People Are Sharing The Home Improvement Projects That Were A Terrible Idea, And I Don't Own A House But I Can't Stop Reading
Personally, I'm confident that whether you own or rent (or are a teenager who does neither), it's always fun to learn about (and minorly judge) others' home improvement projects. Otherwise, we wouldn't watch HGTV.
So, in the spirit of learning what not to do, I recently decided to ask homeowners in the BuzzFeed Community to tell me about a home improvement project they've embarked on that was absolutely not worth it. Here are the most interesting!
1."When we built our house 26 years ago, we had someone landscape most of our flowerbeds for us. It looked great! Then I realized that someone has to maintain them. That’s when I learned that I was not a gardener and had no interest in weeding."
2."We were talked into replacing all of the windows in our house with these expensive triple-pane windows with inert gas in between the layers to cut heat loss in winter and to keep heat out in the summer."
"I think the total was about $36,000, but we were told our heating and cooling bills would be cut in half.
Unfortunately, the windows didn't make up for the poor insulation of the walls and ceiling, so the savings were modest at best. Worst investment we ever made."
3."In-floor heating. Don't have it personally, but I work in the HVAC industry and have had several customers with it."
"It is super expensive to put in and once it breaks you have to dig up the entire thing to find where the problem is. It will cost you a good portion of the install price just to have someone dig around and repair the problem. Put down a rug or some carpet instead."
"I always wear slippers in the house anyway. Literally, I step off my shower mat right into slippers. So yeah, in floor heating would be a huge waste of money for me."
4."We deal with a decent amount of noise at our house, so I ordered custom inserts for our windows that would cut down on the noise. They work, but the trade-off is that you have to take them out to open the windows."
"The inserts spend more time taken down and leaning against the wall than actually in the windows. Complete waste of money."
5."I spent one bitcoin in 2012 for a plumber to install a double shower when my now ex-wife moved in. I was thinking it would have spiced up our love life. It didn’t. She left me when she found out I used her bitcoin."
—Anonymous
6."We live along a golf course, and within three years of having our solar panels installed, half of them have been destroyed by erratic golf balls. Hail damage is part of the warrant,y but unfortunately, golf balls are not."
Schmidt-z / Getty Images, Boris_zec / Getty Images
—Anonymous
7."About seven years ago, my sister purchased a house and redid her flooring on the first floor. She paid $5,000 for bamboo-style flooring. Shortly after they were done, her jackass of a cat (God bless his soul) spilled my pop all over the floor."
"Add to that countless other spills, three dogs, four cats, fur and dander, dog potty accidents, cat vomit, plus other life happenings, her floor looks like crap.
The other thing? She has changed the wallpaper and paint scheme three times. So not worth it!"
—Anonymous
8."Outdoor bar."
—Anonymous
9."We had our original wood windows replaced in our sunroom because they were leaking. Not only did the company that replaced them measure too small for the size of the window well, they also continued to leak after the fact."
Bon Appétit / Via youtube.com
"So after arguing back and forth about the haphazard install they did, we decided to have them replaced a SECOND time by [another company]. While they’re stunningly beautiful and HUGE and our views are fantastic, they also STILL leak.
Turns out it was the siding around the windows in the first place. After $20,000, we did not solve our problem. And now have another project to do with no funds to do it. The worst part is new windows don’t really add value to a house. Especially not twice over. Big lesson for a new homeowner for sure."
—Anonymous
10."Solar! It took my $220 electric bill to $120 per month, but the lease cost me $200 for the panels. So it's actually $100 more per month."
—Anonymous
11."Caulk."
—Anonymous
12."Installed solar panels on my home. When I sold my home, the buyer said that he didn't want the panels. I tried to cancel my contract but was told by the company that even though the panels were removed, I would have to continue to make the monthly lease payment. It's been six years and I still receive a bill every month. Read your contract very carefully. Promises made are very rarely kept."
Acilo / Getty Images/iStockphoto, Pop TV / CBC Television / Via giphy.com
—Anonymous
13."An Epoxy garage floor coating. Not the most expensive improvement out there, costing me about $4,000. Looks great. I was so excited right after it was done. But..."
"First, it was a real pain clearing out the garage and putting all the stuff back. I also had a workbench and floor shelving that I quickly found out needed to be lifted and replaced carefully. Otherwise, the legs would scratch the coating.
Worst of all, if it gets wet, like when putting a car in after driving through a rain storm, it's like a freaking ice rink. Extremely slippery. And over time it gets nicked up and stained in spots, which of course is 100 times more noticeable than if was just a plain, boring, cement floor. Not worth it."
