What's YOUR biggest mess??

[H2ODude]

Wasn't my worst, but just finished making some sandwiches for a picnic for DW and me. Managed to knock over the full glass olive oil dispenser which broke on the corner of the island (granite), discharging about 10 oz of EVOO all over, including one of the dogs! Nothing like paper toweling up EVOO with shards of glass in it, then having to bathe the poor dog, who was like, "What'd I do?"

Likely worst but similar was when I was still changing the oil in our cars. You probably know what comes next. Forgot to put the plug in the pan and did not realize until I pulled out of the garage that I had 5 qts of oil on the floor. Probably easier than cleaning it up from a broom finished concrete driveway.

OK, who else? I wanna hear about the 5 gallon container of paint that got kicked over on the carpet!

 

[EastWest Gal]

Painting the picket fence years ago, the 5 gallon bucet of paint tipped onto the lawn. We were actually able to rescue much of the paint by scooping it with cool whip tub that was empty and clean and dump it into an empty five gallon bucket. A two four square patch of lawn died. Oh well.

When we bought our first townhouse we hired a painter to paint our son's room. (I was pregnant). He spilled some paint on the carpet and didn't tell us. We never hired a "professional" painter again.

Paint makes a godawful mess!


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[steelyman]

My parents were going to an Indiana B&B one time. They wanted me to paint ceilings and look after the dog. My dad said, "buy him a case of beer, he'll be fine".

So I did it, had a stepladder and a roller extension and beer. And a Cubs game on the TV, exciting!

At one point, there was a home run and I fell off the ladder and landed smack into the paint pail, which had another roller with an extension that I landed on, swung up and whacked me in the forehead.

The dog watched this and had this look like, "Thank God we canines don't do this".

 

[TallTim]

Not us, but our former neighbors ... and some time ago.

Mom puts the triplet (*yes triplet*) 2 or 3 YO boys down for their daily afternoon nap, and after about an hour becomes a bit curious as none of them has re-appeared and the room is VERY quiet.

Mom goes upstairs and into room to find her charges have gotten into the daiper changing station and have opened up the baby oil, lanolin lotion and Desitin ointment and spread same all over the walls, ceiling and into the carpet. (!!)

She ended up ripping up the carpet (saturated with baby oil) and repainting all the walls (smeared with oil and creams) and swore up and down until the day they sold the house and moved (boys were in high school at that point) that she could STILL smell the baby oil in that room of the house (and the room below, via the floor).

 

[Sarah in SC]

A somewhat drunken friend thought he'd "help" lift the turkey out of the big fryer. Thankfully only spilled 5 gallons of boiling hot oil on the grass instead of himself.
The greasy spot never went away, and all the grass died. For years.

 

[athena53]

Well, we just walked through our house with a realtor to discuss what needed to be done to prepare it for putting it on the market next Spring and DH's workroom is AWFUL- dusty, spider webs and egg cases, old half-empty paint cans and pieces of lumber... that's going to take a lot of work, especially since some items can be recycled and paint that's still liquid can't be thrown out in the trash.

My biggest mess wasn't physical. Just after I retired I got not one but TWO nasty notes from the tax authorities. I've been doing my/our taxes with the aid of software since the 1980s. This year State A (where we live) sent us a bill for over $9K. I'd been too cheap to download State A software; had downloaded State B (where I worked) and figured I'd do State A in Excel. First, I screwed up and missed a few "gotchas" (DH's SS is taxable by the state because of our income level). Then, because I forgot to include a copy of the State B return, they simply ignored the credit for taxes paid to State B. I gave in and found a CPA and he straightened it all out; looks like State A owes us $72.

I also got a note from the Feds; they misinterpreted a form from a rollover and counted $16K as taxable because the "Taxable amount" box in the form was left blank instead of filled in as zero. For some reason, the download of our investment results from the brokerage was messed up; never had that happen before- and did not agree with the actual statements. The investment results on the taxes, of course, were understated. I estimate we owed about $6K, sent it to them with a note explaining the one item they got wrong and agreeing with the rest. They acknowledged it but I'm still waiting to get a note on whether $6K was too much or too little.

And yes, I'll probably have the CPA do our taxes for 2014. And I know that once the state issue is settled that could affect Federal, and vice versa.

 

[frayne]

I'm taking the fifth.

 

[sengsational]

Dropped a 1.5 gallon bottle (mini-keg) of beer. It exploded.

