15+ Costly Remodeling Errors People Can’t Afford to Ignore

Renovating your home sounds like a dream come true…until you discover that you measured the kitchen island wrong, and now it looks like an aircraft carrier in the middle of the living room. Yes, renovating can be an emotional roller coaster and, in some cases, financial ruin. So you don’t end up crying on the newly laid floor (which, surprise, wasn’t waterproof), we’ve compiled some stories of people who spent a fortune on mistakes they wish they had avoided. Here are some of the most expensive, unusual, and painfully funny renovation anecdotes.

“Thought I’d stop the squeaky floorboards in the bedroom, didn’t think there was anything under the floor.”

“Got the screws out and boom, right through the water pipe! A quick job turned into a lot of trouble!”

• My first tiling mistake was using a cheap standard tile for the backsplash. The tan color I chose was too pink. I knew it, but I didn’t want to spend more. Big mistake.
  The second tiling mistake was trying to lay penny tiles myself. I used a dark grout and any misalignment was immediately visible. I ended up having it professionally repainted in white. @harmlessgrey / Reddit
• There was a leak from my upstairs bathroom into the kitchen directly below. Every time someone had a shower, water would slowly drip into the kitchen. I thought there was a leak somewhere in the drain pipe and I took the kitchen ceiling down to look for it. And this was an old house, so there was this cement type of plaster with metal latticework through it on top of wooden slats.
  It took forever to expose the drain pipe… only to find out that the little knob thing on the shower faucet that you pull up to turn on the shower was broken, and I just had to replace that. It cost me $7. Then I had to completely replace my kitchen ceiling. @-Words-Words-Words- / Reddit
• I thought my husband and I could do everything ourselves instead of hiring a professional. We are quite capable, but we both work full-time and a project that should have taken a weekend has stretched out over months. I’d still do some of it myself, as we enjoy the challenge, but I regret not getting some things done by a professional. @itsmeD1981 / Reddit

“We have just finished a major house renovation. The house is completely plastered, and the floors are destroyed.”

“The floors are LVF (luxury vinyl flooring). This is the 4th time the floors have been mopped, and they still dry dusty and dirty.”

• We wanted to make our living room feel bigger, so during renovations, we knocked down a wall. The contractor assured us it wasn’t load-bearing and said it’d be fine, so we didn’t think twice. But a few days later, strange things started happening.
  Doors that once closed smoothly jammed out of nowhere. Cabinets wouldn’t stay shut. Then, one morning, I got stuck in the bathroom—the door refused to open. I laughed it off at first, but the next day, we heard a loud creak.
  And a structural engineer confirmed our worst fear: the wall we removed was holding up the second floor. Without it, the house was slowly shifting under its own weight. The fix? Thousands of dollars and weeks of emergency stabilization.
• I spent about 5 grand on marble in my bathroom renovation. It looks beautiful, but it was all scratched before the bathroom was even finished. Even my shampoo bottle is scratching it. I really should have gone with granite like I did in the kitchen, over a year and it’s still flawless. @Dopplegangr1 / Reddit
• Breaking through the plaster in our 100-year-old Craftsman house to restore the original fireplace, which had been plastered over. Slowly growing horror as we realized that the original fireplace was far, far beyond our ability to restore — no flue, no chimney liner, and the original face wasn’t hidden behind the plaster, it had been completely removed prior to the plastering. We now have a well-plastered hole in one wall, hidden by a very pretty tapestry and a bookcase, but we will have to deal with that eventually. @erst77 / Reddit

“We recently bought a century-old house and have been slowly renovating it, room by room. The last room is the most difficult.”

“It had very uneven walls, huge and ugly skirting boards that had been repainted at least 10 times without removing any of the layers. The skirting board also had a lot of cracks, so we could not save it. And it had 2 types of wallpaper + borders in the middle.
The top wallpaper was an old vinyl type that was very difficult to remove, the bottom part was a regular ‘paper’ that came off easily. It looked kind of good, but the previous owners didn’t fix the walls, and instead of adding wallpaper glue when pieces came off, they added superglue that turned yellow underneath the paper. It looked like someone had peed on the walls in 5 different places.
The room would also belong to a young teenager who wanted to paint it blue. So we decided to remove the wallpaper. And immediately regretted it. Underneath were the broken plaster walls, which collapsed immediately.”

