30 DIY Fails That Belong In The DIWhy Hall Of Fame
I’ve done enough projects around the house to know that confidence usually arrives several hours before competence.
At first, everything seems easy. You watched endless YouTube tutorials, bought a tool you’ll never use again, and successfully removed the first screw. Why would you pay a professional when you’re clearly a natural?
Then you hit a pipe and make your fourth trip to Home Depot wearing the same increasingly dusty outfit.
The people behind these funny DIY fails didn’t necessarily lack creativity. If anything, creativity may have been the problem. These projects feature strange repairs, questionable renovations, and homemade inventions that technically accomplish something, although nobody is entirely sure what.
Welcome to the DIWhy Hall of Fame, where every project begins with “I have an idea” and ends with the house being worth slightly less.
1. “(Machine not operational) $100”
2. “Urinal/toilet mod in a Rotterdam Chinese restaurant. The restaurant itself is lovely and the food is incredible! There’a hole in the lid where it attaches to the urinal.”
3. “This bad boy is straight piped”
4. “A treasure chest barbecue…”
“From the professional moron who brought you the Cat’s Crows Nest, the Pirate Ship Longboard and the Craftlock™… I now bring you the ultimate treasure – a treasure chest that opens to reveal a barbecue!
Because when I build stupid things, I do them as properly as possible – the Barbecue has an air gap of at least 3cm all the way round, and the chest itself is lined with a welding blanket rated to 1,100°c, so the big hot metal thing won’t set fire to the wooden box it’s in.
Slats are not airtight in the lid of the chest, and there is a whopping great ventilation hole at the back, so the whole thing is safe to use – and close while cooking.
Chains hold the lid up, and a separate chain also lifts the lid of the barbecue as you lift the chest lid.
Let hope I don’t burn the treasure…
EDIT: As a few of you have pointed out, yes, it’s short. I plan to put it on a low table to actually cook on. But for photographical reasons, it looks better on the (yes, flammable) decking.”
5. “Load bearing tubs are in.”
6. “Too cheap to fix pool but also too cheap to remove it”
“Why accidentally fall into a pool of water when you can fall into a pit filled with furniture and other hard things?”
7. “If it fits, Isits.”
8. “This ‘abstract’ billiards table at an Airbnb I was at. As it also turns out, thick globs of hideous paint don’t allow for very smooth table roll.”
9. “Cooks belong in the heart of the kitchen”
“Someone didn’t think they needed a designer.”
10. “Seen in the wild”
11. “I woodn’t recommend this”
12. “Customer replaced their passenger seat with a shopping cart”
13. “Moss in your bathroom…”
“Saw this on Instagram and it didn’t seem to be an old April Fool’s. Someone has spent a long time treating moss and then sticking it around the edges of their bathroom tiles. This is the final product.”
14. “Normally I like modern furnishings, I don’t like this though….”
15. “Wheelchair made back in highschool with a bike and a shopping cart. It worked but wasn’t comfy…and man did it burn your hands”
16. “You can’t make this up!”
17. “Drive in some else’s tires for a day”
18. “This bathroom floor in a house I found on Zillow. I can’t decide if I love it or hate it.”
19. “Saw this house for rent on Marketplace— pretty sure the death pit isn’t up to code”
20. “Just what the F”
21. “Angles I never knew I didn’t want to see”
22. “Phil Swift here, introducing Mighty Chair® the revolutionary tool that does it all!”
23. “I have no words for this atrocity of a mirror”
24. “When one car door handle just isn’t enough…”
25. “Kind of speaks for itself. Motley Crue fan art for sale.”
26. “2 year old house that I am redoing the roof top deck for”
“This place is a nightmare. It has been sitting for 2 years after the builder lost his contractor built it himself and can’t get it approved to sell. We found 2 outlets that were buried behind the drywall”
27. “Don’t really know if it fits here but my mom turned our broken kettle into a planter”
28. “I don’t hate it … but for $40?”
29. “Shouldn’t be any issue here…”
30. “When you don’t know plumbing, just pour the floor around it ..?”
