Do you get tired of seeing perfect finished projects without any sign of mistakes or “unexpected features”?
You won’t find that on this blog – I don’t think I’ve made a single thing in 2,000 posts that has come out absolutely perfect.
Generally I share where I went wrong so that you don’t have to have the same learning curve, and most of my projects are decent.
BUT, there is a whole plethora of projects that seemed like a good idea for blog content – but were so disastrous that I didn’t share a single peek.
Today I’m going to share a few so you can see that I truly am a low-level-estrogen-filled Tim The Toolman. 🤦🏻♀️
I’ll start small… I love cleaning videos. Pressure washing, organizing, cleaning filthy homes and mowing overgrown lawns – all of them speak to my jonesing for a good before and after. With that in mind, I thought I’d try a cleaning tip I’d seen to make your cookie sheets look like new.
Who doesn’t have dirty cookie sheets right?
I took the photos – the before above – and then the during; where I sprayed them down with oven cleaner.
Then covered them in cellophane so that the cleaner would magically remove all of the burnt on stains.
It worked too!
Too well.
When I removed the Saran Wrap and gave the cookie sheet a little scrub – the non-stick coating came off.
Yes, I didn’t pay attention to the fact that the online cleaner that inspired this wasn’t cleaning non-stick cookware.
Technically they are “clean” – but now the cookies stick to them, and they look even worse than before.
FAIL!
How about this brilliant number I decided to try for storing garden tools:
The concept was great – I’d seen something similar in a store display – so I futzed with whatever scrap wood I had in the garage to make two boxes.
A narrow one fitting neatly inside a larger one. Seems okay so far right?
Yes, but the inside one wasn’t a perfect square, so when I drilled holes to tuck broom handles through, I measured from one side, then measured from the wrong/oppposite side on the other. Tough to explain, but you can see below my grid is far from straight.
It’s okay, we can still work with this; just don’t show any photos of the shit-show middle section right?
Well, the boxes weren’t tall enough to keep the garden tools from splaying out everywhere. This meant that the “garden tool caddy” – which is portable btw – ended up taking up more square footage than just piling your garden tools in a garbage can.
What a mess.
FAIL!
This dollar store project can’t fail – the boxes were already built – all I had to do was put a few together and it would make a perfect little tea caddy.
You can picture it right? Adorable little apothecary labels on the front displaying what flavour tea bag was in each drawer. BRILLIANT!
I glued the dollar store containers together so I could store and display a dozen different flavours of tea. I stained it all, every single drawer, and was ready to stock it for photographs.
A better idea would have been to measure the size of average tea bags before bothering with all of that work.
Yes – the little drawers were too small to hold any brand of teabag I had, so they wouldn’t close at all.
So close…. but
FAIL!
One more for you to giggle over… my brilliant idea for a platform for my dog.
My patio floods and with the Spring rain it meant that Bentley was running straight into the house from a mud puddle. I thought if I could build a small platform that would shed water, I could rinse his feet with the hose before letting him in the house.
I ripped down 2×2 pressure treated wood.
Then painstakingly cut a million little cross pieces to create a “grate”.
I built a frame to go around the outside of the mat/platform and sanded it to almost beautiful.
Now if you think about this, you’ll realize that if my patio is flooding, it means that it isn’t level. If it isn’t level, then there isn’t equal support underneath this platform.
It essentially works – except for the fact that the tiny little cross pieces that I’d spent so much time cutting and gluing into place – pop out when you step on it.
In hindsight, half-lap joints would have been a much better option.
But hindsight is often my best view. lol
I have SO MANY projects like this, it’s ridiculous.
What’s worse, is that I know I’ll have so many more fails. 😂
But you don’t learn if you don’t try, and if you don’t laugh, you’d likely cry.
Next time you have a brilliant idea for a project, or want to try something you’ve seen online – GO FOR IT! None of us have our shit completely together, and mistakes make for much funnier memories.
Have a great one!