Hello everyone,

My name's Avril, I have a website called Home Decor HQ and I'm researching ideas for an article called 'home improvement disasters'. We've all seen the pictures in the house and garden magazines of stunning makeovers, but as some of you might know from experience, sometimes decorating doesn�t always go right! How many of you have started a decorating project with great intentions, only for it to go completely pair shaped somewhere along the way? So, if you�ve committed any home decorating sins, and you don�t mind sharing the stories, please let me know. It might make you feel a little better.

I completely blew up my house once* and I was only trying to strip a bit of wallpaper off.

* it's true

Well, I don't know if mine qualifies for a disaster...We moved in 3 yrs ago come thanksgiving and two of the rooms were horrible. Our house had been redone (it will be 100 yrs old next yr) except for these two rooms and one of the rooms was to be a guest bedroom. I started working on that one as it was mostly empty except for the bed. I repainted the walls and baseboards (it was all painted) and the wood floors had been painted and so after all the painting was done it looked really nice. For some reason I decided to see what the floors looked like under all that paint. So I started striping paint off my wood floors (I would suggest getting a heat gun...we tried scraping, chemical striping and then the heat gun which really sped up the process) and that led to striping the paint off the baseboards which lead to striping paint off the door which lead to striping paint off the door frame. So today I have only got the door frame striped down to bare wood and have one side of the door striped down to bare wood. One of these days it will look so nice...but it will be a long journey!

That would be an interesting story to include the article. Out of curiosity, how exactly did you manage to blow up your house?

So conniem,

Has it become one of those never ending projects?

My never-ending project is the babies room. She inherited her brother's old room. Originally, I'd painted murals on the wall of Noah's Ark and the animals. As my son grew older, we changed to rocket ships/stars and added a wide paper border on 3 walls. He peeled off part of the border. So now the room she's in is part Noah's Ark, part rocket ships/stars. With fish curtains (we want to eventually do an ocean theme in there--when I have time) and a fish mobile. Quite the mixed up mess. Luckily, she's still too young to really pay much attention to the decor.

It involved several gas canisters and a badly positioned candle.

Actually the roof fell off once at another property I was 'doing up'. I'd gone up onto the roof (the reason why escapes me now) and then it fell off*

* this is utterly and completely true

Yes it has! I have finally managed to finish one of my many projects! Hubby pleads for me to finish something before I start something new. I managed to get windows from a guy here in town (these windows are the original to his house built in the early 20's) and I removed the glass from one of them to replace a window that was cracked. It looks great! Right now the glazing is still trying to dry so I haven't gotten the window back in yet. My top windows are divided into 3 panes and there are about 5 of those that are cracked. My problem is I can't get the top window out and I am really hesitant to take this project on with winter approaching. There is a strip of wood that holds the top window in and I am pretty sure to get the window out I will have to break that strip (the paint build up is horrible and scoring with a razor blade didn't help any) so I am going to check into getting new strips to replace the old ones before I break anything.

There is one huge window that is divided into 3 parts and I had an idea to use this for a frame and blow up old photos of the house for one of the divisions and then new photos of the house and then photos of the previous owners (one of the grandaughters sent me lots of photos to copy) and their buisness here in town. My favorite photo is of their boys. They are all young and have sailor outfits on except for the baby and it looks like he is wearing a christening gown. I have the perfect spot for this at the top of my stairwell.

It's embarrassing <img src="/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" /> to admit for us, but even the professionals have some of those disaster stories.

I replaced the ceiling in the hallway a few months ago, it looked lovely, even the plastering got much better than I expected.

I'm in the home building business, specialized in plumbing, electrics, heating and air con, plastering is something I've never been good at and I can only consider myself a DIYer for that job (I'd never sell my services as a plasterer).

Anyway back to the disaster, just after a few weeks of enjoying my lovely new ceiling, I was running the bath to enjoy a, well-deserved, relaxing bath after a hard days work. While the bath was being filled I got sucked checking some emails ... guess what ... Did you say flood? You are right.

Before I realized the bathroom was flooded and my new ceiling was all dripping water all the way to the hallway (the bathroom is on top of the hall). It wasn't terribly bad it only needed a new coat of paint but ... not very good for a Pro, is it?

Lesson to be learn : Don�t try to do 2 things at the time, none will be done properly.

Please don�t tell my customers ;-) (just joking)