PSA: That one Thursday last month nearly cost me a whole job

I had a day last month that started great and then went totally sideways. I was working on a basement remodel in a house near Detroit, and the first three sheets went up perfect. No stud issues, no weird corners. Then around 2 PM, I hit a pipe with a screw and flooded the laundry room. Took me 30 minutes just to find the shutoff valve. The homeowner was watching me from the stairs, real quiet. I ended up having to cut out a 4x4 section of wet drywall and patch it the next day. Plus I had to pay for a plumber to check the pipe, which was $150 I wasn't planning on. Has anyone else run into a pipe that wasn't marked right on the blueprints?

3 comments

3 Comments

joel_clark371mo ago

A flooded laundry room for a missed pipe? Dude that's a rough day but a $150 fix is pretty light for that kind of mistake. Are we really calling that a near job-loser though?

piper7791mo ago

Blame the blueprints all you want but honestly that's on you for not checking for pipes before sending screws into a ceiling. Tbh blueprints are just rough guides in old houses like that near Detroit. You should have listened for the homeowner being quiet too that was probably your clue something was off. Ngl you got off cheap with only $150 and a patch job.

-1

wesley_jones1mo ago

Used to be on the other side of this argument, thought blueprints were basically the law. But after seeing enough old houses around here with wiring running through walls that should be empty, I get it. Those plans are more like suggestions than guarantees, especially in a city with a hundred years of patchwork renovations. You can blame the guy all you want but he's not the one who drew up the original sketch in 1923. And that quiet homeowner thing is real, had a client go totally silent once and I knew right then I was about to find something nasty. He did get off light, that's for sure.