“Small” items which turned out to be a much bigger pain

[Eric F.]

I am sure everyone has had this problem once or twice (or 100 or 200 times). We look at a rehab and see a couple of things we believe will be simple to fix but turn out to take 10x more time than anticipated and cost much more as well. Hopefully this thread can save a couple of people from getting caught like I did. Please feel free to add examples. I have two.

I bought a rehab that had a dirty skylight cap. We thought we could just replace the plastic bubble on the skylight. 8 bolts, a new bubble, and we are down the road. How hard could that be? This should take like an hour and cost 200 bucks, right? Opps. We could not find a bubble to save our lives. I called multiple distributors, window stores, etc. We ended up buying an entire new skylight kit + what we needed to install it. Then we had to create a new frame for it to fit. I probably sunk 15 hours trying to find a replacement bubble + the actual cost with labor and everything was probably $900.

My second example is a single replacement cabinet door. We thought it would be easy to match it up and order a new one but it was not that easy. This one did not end up costing me a ton of money but I had to get a “close enough” replacement. My time estimate was way off though. I spent hours trying to find a replacement. Does anyone have a simple way to find a replacement cabinet door if this happens again?

Please feel free to add an example or two yourselves. We all know we've had this happen to us.