new construction job, I was drilling a bottom plate into the basement to run a cat5 cable. Something didn't feel quite right, but didn't think much about it at the time. I still a scrap piece of romex in to the hole and locate them later. later came and i couldn't find the romex marker. sure enough, drilled into the drain pipe and sure enough, plumber was to have an inspection tomorrow and was pressure testing. but to my defense, he had his drain pipe almost touching the subfloor.

"I still a scrap of romex in to the hole"?

These things happen. How long has it been since you've heard of some installer running cables through a wall, only to find out that they also went through a pocket door that now won't close?

I've drilled into two water pipes in the last thirty years. The first time I did it, several different trades said "You'd think that would happen real often, but this is the first time I've seen it!"

Radiant heat buried in concrete floors is the worst.

I cannot imagine this happening.

I can however imagine someone retrofitting a speaker and cutting the radiant ceiling heat (wasn't me). A 220v ceiling grid system buried in a plaster ceiling.

No plumbing yet but i did mount a TV bracket right through a pocket door. House was being renovated. Bedroom had an attached bath with a pocket door. There was also an unattached door leaning against the wall. I must have subconsciously assumed that this door was for the bathroom. A few bolts later and i am done...until the client calls me and asks why the pocket door wont slide out.

I used spray foam to fill the hole (hollow door) and bondo to finish it. Luckily the place had just been painted so i had matching paint.

My E1 electrician whom I was apprentice under. Told me a story that he was on the site with the plumber. And the plumber had begun to drill a hole from the inside out. After a few seconds POP sparks and a whole lot of noises and screaming. All the lights flashed and whatever.

My E1 determined the plumber had drilled into the main cable from the meter. So he had to unplug the meter. Oops

KOT

At least you found it now. My boss drilled all the way through and ran cat through a central vac line one time. The house was being insulated with spray foam and the customer wanted to add one more data jack for the office. We ran in, worked around the insulators to get it done. He drilled the floor and pipe, then stuck a glow rod down and pushed through the foam. the guy down below attached the cat and had no idea there was a pipe in the foam. No one found it until the house was finished and the central vac wouldn't get suction.

This is one of my favorite stories, and I can't resist the temptation to tell it...So much so, that it's probably some of your 2nd or 3rd time reading this story. :)

When I was still working for my dad, so i couldn't have been 18 yrs old yet.  We were installing an alarm system in an old plaster house that was fighting us every step of the way.

My partner was drilling, I was tying the lines onto the end of the diversibit from the basement.  He was STRUGGLING to get the keypad drilled into the basement.  I decided to take a smoke break.

Came back in a few minutes later, I see this white stuff all over the kitchen floor? I asked.."What's that?"

He panicked!  Swung open the fridge door.  He was drilling in the wall that backed up to the back of the fridge.

Drilled through the back of the fridge...into the fridge....pierced a full gallon of milk.
I'm laughing now.  Wasn't funny then..

In his defense, the guy name Mike was one of the best guys I've ever seen fish wire.  So, don't feel to bad Chris, it happens to all of us at some point.

Yup. A pipe or two, maybe a roof, possibly missed the difference of a sunken living room and drilled through a baseboard once. Nothing recent, eventually you learn to look twice.

I guess I've been lucky!

I did run into a retro today that could have been a nightmare if I hadn't spent about an hour with a tape measure.

Finished top and bottom.

Right below the chosen location (had to go down) was a pex,vent,and sub panel run.

I was able to dodge everything by about 1/2" after careful planning.

If I would have just drilled down blindly,it wouldn't have been good!

I don’t know how true it is because of nature of it. But a Comcast tech who I worked with was fired. Because when he drilled in the wall, he neglected to check the other side. And drilled right into a cat and killed it, sadly.

Either that cat was deaf, dumb or whatever. But if it wasn’t deaf, then why the heck it didn’t move after hearing a foreign noise is beyond me.

KOT

Seems like a deaf and dumb cat to me, but I guess it could have been curious and trapped behind something when the bit suddenly broke through the wall.

I also had an implausible story related to me by a telephone installer. It seems that a pair of installers measured, calculated, drilled, and drilled, until they had two feet of drill bit into the project and nothing came out -- nothing. Eventually they discovered that they had drilled up, dead center, into a grand piano leg.

Worked for a contractor in 2005 and one day, we got a call to replace some cabling in a remodel. Turns out, the plumber's helper, who seemed like he REALLY liked the smell of PVC cement, used a hole saw to drill for a pipe and ripped up part of a bundle that had been installed previously, which included coax, Cat5e, speaker wire, Lutron and Crestnet cables. This bundle was on the other side of the stud at a corner that hadn't been rocked and if he had bothered to look, he could have moved it out of the way to prevent the damage.

Same guy waltzed into the family room while we were running cables in the exposed ceiling before it had been rocked and our ladders were in the middle of the floor where we were working. He needed to find a fitting, so he proceeded to dump a big box of parts next to one of the ladders. Once he realized that the part wasn't in that box, he dumped the contents of another box onto the floor without picking up the first parts and some of them went directly UNDER one of our ladders. Not having any luck with that box, he dumped a third box and basically covered an 8' circle in the middle of the room, under both of our ladders. He finally found the part he needed, stood up and started to walk away before one of us told him to clean up his mess.

This one time I was doing a retro in a very high end high rise. The owner swore they remembered the walls from when the place was remodeled, and there was absolutely nothing in the way where I needed to drill. I started drilling and hit something. The owner swore up and down nothing was in the way and told me to keep going. So I kept forcing and forcing until BAM a stream of of water shot out and knocked me off the ladder. I hit the water main, flooded the entire city of Seattle, and caused the governor to declare the entire region a state of disaster.

You're Mr Stanley?

Oh, HELL NO! I would never trust a homeowner to tell me that nothing is in the way and I have a scope camera for verifying where I need to drill. That's $65 worth of "I'm not gonna give my insurance a workout".