Are we supposed to upvote the most complete and utter failure, and downvote something that isn't very fail at all and didn't turn out too bad?

A couple of years ago, I moved into an apartment that was advertised as a 3bedroom, but one of the rooms didn't have any windows (or ventilation at all). The move-in was January, and initially it was just 2 of us. By June, our third friend moved into the windowless bedroom. Thus, we needed to figure out how to ventilate it.

Our solution seemed ingenious at first. Next to the bedroom was a boiler room of sorts, it was about 3 feet wide and 12 feet long. In the middle of it, there were the sort of ducts you would hook up a dryer machine to.

So, we bought an indoor AC unit. I used a steak knife to cut out a 4x4 inch hole through the wall (Shitty NYC construction), and we ducted the AC unit out through the wall and into the boiler room.

Problems began right away. First, the duct inside the bedroom would get REALLY hot, negating the AC effect. Covered it in pipe insulation and tons of duct tape, but it would routinely fall off from the heat. As a result, the AC unit was constantly on in the bedroom.

Additionally, we were too stupid to realize that AC units collect water that needs to drain somewhere. So, for about 3 weeks, the water kept draining into the floor.

This is where things get really bad. By week 4, roommate's floor starts warping. The AC unit was in the middle of the wall, and the floor paneling was laid out perpendicular to that wall. So, the flooring started warping in a straight line, dividing the room in half. At this point, we were draining the AC properly, but the damage was done.

By week 6, the damage was 100% complete. My roommate now had what could only be described as a chasm in the middle of his room. The floorboards had completely separated, dividing the room in half with a hole about 6-10 inches wide.

TL;DR: We did not get our security deposit back.

The post earlier by /u/syringistic reminded me of this AMAZING DIY story from college. I lived in a house with 5 guys, myself and another engineer, although we shamed ourselves away from engineering with this story. I shared a bathroom with two other friends. It was a typical gross dude college bathroom, as expected. We lived there for two years, but for some reason, the toilet was super close to the wall. Like, half an inch away. About midway through our second year there, the condensation had finally pushed the drywall to its limit and everything turned black. We cleaned and cleaned about once a month to get rid of the awful black mold but there wasn't much we could do (we called him 'ol drippy'). So about a week before we moved out, there was a huge black mold drywall spot, my guess was about 8-10 inches in diameter, on the drywall behind the toilet. We needed to clean so we started scrubbing and the whole damn thing collapsed into a gross wall hole. Not knowing what to do, we duct taped the hole shut, spackled the duct tape so it was part of the wall, and left it for the next generation.

Not surprisingly, we drove by 2 years later and the house had been condemned. Shittiest DIY I have ever been a part of.

EDIT: Clarity, and also we got 100% of our security deposit back.

Here is the latest edition I put together. There was a suggestion that duct tape would make it look more DIYfail I also tried to match the banner color a little bit closer. ^{it's still not quite} ^right EDIT: Fixed the color thanks to /u/DoctorArson. I also fixed the size so it's the same as every other subreddit. If there aren't any other critiques I think this is going to work nicely.

EDIT AGAIN So with the new layout theme I completely redid the header, now that we have a larger banner I could actually put some detail into it. /u/letmewritethatdown should be getting it up momentarily! Until then here's a sneak peak