“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.

[Eric F.]

@Steve Vaughan in retrospect we should have done that. We had no clue what replacing it would have entailed so we did not protect it while painting. You can be sure that lesson was learned!!

@Justin Fox I will be doing that in the future. I went with the Steve Vaughan Habitat Restore method for this one.

@Daria B. Multiple Lowes trips are the bane of my existence. Luckily returns are so easy there when I am in a situation like you described I buy every single possible match. By the time a job is done my return pile is massive but one major trip to return everything beats they heck out of driving there 10 extra times.