The bottle was PET (plastic), and normally it might have bounced, but I had it overpressurized with CO2 in order to force carbonate the beer. The beer was cold and the bottle had condensation on the outside, so slipped out of my hands while shaking the CO2 into solution. Very, very sad. Not only the clean-up (in the finished basement's bathroom and out into the adjacent room), but that beer was a really good one, and was lost.

I picked-up a remaining fraction of the bottle, tipped it into a glass, and at least had one beer off of that mini-keg.

 

[W2R]

I don't know about my BIGGEST mess, but yesterday I spilled an entire box of raw oatmeal on the carpet in my den. Not just part of the box, no... the entire box and it was full. It's too complicated to explain how such a thing could happen, but it did. I was distracted.

Anyway, what an awful mess that was to clean up.

 

[Sue J]

Mine was a spilling a 2 quart container of apple juice off the counter when my kids were little. Luckily, it was in a plastic pitcher, not a glass container. Apple juice is the world's stickiest substance!

(Warning, grossness ahead)
A close 2nd to that mess was when my son wasn't looking all that good while eating lunch. I picked him up and he proceeded to barf all over himself and me, including down the inside of my shirt. There was no wiping that would take care of this, I took both of us right to the tub.

 

[karluk]

It hardly seems like the crowning achievement of a lifetime of klutzy behavior, but last winter I tried to do some emergency maintenance on my snowblower without draining the gas tank first, and discovered by practical experience that the gas tanks on those contraptions do indeed leak if machine is not upright. I ended up with the whole gas tank spilled on my garage floor.

I'll have to think about it. I'm sure I can come up with an even more spectacular mess than that.

 

[scrabbler1]

This is the story about a green shirt I had back in the 1980s and the messes it endured in its last few months.

Back in 1986, after having moved back to my parents' house for a few months, I got my own place and moved out late in the year. While cooking some chicken cutlets, a large cutlet slipped off the fork as I was lowering it into the skillet. It splattered some oil onto a green shirt I was wearing. I was not injured by the hot oil, as the shirt took the brunt of the splatter, leaving a large stain in the front.

I tried washing it a few times but the stain was still visible. I brought it to my parents' house and my mom tried to get it clean but could not. I still wore it around the house but never when I went out. My dad, meanwhile, thought I should just get rid of the shirt because of its ugly oil stain and ribbed me about it for several weeks.

A few months later, in January, my dad's birthday rolled around. Besides the regular gift I got for him, I decided to give him that green shirt, something he always wanted. I wore it under another shirt I was wearing so I literally gave him the shirt off my back for his birthday. He, my mom, and I got a nice laugh from my little show and I handed him the stained, green shirt.

He opened up the back door and threw it outside. It landed on a pile of snow in the backyard. He had his wish, at least for now. A few days later, I was talking to my mom and I asked my dad what he did with the shirt. She told me it was still outside in the snow.

A few months later, during the spring, I was at my paretns' house and my dad was helping me change the oil on my car. I was under the car and I needed a rag. My dad told me to wait, he would get one. I knew what was going to happen and I couldn't do a thing about it. He brought out from the garage my old GREEN shirt for me to use as a rag. I was laughing so hard I nearly banged my head on the car's undercarriage. I had no choice but to use the rag to wipe up some of the mess under the car. Now the shirt had two types of oil stains - cooking and motor - and was totally unwearable ever again. My dad was laughing, too, for he had finally gotten his wish.

 

[FIREd]

When I went to engineering school, I was hazed on the first day - like the rest of the freshman class. I was sprayed with paint and juice from fish that had been left rotting in the sun all summer in a black plastic bag. The dried up paint required a lot of scrubbing to remove, but my bathroom stunk of rotten fish for months afterwards despite my best cleaning efforts.

 

[Amethyst]

I was going to post a photo of my needlework room, but fear it may send the more OCD among us into spazzums.

Amethyst

 

[MooreBonds]

There has to be a bigger mess [-]I've made[/-] that I have personally seen, but the most recent one is when my hand was a little wet and slipper and I dropped a glass bottle of red pepper hot sauce (similar to Frank's brand) on my kitchen floor as I was trying to take it to the fridge.

Glass pick-up wasn't bad, but that pepper sauce went everywhere. And of course, when I was halfway done cleaning it, had 2 co-workers knock on my front door to look at something in my basement I was going to have them do. As I was coming up the basement steps after showing them, the smell of the hot sauce hit me as soon as my head got a few feet above the floor level (basement steps are in the corner of my large open kitchen/family room combo room).

