This just happened to me 2 days ago. Im at this customer's house installing speakers and equipment in a pre-wired home (track home). Wife decides she wants an A/B switch for their family room to switch between the stereo in this room and the whole house audio system in another room. As I start to run the new wires over to the volume control, I encounter half a forest of studs, fire blocks and MDF board. In all my years of doing this, I have never seen so much wood and crap in a 5' section of wall (the home owner was right there and agreed with me).

Anyway, I bust out my sawzaw to cut out some sections to run the wires. Im just cuttn away, pulling out the peices as I go. Everything is fine till I go to use the bathroom located on the other side of this wall. Before I finish this story, I need to say how frustrated I was with all the cutting I was going to have to do, that I just picked up the saw and started cutting without paying attention to which type/size of blade was attached to the saw. Yup, you guessed it, I had matching outlines of holes in the bathroom. I had the long blade on instead of my short blade.

Luckly, the customer was very cool about this and the jokes began of how handy peep holes would be. Anyway, won't be making that mistake again anytime soon. Have a great day!!!!

I was on a retrofit job in an attic, that was being converted into an office/media room and the GC had to cut/remove all of the sub floor and add structure to be able to pass code, and he put the sub floor back without securing it and without telling any of the subs on the job that the floor was not secure and I almost fell 20+ feet to the first floor. One of my installers grabbed me at the last second. A huge chunk of sheetrock came within inches of a $30K chandelier, and to top it off I got to hear the customers wife use more expletives than a sailor trapped at sea for a year. Oh yeah, and I got stuck paying for the sheetrock repair, not cheap, the sheet rocker had to erect a scaffold to get to the damage.

Ahh the joys of a job well done...something about learning from your mistakes...like staying away from MILF/Trophy wives, burning up daddy's money.

LOL... You didn't really think I worked did you?

Mark

Responding to the guy falling through the cieling... I did that one once...

The jobsite superintendent swore all the attic was decked over, and I brought my tools up for the job, and noticed that they blew in like 4' of insulation. I probed with my toes and found that there was a 8x8' section NOT decked, and turned around to get my tools, now with drill, trick bit, tool bucket in hand, I managed to over step the place I found the cieling joist, creating the new skylight location in the master closet...
That sucked...

However, I have NEVER heard anyone tell me they drilled through a refrigerator, so I don't feel bad AT ALL for all the mistakes I have ever made hahahaha.... But even as I write that line, I am knocking on my hardwood desk hehehehe..

G

Once, I heard an HVAC guy using a sawzaw for 20 minutes, Came out of the basemnet and he had notched out 8" of a 12" wood support beam. The funny thing is that the customer ran out of money and we never got to go back and see what had happened. At least they didn't live on a cliff....

Another one... when I first started to do a/v install we were going to install tha plasma on a wall in the kitchen. It was one of the 25k pioneer 50". I was working with another guy and t was around 95 degrees with 100% humidity. I bought the bracket into the house, and hung the bracket on the wall. Put all of the fittings on the wire, put the DVD and HD Cable box in, Installed teh IR system. My former partner was nowhere to be found. I asked the GC (Whom I knew personally) if he would help me put the plasma on the wall. We went out to the van adn opend the back. Sitting in the van wiht the plasma was my partner with the van on and the AC on. He looked at me with this blank look on his face and I sadi what are you doing. His Comment was "I was Keeping the Plasma TV Cool." Me and the general contractor could not stop laughing. Now this saying has become a mainstay at our stores whenever we cannot find someone.

Mike

I would definitely have redirected the bill to the stupid flooring contractor.

Came out of the basement and he had

Another good incident report that compares to this?

Builder that I once worked for was the typical cheap SOB. If he thought he'd save $20.00, he'd use a new sub in a heartbeat.

Tried to get me in a bidding war with some newbie. I refused to "deal", so he used the newbie to install a central vacuum system.

Apparently this newbie was worse than most, since he drilled straight down through a doubled laminated beam with a 2 1/2" bit and ran the pipe.