• I had a main line blockage (but didn’t know it). I couldn’t get a line through the toilet to flush out the blockage that seemed to be affecting that particular toilet. I flushed the other toilet, and it worked (but it was at a slightly higher level). So I pulled the toilet. And then…the disaster.
  Dirty water everywhere, pouring up from the flange. The wax seal came apart when I pulled the toilet, and it must have taken gallons to get it plugged. I had to cut six inches out of my drywall in the whole bathroom and throw away all the trim. @Unknown / Reddit
• Marble kitchen worktops. Always loved them, always wanted them. Finally got around to redoing my kitchen and stuck to my guns. Several installers said it was not recommended for kitchens. I didn’t care. I wanted them.
  They made me sign a waiver saying they didn’t recommend it. I paid so much for them…. Although they were beautiful for the first few months, they started to stain.
  The oil splatters from the cooker don’t wash out easily. They chip. Citrus stains take the shine off. Big regret. They look so weathered now. They’re only 5 years old. @No-Cryptographer-741 / Reddit

“We recently had a so-called specialist flooring contractor come in to install 20mm engineered oak herringbone throughout the upstairs of our house.”

“We made the cardinal mistake of going on holiday and leaving him alone in the house to minimize the disruption to us. We were told that the floor needed to be level.
Instead of correcting each room by removing the chipboard subfloor and leveling the joists, he decided to add almost 1100kg (44 bags) of self-leveling compound to bring all the rooms to the same level. This resulted in an unacceptable step of 40mm in each bathroom and a further 40mm on the top step of the staircase (taking it over the 210mm building regulations limit).
On top of this, it looks like he ran out of glue during the job, or the glue went off too quickly, as there are areas of the floor that are lifting. Now we have 40m2 of potentially ruined floor.”

• The renovators I ended up hiring gave me a fake address, had no funds of their own, they had permits but no assets to speak of and no skin in the game, so when they screwed up, and I sued them, I had no hope of ever collecting on a judgment. I lost tens of thousands of dollars.
  I’m wealthy, but I don’t have that kind of money to lose. It took a long time to recover, and that’s not counting the time it took to find a contractor willing to finish the project (about 6 months, as no one wanted to touch it). @phoenixmatrix / Reddit
• I live in an old Victorian farmhouse. I’ve stripped all the doors and refinished all the floors myself (probably a good two weeks’ work), but was persuaded by the wife to stain everything a ’dark walnut’ color before refinishing. It looks nice, objectively, but the dark wood shows scratches and wear very easily, and I honestly just think dark stained wood floors are a bit of a Pinterest fad.
  I really, REALLY wish I’d left all the pine natural and finished it with something that would have made it amber and just be itself. To go back now would take weeks, and I’ll probably never do it. @Unknown / Reddit

• We hired a qualified electrician to rewire the whole house. Halfway through the project, the manager turned up at my door (unannounced) to collect part payment. They had at least one more full day’s work to do, and I had already paid 5k+ at that point. When I spoke to him about a week later and told him how unprofessional his collection methods were, he got angry and said he wouldn’t finish the job.
  Since then, I have redecorated the rest of the house and found more and more mistakes in their work. Today I tripped the kitchen sockets by running the rice cooker and deep fryer at the same time, and when I went to turn them back on I smelt burning plastic. I took the panel cover off and did more of an inspection than I’ve ever done before and found it to be quite unsafe.
  2 wires were completely fried, and the adjacent wires were burning. The whole point of hiring them was to make this old 1960s farmhouse safer than it was. They basically ignored the safety concerns and proceeded to run the rough in lines and replace some short old runs. @ItAintL*** / Reddit
• My brother tried to fix a leaking hose bib himself to save money. He used the wrong glue to join the CPVC. His first floor flooded overnight while he slept. @RealMacMittens / Reddit
• We spent a fortune replacing our outdated flooring with beautiful hardwood. It was our biggest renovation expense, but we figured it was worth it. A week after installation, we noticed something weird. The planks seemed to be… shifting.
  At first, we thought we were imagining it, but then one day, a whole row had slid an inch out of place. Turns out, our contractor forgot to leave an expansion gap. As the wood adjusted to temperature changes, it started pushing against itself, causing the planks to move. The only fix? Rip it all out and start over.

At the end of the day, the best reform is one that leaves you with neither savings nor dignity. So before you start the demolition, learn from these stories and make sure your next big idea doesn’t end up in a “disastrous reform” Reddit thread. And if you want to see more examples of what not to do, check out this article. Remodelling with your head and no regrets!