What's the most damage a single action has done to your home?

the old owners of my home neglected to get the the eves-troughs fixed (they were shitty landlords), it cost me about 10K for the replacement which will last 20+yrs. the leaking water ruined every window frame in the house, and cost us about 50K to repair that damage. replacing those windows also like halved our heating/cooling bills (and made the upper floors comfortable to exist in). Luckily we got a nice interest free government loan because it's greenifying our home.

they had all kinds of other landlord specials, like pouring concrete (not levelled right) down the basement drain and making the stairs to the attic out of plywood. fuck landlords. Did I mention they made over 400k on the appreciation of the house and were probably making 2-3K more per month than their mortgage from renting.

Her name was Jessica.

My husbands affair! Hahaha…ahhh…

hurricane. home became homen't

Lightning struck my late father's homemade CB radio antenna back in the early 90's. It made the antenna explode, and fried around 3/4 of every electronic device in the house ☹️

Thankfully the refrigerator survived at least, and of course thankfully the house didn't burn down.

If he had only properly grounded his antenna and CB radio...

60 year old house. They used to use this stuff called "no corrode" pipe for sewage. It was made of tar and straw and had around a 60 year service life. Mine finally collapsed, backed up and caused $30k of damage to my basement + 25k cost to dig up my back yard to replace it.

Shortly after we moved in, someone was taking a shower in our second-floor bathroom, the bottom of the shower cracked, and they didn't notice. End result was an entire shower's worth of water draining out the bottom of the shower, flowing about 10 feet inside the first-floor ceiling, draining down through the hole from a light fixture, across the kitchen floor, down through the kitchen floor into the basement ceiling, soaking into a bunch of exposed insulation, and making that insulation collapse onto the (concrete) basement floor.

My Dad fell down the stairs naked and landed in my mom's sisters special spot.

I used a convection toaster oven in the kitchen.

That fried the circuits of 1/3 of the house. Some amateur electrician tied in several new circuits into the same kitchen breaker. They used undergauged wire on top of it.

Cost us $6k to fix and that was a hell of a deal from some Covid - unemployed union electricians. They put in 3 breakers where there was one before. The electrician had a hell of a time tracking where all the lines came from. That included a 3ft fireball shooter ng out of the wall because a line was love when it shouldn't have been.

My daughter didn’t check the toilet after she flushed it right before bed. It was in a back bedroom that nobody else really goes to. It ended up flooding overnight and I didn’t discover it til the next morning, when I found my kitchen flooding from the ceiling. It apparently wasn’t from poop though as I didn’t see any fecal matter around (unless it was in the ceiling that got torn out). Whole kitchen ceiling got torn out, along with the floor of the bathroom. Not a huge amount of damage, but the most the house has sustained… so far.

My sister burned her apartment down by leaving a portable battery bank plugged in and charging. Luckily the reason she wasn't home at the time of the fire was because she was bringing the cat to a cat sitter, or else the cat would've been cooked too.

Be careful with portable battery banks folks! Don't leave them unattended!

Getting cats. Well, not the home itself, but everything in it.

My nephew (it was my own damn fault for leaving the equipment set up because I was halfway done with a project) siphoned 55 gallons of water from an aquarium I was building into the carpet.

And that's the story of how I learned to do flooring and replaced the carpet in my home office with linoleum so that the next time something like that happens it's non issue.

Trusting the home inspector that said the roof wouldn't need to be replaced for at least another couple years.

Not my current house but previous one. 15 days before we gave over possession, there must have been a loud bang or something that scared the dog about 15 minutes before I woke up, he climbed onto the toilet and turned on the bidet and flooded the lower floor.

That was damn expensive to fix properly for the next people.

Not damage but the most entertaining, terrifying, and educational event - I made a mango soda, fermented it with some ginger beer and it was lazy getting fizzy so I bottled, refrigerated and promptly forgot about it. Found it a few weeks later and figured since it wasn't fizzy ok to open.

Mango soda on the floor, walls, ceiling of three adjacent rooms. It exploded up but did not break the glass bottle. The second one I opened outside facing away from me and got to taste the small amount that remained in the bottle - probably the best drink I have ever made, all lost due to my negligence.

Oak tree. Destroys slabs like no other.

Not immediately throwing my clothes in a wash and showering when I got home like usual. That small mistake resulted in a months long battle with bedbugs. Never again.

Frozen pipe burst over my bedroom as a kid. I don't even know how much it cost to repair and to replace everything that was ruined.

The ceiling caving over the dining room was pretty bad. Right below my childhood bedroom too, so I had nightmares for a while.

Nothing too wild happened at my current place besides a pipe leaking while I was away for work. Landlord fixed the pipe but didn't clean up the water. Came home after a month to the saddest kitchen you ever saw

Tesla hired the lowest bidder from a different county to do my roof for $8k

3 years later I’ve got a few quotes all over $20k each to redo their bad work and $8k in repairs. They are evaluating their options.