My wife and I bought a house with two GIANT trees in the backyard. At least sixty feet tall, four feet across. They were probably planted when the house was built in '72.

One month in, one of them dies. It cost $2,700 to remove it and leave the stump.

Then in March this year the OTHER ONE FUCKING DIES TOO. We went ahead and had the stumps ground this time. $4,400.

I spent $7,100 to have a backyard with 0 trees and 2 mounds where I would rather have trees. Fucking NOTHING to show for all that money. Those trees were gorgeous. I was pretty devastated when we had to have the second one cut down.

Apart from the trees, we have had:

• A 50 year old toilet flush valve break ($35 plus the time it took me to repair the toilet because I do not want to figure out how to get rid of an old toilet);
• The garbage disposal fail ($300 for a new disposal; $450 for the plumber because I got in over my head);
• The gas valve on the heater break ($840 plus a weekend of it being 45° in my house before anyone in town could come with the part)
• A garage door that hangs up as it closes. I'm gonna ignore that one for as long as I can and just pull it down while it closes for now. Maybe I'll get the hardware to convert it to a manual door while I'm young enough to pull it up and down.

I'd still rather own, but man, the cons go hard.

The trick is to bring in whatever busted piece you have and find the exact match. Nobody's gonna think you're shoplifting rusted garbage and usually you can knock out your purchase in just one trip.

If your project/fix is too complicated to bring in the busted piece, may God have mercy on your soul.

It's always the plumbing that makes for the late night trips too. Missing a piece of wood or something electrical, and it's fine. You can fix it tomorrow. But busted a pipe and have water cut off to the house until it's fixed? That's when you make a late night run to wherever is still open.

Ah, I remember getting the stairs redone. They had 1990s vinyl on them, and we wanted non- slip carpet. I was smart enough not to do the carpeting myself, but surely I could strip it?

Turns out the vinyl was attached with pure fucking magic, and the nothing short of xenomorph blood was getting that shit off, apart from hard labour. So after 2 days of violence, I find out that they can't actually glue carpet to paint. They used to be able to, but the modern glue puts not killing the user over being convenient for me, which is fair. This wasn't true for the previous glue, which I had to burn and scrape off.

Unfortunately, unlike the vinyl, the paint too was very high quality. And thick enough to serve as a a staircase by itself, so after using some expensive goopy enzymatic paint stripper, and some good old fashioned harsh chemicals, I ended up sanding away the remaining paint over the next week.

It's been two years, and I think I finally vacuumed up the last dust.

Never again.

As a European:

Struggle to find a craftsman to do any small work.

Work really needs to get done.

Go online, find how it is done.

Go to some hardware store and buy everything and a couple of extras, just for good measure.

Start the work.

Break or destroy whatever the cause of the problem.

Realize the original work was already badly done, is too old to be safe or was half assed together by some lazy person.

Go back online, find modern solution.

Go back to store, buy extra materials.

Break things even more.

Replace bad original work with modern solution, creating in the meanwhile a solution to conected bad work you can't solve to the work you've done.

It works and it is safe.

Eventually, one of the crafts worker calls back.

Sees the work you have done: "Why did you bother doing all of that? You spent too much money."

Describes shoddy solution, like what was before the damage you solved by yourself.

"Fuck my luck."

End note: I faced this when fixing a sewers issue and a renewal of an electrical circuit.

No project is complete without at least two trips to the hardware store.

I was almost finished redoing a floor when one of the planks kicked back in the table saw and hit me in the arm. I didn't think anything of it, and then realized the threshold I bought wouldn't work.

So there I was, in Home Depot at 8:58pm, walking back to the flooring section when I realize that I've been dripping blood on the floor from a cut in my arm the entire time.

The guy on the right is carefree and full of joy compared to a guy who walks to the auto-parts store.

Going to home depot at 9p to get one more of a simple washer or nail that you could have gotten on any of the 3 previous trips that day to finish fixing whatever broke in the middle of the night is what I call the adult walk of shame

Going back 3 fucking times for the right part or to buy a tool you know you already own but you can't find right now is a whole level of hell that we sometimes pay people thousands of dollars to help us avoid

I’m in both of these pictures.

Mercifully for us, there's a Menards right outside our subdivision. A perfect location when you're a homeowner.

Isn't it wonderful?

That's me, but with my 3d printer.

Ah, that Saturday evening at our old house when we came back from the movies at 23h, brushed our teeth and the the faucet in the master bathroom broke and water kept running. Oh, the great many Sundays we spent at Leroy Merlin and at furniture stores to find a cabinet to put under the new sink after we had to redo the whole plumbing.

And the previous owners of our current house had a thing for shitty electrical wiring. They did a lot of stupid things and we keep fixing their mess as we find them. There’s a special place in hell for those DIYers.