The moment your heart stops
I'm pretty good at DIY. My wort problem is usually finishing off - you know the scene, you've done 90% of the job in a couple of days and when the room is ready enough to use, u forget about all the little jobs until about six months later when you finally tire of the missus nagging.

Anyway, I'd had to refit some pipes for the bathroom at some point which had meant pulling up the floorboards in the adjacent room. The job was a success and, as we never used that back bedroom, I'd never got round to banging the boards back down properly.

A couple of weeks later and we are going on holiday, to Barbados for two weeks of bliss and sunshine. We were packed ready to go, missus had called a cab and we were just going round making sure the house was all locked up tight.
As we have a couple of cats, my brother was coming later that day to stay and look after them.
Just as the cab pulls up, the missus tells me I need to bang those boards back down in case my brother (tbh an accident prone guy) trips over them. So I grab a hammer and dash upstairs as she lugs her bags outside.
Now the boards where in place already, the nails sticking up out of them waiting to be banged in. Marvelous I thought and gave the first nail a hefty whack.
Soon as the nail went in there was the most awful hissing noise and I could almost feel my heart sink down into my belly. I knew I'd hit a pipe, but now I couldn't get the damn floorboard back up. I ran downstairs, grabbed a chisel which I was able to use to pry the board back up just in time to get a face full of water from the large hole in the pipe.
Fuck.....
remembering an old plumbers trick, I knew if I could find a screw, I could screw it into the hole and stop the tide of water.
I ran back down the stairs, found a screw but no screwdriver. So I'm up there, water spraying all over my face trying to twist this screw into the hole with just my fingers. I manage to get it in and I thought, nice one - job has been jobbed, when the damn thing pinged across the room and water started spraying all over the place again.
Admitting defeat I ran downstairs and did the thing I would have done in the first place - switch of the mains water supply.
Once that was done, I surveyed the damage.... the downstairs ceiling was leaking water all over the place, a lovely brown rusty colour too.
Cabby was beeping his horn outside and if I didn't leave now we would miss our flight.
So, I did what any guy would do at this point, picked up the phone and called the one guy I knew who could sort this for me.
"Dad??" - thankfully mine is a legend and by the time we were ready to board our flight he sent me a message to say he'd sorted the problem.
When we got home we found a new addition to the mantelpiece, the piece of copper pipe had been cut out and mounted onto a block of wood.
(EvilMeister, Mon 7 Apr 2008, 12:00, 3 replies)

For a minute there
i thought you were going to bang the nail into the cat.
(MrTrent cannot think of a clever sig., Mon 7 Apr 2008, 14:45, closed)

i thought the cat was going to get it
Dad's are ace!
(phe, Mon 7 Apr 2008, 16:51, closed)

Haha
Not only did he fix it, he left you a lovely mounted reminder of your folly. Now that is attention to detail!
(Lurkaloid awarded wanking black belt on, Tue 8 Apr 2008, 13:23, closed)