 

[LoneAspen]

Years ago, I used to play a lot of online multiplayer games. Normally, I'm not a very competitive person, but I was when I was online.

One time, I was getting pretty upset about something (forget what, probably my team getting beat pretty bad), so I took my keyboard, picked it up about a foot above the desk, and slammed it down pretty hard.

Unbeknownst to me, a pen had rolled under the keyboard, and when I slammed the keyboard down, it shattered the pen, and blue ink splattered EVERYWHERE. There is way more ink inside a pen that what I would have thought.

Ink was all over the desk, the monitor, my clothes, and worst of all, it went all over the wall and some even dripped on the wooden floor.

That mess took days to clean up, and I ended up having to repaint one wall because I couldn't scrub the ink off completely.

I guess if anybody had seen me do that, they'd think I was a complete lunatic, LOL.

 

[6miths]

My garage and work room are battling it out. Back in the day when I worked at the university and had an office - that would have won. When I moved to private practice, I solved the problem by not having an office space.

 

[SumDay]

When the kids were little, I was sitting on the kitchen floor, reorganizing my Tupperware cabinet. All of it was out on the floor so I could determine what to keep and what to donate. One of the kids came into the kitchen with his sippy cup full of apple juice, and tried to set it on the cabinet, immediately above me. It fell, the lid came off, and all my Tupperware was full of, or had apple juice all over it. Every single piece had to be washed.

I guess if that's my worst mess ever, I'm one lucky duck.

 

[NW-Bound]

The biggest mess in my life must be the two start-up ventures that I got myself involved in. But I do not think that's what the thread is about, so I will stop here.

 

[Keim]

If this was a competition, I could make a strong run at winner. I can relate stories of two VERY different messes.

1. I was helping at a large boy scout camporee. Overnight some pranksters tipped over the port-a-john. I had to clean it up. Thank God I have no sense of smell.

2. I was hired as Executive Director for a local nonprofit. The third in one year. They had just run an event. Rather, it had run them. No fiscal controls in place. They expected several hundred to attend, and no one did. They expected to make $40k. They lost $20k, out of a total yearly budget of $250k. On top of this, the 2008 financial crisis was hitting. Their line of credit was called. I had to staunch the bleeding, and try to fill the $60k gap. Not my mess, but clean up was a bugger.

 

[bjorn2bwild]

A buddy was helping me with some carpentry up in the attic when he lost his balance and fell through the ceiling taking a large chunk of sheetrock and 10" of loose fill insulation with him. Only his pride was injured, but what a mess. The insulation and fine dust covered most of the small living room and about half the kitchen. Took days to rectify that debacle.

 

[Sue J]

Then there was the time that DH was sanding plaster patches in our 1st floor bathroom. He planned ahead and as he sanded he held the shop vac nozzle just underneath where he was sanding. But the filter thingy on the shop vac exhaust end was not attached properly and all the plaster dust exited the bathroom and was directed to the hallway and right into our bedroom. Everything (floor, bedding, dresser, book shelves, electronics, DHs precious piles of crap) had a layer of plaster dust. Ugh!

 

[Walt34]

I dropped a plastic (thankfully!) container of two quarts of spaghetti sauce on the kitchen floor from shoulder height. That made a pretty good mess and I was surprised at how high the splashed sauce went. I think one kitchen cabinet went unsplashed.

Shortly after we had put together a new corner desk I changed the black ink cartridge in the old printer. It didn't work and I was going through the checklist on that when I noticed black ink creeping out from under the printer. Thankfully we had it contained before it dripped on the carpet and amazingly it all cleaned easily off the desk surface. Oh, and I replaced the printer.

 

[brewer12345]

Many years ago I dropped an empty 7 gallon glass carboy. I have never seen so much broken glass.

When DD2 was maybe 1, we went into her room after naptime to discover she had removed her turd-filled diaper and repainted herself, the crib, the sheets, the nearby wall and even the carpet.

 

[RetireAge50]

Had a gallon of oil based primer attached to the top of an extension ladder. I climbed down to adjust the ladder and the paint can tipped spilling entire contents directly on top my head then running down my face.

With my eyes closed was able to somehow find a can of paint thinner which was used as my shampoo.


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