It never rains but it pours - malicious inanimate objects

[SteveW]

I am currently in the middle of re-doing our bathroom. Tomorrow the bath and its waste pipe are due to come out. This morning I was having a shower, only for my wife to shout that water was coming through the ceiling. Normally I'd have stopped showering and investigated, but my current contract is ending and I was due at an interview for another company at 08:00, so had no choice but to finish off.

Got back at lunchtime to find a chunk of the hall ceiling on the floor and chunks of plasterboard falling off every few minutes.

After 18 years in the house, a joint in the middle of the waste pipe that has been there longer than that has slipped off the day before it was due to be ripped out.

I presume it was disturbed by the other work - or maybe it was a pre-emptive strike.

SteveW

[Tim Watts]

On Friday 29 November 2013 23:02 SteveW wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Oh man - what a bitch!

[Tim Lamb]

In message , Tim Watts writes

My mother referred to this phenomena as *the animosity of inanimate objects*

[stuart noble]

Sounds like it had always been an acccident waiting to happen due to the incompetence of a human. I'm with the inanimate objects on this one

[Brian Gaff]

And the orrible smell of wet plasterboard lasts for months... I had this with a tap in the loft that a plumber turned off when changing the cylinder, and obviously it had dripped for a month or so slowly soaking into the bedroom ceiling until one day, flump, that is the sound it made as it kind of came down....

Brian

[SteveW]

I've found a few booby traps over the years.

This one is where they have run the waste from the bath to outside, but tee-d in a connection from the washbasin - where the push-fit tee was hanging from the bottom of a 45° pipe, with no other support for the tee or the pipe! Of course all this was hidden under the floor, under the bath.

A previous one, discovered when there was some work on the water mains and some grit stuck the ball-c*ck slightly open, was that when fitting the overflow to the header tank, they'd changed their minds after drilling a small hole through the tank (looks like they'd used a high speed wood drill, but stopped when only the tip had gone through) - of course they'd not sealed off the hole and then had fitted the overflow on the other side and three inches higher! I found that one, when getting up at 04:00 for a business trip, I squelched across the landing.

I also found the obligatory nail through the lead gas pipe and another gas pipe turning through 180° and almost flat at the top of the curve.

SteveW

[stuart noble]

The joys of the property bubble! I don't know how the buggers sleep at night. My son's electrician drilled through the gas pipe last week, and missed the mains water supply by half an inch. Neither was anywhere near where you'd expect them to be. Needless to say the cables were running diagonally across the kitchen wall, and all this behind a posh Smeg cooker.

[fred]

Smeg ? Posh? Think not. SWMBO had Smeg dishwasher and larder fridge fitted a few years back. Overpriced rubbish, even though I got it wholesale. Am no w getting ear bent for Miele