The next morning the beam failed, the entire center of the structure, from roof to basement, dropped nine feet.

From the street it looked like a Tennesse walking horse.

The builder lost his butt over that one, since the newbie had NO insurance, as well as no ability.......

Worst one happened to me when I was first starting out....

Had to run wire in a finished house from outside to inside through a stucco wall. Made the penetration through the outside wall hit something, then...something else, then something else....At the time I didn't think much of it until we put the wire through and continued our retr-o wire run. About an hour later I was walking through the house and began to close the doors to all the rooms when I came to the one room that we were running the outside wire through and made a funny discovery. I could not find a door to close in that room because they had installed a pocket door. So as I went to close the pocket door I noticed a small amount of resistance. Come to find out we had run the wire right though the hole I created in the last 3 inches of the pocket door to the master bedroom! I still have some who will not let me live that one down.

That last one is apparently rather common?

I know a homeowner who thought he'd be helpful around the house.

He hangs this big huge mirror on the wall using these big old butterfly anchors, and proudly proclaims to wife "look what I did hon".

She's impressed, UNTIL she tries to close the pocket doors between the DR and LR....

Then it becomes "Oh, for gods sake Ralph!".....lol

That pocket door one is a classic because it is so easy to do.

I have been incredibly lucky in general, but I once hit a 2" water pipe drillling down below a house. Funny, it took me about 90 seconds to get to that location under the house until I hit that pipe, then it took about fifteen. There's something to be said for motivation -- I HAD to know what I had hit!

The one that really got me was one I think I saw here three or four years ago. A guy drilled through a wall and ran a wire, and some time later heard the client complaining about an odd smell. It turned out he had put a 1/2" hole sideways through a plastic sewer pipe going down from an upper toilet...wonder if anything had hung up on the wire....

i had a a guy i was working with fall through the ceiling i mean all the way from the attic to the secound floor and landed on a glass table that colapsed but did not break. one time also i was at a guys house putting in an alarm. he made home made wine... he made me and my partner lunch.. ...we had wine... drinking and d'versa bits are a bad combination. i drilled rite through the roof and we were laughing so hard we could barley get up the ladder to fix the roof( duct seal works nice) we were so drunk we had to leave the van at the guys house and get a ride home.

Someone here mentioned the prewiring that went thru the basement of the guy's house, speaker wires specifically.

Speakers sounded great, but the next Saturday, the homeowner complained that he couldn't cut the grass because the speaker wire ran thru the handle of his lawn mower.

A few years ago an installer and I were retro wiring a house for whole house audio.Attic was very tight. Trying to explain how to drill down in a tight spot from below I hear o sh** and what sounded like water spraying. I yelled up and said that better not be what I think it is. Homeowner right in the next room says same thing. He yells down shut off the water. I say a couple 4 letter words running to main water tap only to come back to a full room water trickles over brand new berber carpet. I get my guy down to help cover room with plastic all the while trying to assure customer that insulation will hold the water and not leak too much, BAM whole ceiling in living room, hall way and some of entry way comes crashing down all with grey blown insulation all over uncovered berber carpet. Losing my cool and not every having anything every happen like this before I say "sh** happens" to customer. DUH they did not take it too well. 38 K to fix everything all this was from bumping the pressurized sprinkler pipe in the attic somehow popping it right off of a joint

This message was edited by Home Kustomizer on 10/31/04 23:41 ET.

OUCH!!!!

That tops me.

My worst was doing a home for one of the managers of Good Guys parents house. I was done in the attic and on the way out when my foot got caught up in the power cord I had hauled up. Didn't make it to the next rafter and fell basically up to armpits through the ceiling. Blown in all over white furniture and unnaturally white carpet (why the hell would you make any room so bloody white?). Clean up wasn't too bad and at least didn't have water to deal with. Best of all we did the pathcwork which cost us time but saved on-hand cash.

Luckily (knock on wood) this remains as the only ceiling I've ever fallen through or even dented.

and I thought my near death ceiling incident was painful!!
I have to vote this one is the worst-to-post yet.