worse, so they say.

 

[amassi]

Went to the gym I worked at to build some 20x24” plyo boxes and some broad was parked in front of the roll up door so I couldn’t back into the gym and unload tools and lumber. Anyway, we’ve been married 15 years


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[IDbrushswimmer]

I think I hold the hold the world record for the duration of a bathroom remodel...

Nov 2021 - I demo'd bathroom, patched walls, painted, installed a new vanity, laid new flooring, and hired a contractor to install tub and do tile work for the shower. I said I would do the trim work shortly after... well it's Nov 2025 and the trim work still isn't done. Back in July 2025 I did demo the linen closet and built a tall cabinet and installed that. Still need to build a door for the lower storage space... and finish the trim work...

We have a bit of remodel ADD but the house looks pretty damn good minus these one off 90% completed rooms. Need to just get it done.

I’m a solid 90%er myself..

 

[jayhawk]

I use to have an early 2000’s Toyota Corolla that burned a quart of oil for every tank of gas.

Onetime I went to change the oil and in a rush wasn’t paying attention to what drain plug I was removing until the fluid coming out was red…. Luckily I was at my parents house and dad give me a ride to the nearest auto parts store to get some transmission fluid. That 20 min oil change took 2+ hours.

Had a friend do that too. You’re not alone my friend

 

[BFR]

Told my wife I wasn’t paying $500 to replace 6 4’x4’ T111 panels on my barn. Well, I didn’t but cutting the panels and hanging them 1 handed was a real bit(#.

 

[BFR]

And then told my buddy to keep some speed up and stay in the center, did he listen?

 

[EastHumboldt]

I use to have an early 2000’s Toyota Corolla that burned a quart of oil for every tank of gas.

Onetime I went to change the oil and in a rush wasn’t paying attention to what drain plug I was removing until the fluid coming out was red…. Luckily I was at my parents house and dad give me a ride to the nearest auto parts store to get some transmission fluid. That 20 min oil change took 2+ hours.

LOL. I did this with a Subaru. Drained the tranny, then double filled the crank case. I’m thinking to myself “Why is the oil so red?” While I’m listening to the engine make this weird gurgling noise. I think the bottom of the pistons were actually slapping into the oil. Then the light came on. DERP! Fortunately no harm done.

 

[wyojdubya]

This fall rebuilding the front end of my truck in between hunts. Budgeted two days, because it was my first time. Everything went wrong. Took three long days (headlamp got lots of use), including a late night 30 minute run to buy more parts. Finished just in time to take it in for alignment before leaving on my next hunt.

Also, pretty much every other project I've ever done.

 

[Ryan Avery]

Rokslide....

 

[Tjdeerslayer37]

Last year my tennant called me and said the tub was gurgling when he flushed the toilet. I said ok no biggie, ill run the snake through the cleanout again (id done this 2-3 times before, cleared it all up and went on my way.) so i went and rented the snake and headed over there. pushed it down the cleanout about 65 feet, no real issues getting it through or anything. started retracting the snake and got to about 10 feet left and it was stuck, like stuck stuck. like we hooked a forklift to the snake and couldnt pull it out, nor could my 10k winch on my truck. tried pushing and pulling, tried running a smaller snake alongside that one to wiggle it out, everything we could think of, all while throwing my tennant in a hotel for 4 days. End result was an 8 foot deep hole, 2k worth of concrete broke up, pipe cut and replaced, total cost ~$11k.... for a 10 minute snake job. big ole root ball was stuck on the snake and got lodged in a 6" to 4" transition coming out of there.

 

[svivian]

Plumbing is also my arch nemesis

A long time ago I was at a tournament down at Lake Mead. As I was pulling my boat out my alternator takes a shit on the boat ramp. No big deal get towed up to the parking lot and hitch a ride to autozone for a new one. I call ahead and they say yep we got one right here for your 5.4 v8.... perfect. I get there and they hand me the box and i ask again this is for the 5.4 and they say yep!

Sweet, get back to the parking lot and with just a few shit tools i get the alternator on no problem. Shame on me for not inspecting and counting the grooves on the pulley.... I get 40 miles outside of Las Vegas on a busy freeway and I hear a loud pop come from the engine. I put it neutral and shut down the truck and let coast to get pulled off to the side of the road.

Those fuggers at autozone gave me the alternator for the 4.6L not the 5.4L and I ate belt and broke the timing arm. At that point it had to go to the shop but it was a sunday. So I ended up in a hotel for two more days until it was fixed.

 

[txtransplant]

First house I bought was 30 years old. I was a desk jockey, but worked in residential real estate, and so I had more knowledge about construction and home repairs than I otherwise should have. Let's just say the capabilities of my hands are not on the same level with my brain. The first two projects made me realize I should outsource almost all repairs, even though I knew how to do it.

1st project: back porch outlet wasn’t working.

No problem, I’m young and single, I’ll spend an hour or two on Saturday morning replacing it. Takes me maybe 30 minutes to run to Home Depot, buy an outlet, gather tools, and pull the old one out of the wall - just barely.

There was almost no slack in the wires, the outlet only pulled out from the wall just enough to fit my fingers and a tool behind it. That's when the fun started.

The copper wires had fused together the outlet over the decades. Full. Effing. Stop. I could not get those damn wires off of the outlet AT ALL (and I didn't want to cut the wires because I needed the slack to install the new outlet). I tugged and pulled, twisted and cursed at that damn thing. It took about two hours, but I finally got it off.