—Anonymous
14."Not really my spending, but here goes — I was working as a general contractor, and an older woman wanted a step stool that pulls out of the cupboard near her refrigerator."
"She wanted it because she couldn’t reach her guns in the cupboard above her refrigerator. I charged her $200.
She passed away shortly after the install so yeah, I don’t think it was worth it."
—Anonymous
15."Waffle oven."
—Anonymous
16."Pool Table. Husband had to have it, used it a handful of times, and now it's an eyesore taking up a large area of the downstairs. HATE IT!"
—Anonymous
17."For years my wife wanted a bay window in our bedroom so she could see the woods that go behind our house. We saved up for five years to finally get one. One year of enjoying the view went by before a deer, I’m talking a big ol’ buck crashed into the window, cracking it near open."
"The deer had mad deer disease or whatever they call it. The one where the deer walks around all drunk like it ate apples on the ground. Like that. It’s kinda like a zombie movie if it were just deer.
Anyway, if I would have known that the deer zombie thing was going to happen, I would have just put up a smaller window since it only hit about three feet into the seven-foot-wide window. Two smaller windows would have saved us two grand.
Not worth it. But don’t tell my wife."
—Anonymous
18."Two DIY projects. The first: we paid to have an in-ground pool built. It turned out great. It required a couple of retaining walls built to terrace our backyard. I thought I was the wise owner, so I had the larger slope terraced so I could have multi-zone garden beds."
"I myself installed eight separate sprinkler zone valves and eight separate drip irrigation main lines underground to six terrace zones and two zones around the pool deck. I burned out on the DIY yardwork projects, and five years after enjoying the awesome pool and concrete deck area, I had yet to plant a single fruit, vegetable, or decorative shrub on any of the six terraced zones or two pool deck zones..."
"The second was a DIY for the same in-ground pool. I paid extra for the pool contractor to place an extra concrete pool deck extension near the deep end so I could later buy, set, and power up an above-ground spa to soak my weary bones in."
"Ahead of the concrete placement for any of the pool deck, I trenched and ran separate underground electrical power and data conduits to bring 120-volt power and hard-line data wiring to several spots around the pool deck.
This was so we could power up our laptops, patio table lights, laptops, landscape mood lights, appliances for pool parties, and data lines for our laptops (before home wi-fi took over).
Like my irrigation plans, I got DIY burnout and never finished pulling the power and data wiring or finishing any outlets."
"After five years of using our $35,000 pool, my wife decided she needed more home square footage to keep up with all the neighborhood Joneses, and we sold the home and moved."
"I never plugged in a pool deck light or appliance, never logged in my laptop poolside, never irrigated or ate a single terrace garden-grown vegetable or fruit.
Regrets? Absolutely. All my back-breaking DIY work for someone else to finish easily and enjoy."
19.And finally: "[My mistake was] installing flooring from one of the large national chains. I’m a single, first-time homeowner so I admit I was naïve and didn’t do enough research (though their online reviews were glowing, so they must have a great service to scrub the bad ones).
"I honestly believed their marketing when they said they had their own installers (versus contractors; I thought actual employees would be safer and more accountable). The installers who showed up were in an unmarked van and spoke almost no English, which was nerve-wracking because I didn’t know what they were asking me or what I was agreeing to."
"They removed my toilet to tile the bathroom but started at the other end of the house (I was tiling the kitchen and hallway too) but by the end of the day, they weren’t done — and left me with no working toilet."
"Because of the language barrier, I'd had no idea this would happen and hadn’t planned to not have a bathroom!
The next day they showed up five hours late and completed the job — clearly rushing — but the finishing work (trim etc.) was sloppy, cheap quality trim, and looked terrible.
I was deeply disappointed but couldn’t communicate the issues to the installers. So I called the salesperson, who referred me to a customer service hotline, who told me if I wanted them to fix it, they would have to remove everything and redo it, but I would have to pay for a second installation because it didn’t meet their definition of an incorrect installation.
I got the runaround and many excuses about their 'customer satisfaction guarantee.' What’s worse, the tile sucks! It shows everything, including simple water spots that dry on the floor, so it always looks dirty. I clean it more than the old floor and every time I mop it I burn with resentment. It’s my biggest regret, and I’m mad at myself for being so naive and fooled by marketing."
—Anonymous
If you have any home improvement stories of your own, sound off in the comments! Or, if you prefer, you can write in to this anonymous Google form.
Who knows — your story might be part of an upcoming BuzzFeed article!
Note: some comments have been edited for length and/or clarity.
