“Removing our popcorn ceilings. We thought we could do the whole house in one weekend. Three years later, we still only have one room de-popcorned. I tell everyone that whoever said it went ‘out of style’ never had to remove it themselves. Word to the wise: Just pay someone to do it and save your back.”
“My brother was taking out a wall in our childhood home. This started an electrical fire and destroyed the entire house. He had a professional rebuild it.”
“I know this is one of the easiest DIYs you can do, but I don’t think it was worth painting my own cabinets. They look great, but it took me about two weeks after work hours in a disassembled kitchen. It would have taken a professional with a paint gun about an hour.”
“I built a retaining wall from wood, but it didn’t last long due to drainage issues. I should have just hired a pro and built it from concrete products.”
“Not me, but my mom. She had a beat-up wood floor in her bedroom that she’d decided to paint, but she opted out of doing a first coat of primer because she thought it wasn’t important and would save her time.
Turns out primer on a wood floor is important — it gives the top coat something to stick to! She spent the next decade having to repaint or retouch the floor once or twice a year.”
“One of our first-ever DIY projects was tiling our bathroom. Let’s just say that I see every imperfection when I shower. It definitely didn’t help that we only have one bathroom, and we were stuck working on it most weeknights. I wish we’d just hired someone who would’ve been able to get it done in 1/4 of the time and with better results.”
“Anything my sister attempted on MY house! She’d take on projects thinking she could do it because our dad did it at his house, but our dad had a lot more practical experience. From the uneven peeling caulk she’d tried to put on the tub seams to the three doorbell buttons on the outside of the house, all the way to the tape she’d attempted to repair a crack with.”
“Flooring! We tiled our living room/dining room combo at our last home, and it nearly killed us. With our new house, the first thing we did was hire flooring people! It was much less hassle, and they completed it in just three days.”
“Moving. We rented a U-Haul and everything but brought it all up ourselves. Mind you, I live in a house with my sister and mom. We were moving into an apartment on the third floor. There was no elevator. We were outside in the winter. We should’ve just hired movers.”
“Painting the entire interior of our house. Granted, it saved us several thousand dollars, but we didn’t do the best job. And holy cats — the arguing! It was beyond stressful for both my husband and me. It was during the heat of summer, and we didn’t take any time off work. In our marriage, we’ve never argued so much except during that time.”
“My husband and I remodeled a kitchen in a 921-square-foot home with two toddlers. It took forever to complete. I saved the cabinets by painting them, we made concrete countertops (twice, because they broke the first time), trenched electrical in a slab for an island, and managed to keep it within our $8k budget. Don’t get me wrong, I felt proud to have completed it, but two years of reno would have taken professionals maybe only five to six weeks.”.
“ALL OF THEM. I DIY’d my kitchen backsplash after the cost of renovating my kitchen went over budget. I figured I could save on labor, but I nearly lost my mind in the process. Anything I would have saved on the price of a professional install was spent on buying and renting all of the tools needed — not to mention my time.”
“I built a flagstone patio — nothing too large, about 15×20. It was the worst weekend of my life. Digging six inches in clay sucked. Making the ground flat sucked. Everything was heavy (the bags of rocks, the bags of sand, the stones), and getting everything level was a pain. Never again.”
“No doubt drywall finishing. It’s an art, man, and it takes 1,000 passes to become good at it. Every time I do it, I just wish I’d paid an expert.”
“The half-bath in his (dad) house needed to have the flooring replaced. Instead of doing it properly, he got some peel-and-stick laminate tiles, cut them to size by eyeballing them, and slapped them down. I had to go in later and redo the whole thing so that my parents would stop tripping over the edges.”
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