Installed the new outlet, maybe 15 minutes, screwed everything back into place, flipped the breaker back on, and - nothing. That's when I realized the old outlet was probably perfectly fine, but there must have been an issue with the circuit.

I went up-stream to what I figured was the next outlet on the circuit, in the bathroom on the other side of that wall. Plugged something into it - nothing. So I pull that outlet back from the wall and hundreds of fried ants fall out.

GAAAAAW-LEE SARGENT CARTER, I think I found the problem!

Another trip to Home Depot, walk of shame past the same employees I saw in the electrical section hours before, right up to the same bay to grab another outlet. Back home, swapped it out, everything worked find.

The whole thing took maybe 4 hours, but could have been done in 30 minutes had I thought to troubleshoot the circuit before replacing that exterior outlet.

2nd project: flood lights over the garage didn't work. Same deal here, I figured it would be maybe 90 minutes to get this done.

The fixtures were 30 years old and fused into place, just like that patio outlet. In this case, I had to use a utility knife to cut through several layers of paint holding the fixtures to the house even after taking the screws out. Just getting the fixtures off took way longer than I had planned.

Once I pulled the fixtures down, I let out of sigh of relief - the electrician in the 80s thought it prudent to leave a few extra inches of slack in the copper this time. Bless you, time traveling electrician who knows some infant several states away will be replacing these outlets in three decades. You're doing the lord's work.

But wait, why are there more wires than I thought there would be?

I don't recall exactly, but some combination of reading the instructions, searching on Youtube, and texting pics to my handyman over the course of an hour or so resulted in the realization that these lights were on a three way circuit.

Ok, I do know a good deal about home construction, and I get the concept of a three way circuit, but I hadn't planned to learn how to wire one up. Back to Youtube...

Eventually, I managed to get them wired up and mounted back into place. That project probably took me 4 hours as well.

While I did end up painting that house as well, I pretty much outsourced everything else from that point forward.

 

[Mighty Mouse]

TLDR: What I expected to be a 5 minute plug-and-play brake controller install took 5+ hours…FU FoMoCo

A couple years ago I wanted to temporarily put a brake controller on our family car (2019 Expedition) for a one-way haul pulling a fairly heavy trailer. I thought it would be as simple as unplugging the brake controller on my 2005 F150 and plugging it into the Expedition…wrong.

I was expecting to find a universal brake controller plug under the steering wheel, but apparently Ford skipped that feature on our Expedition. According to the Internet, Ford wants to have their dealers install Ford OEM brake controllers for you (at an exorbitant price and unreasonable schedule), so they put a special Ford plug in a hard to reach spot behind the dash that doesn’t mate with aftermarket controllers. I found the special Ford plug and wiring harness and thought, “I’ll show them. The wires are all there, so I’ll just cut into the harness and splice in my old brake controller. Just connect red-white-blue-black to red-white-blue-black, should be easy”…wrong.

I spliced in my old controller easily enough, but when I started the Expedition to test it, the dash lit up like a Christmas tree with a litany of warning/fault messages. Some more Googling revealed that reprogramming the onboard computer is a necessary step in the brake controller install process. Failing to activate the “trailer brake control module” shuts off power to the brake controller and causes other assorted faults. So
I got out my OBD2 scanner, found the procedure online, and fired up FORScan figuring it shouldn’t be too hard to activate the module…wrong.

After a dozen failed attempts using multiple versions of FORScan and a healthy dose of cursing directed at the mofos at FoMoCo, I still had a non-functional brake controller. So I disconnected the spliced-in controller from the factory wiring harness, ran a jumper wire directly off the positive battery post and through the firewall to power the controller then ran another wire all the way down the vehicle to get the brake controller signal to the 7-way plug. After all that hassle, I finally had a functional brake controller that the vehicle didn’t “know” was there.

Thus ends the tale of my (Pyrrhic) victory over Ford in the ceaseless war between DIY’ers and the automakers that hate us.

 

[Q child]

Oh, I have an oil change story too.
I set out to change the oil on my Subaru. I removed the plug and drained the oil, put the plug back in, and dumped in a bunch of new oil. I checked the dipstick and the oil level was high, like really high. I figured there must be an air lock or something so I let it sit for a while and checked again. Still very high. I started the engine imagining that getting the engine moving would allow the oil to settle. It sounded like sh*t, but not like it was about to explode or anything, so let it run for a few minutes, then checked the dipstick again. Still very high.
I was scratching my head for a while. What the hell is going on? I thought about driving it over to my uncle's place - he's a mechanic and I figured he could help.
Finally I got underneath it again, and noticed the second drain plug. I checked the manual and realized that I had actually drained the transmission fluid. So, my car had no transmission fluid and double the oil. What a mess. Luckily I was within walking distance of an auto parts store. I got new oil and new transmission fluid. When all was said and done, I had spent the better part of a day, a bunch of money, almost totaled my car by driving it in that state, and had a five gallon bucket full of waste oil and fluid. Oops.
I'm not a mechanic (obviously), and I don't like working on cars, so have never really invested much time into learning about them. I am however, pretty good at working on things and can usually figure out how to fix things. But the lesson is, as is usually the case, read the damn manual. Even if you think you know what you're doing.