Personal Financial Tips

Article by Ben Goldman

Usually when a general contractor screws up, it’s something as benign as a misaligned kitchen floor tile or a pantry that won’t shut properly, but sometimes you encounter a job so botched as to make you wonder whether or not the contractor’s only experience building comes from reading the instructions off a box of Legos. And while sometimes these blunders can be fixed, other times the mistake is simply too critical to repair and is left as a hilarious monument to the dumbest contractors alive.

So in order to sample just a few of the ridiculous and bewildering mistakes of the IQ-challenged general contractors of the world, we’ve compiled this list of horrible general contracting disasters.

Bridge to Nowhere

Misaligned-bridge

Though some mistakes can be relatively harmless, albeit hilarious, in their nature – what do you do when you’ve spent millions of dollars and countless man hours on building a bridge that, through some tiny miscalculation, won’t connect? This is a mistake that anybody who has ever played with a model train set has experienced – you lay out loops and curves and bends only to realize that the last piece won’t fit together and you have to take the whole thing apart. But that’s understandable when you’re a 9 year old trying to have fun – not so much when you’re a professional contractor who has presumably attained some sort of degree and planned the construction out for months.

As to how these nitwits plan on solving this contracting disaster is anybody’s guess, but I’m guessing it will take as big a genius to fix it as it took as big an idiot to screw this plan up.

Light-Post Problems

Light-pole-balcony

What happens when you’re building an apartment complex only to realize that the beautiful walk-on balconies you’ve promised the tenants interfere with a city light pole? Simple – you market the balcony as having its own strip pole, call it a swingers’ paradise and then call it a day!

Besides, I’m sure the thing makes for a pretty decent night-light, totally free of charge.

Surreally Dumb

Bad-staircase

Either the general contractor who made this was a complete moron or an avid fan of MC Escher who wanted to create a real-world tribute to the legendary artist. But for some reason I get the itching feeling that the former explanation is the right one.

Balcony Baloney

Balcony-without-a-window1

Now, I’m not even sure how you go about making a mistake as obvious as this one. You’d think that at some point one of the construction workers would have stopped and said “Hey, how’s someone gonna even get onto the thing?” before having finished sanding the tile and attaching the railing.

But I guess sometimes it’s just easier, and more fun, to just demolish a wall now instead of asking a question earlier.

Big Money

Atm-fail

Though it’s possible this ATM exists in a land of 10 foot tall giants, judging from the picture of the man performing acrobatics in the picture above, and the fact that no such land exists on Earth, I’m just going to place my bet on this being a giant blunder by a tiny-brained contractor.

However, there always exists the possibility that the owner of this ATM doesn’t want you to take out money, in which case I retract my earlier statement. Still… something tells me I’m right.

Foundation = FAIL

House-propped-up-barrels

Okay, while I know that repairing the foundations on a home can be expensive, the picture above seems like a really bad solution to saving costs. The only problem with including this picture on a list of general contracting mistakes is that this solution may have actually been implemented to avoid hiring a general contractor. In that case, more power to the owner. But I’d be willing to bet that cement-filled oil barrels aren’t generally used in home-building for a reason.

Driveway Dismay

Steep-driveway

Okay, while I admit that it would be fun to have a driveway like that to sled on during the winter months, something tells me that any pleasure derived from that will be offset by having to repair the front of your car from it slamming into your practically vertical driveway every day.

This case also perplexes me as it seems that they could have simply extended the decline of the driveway and solved this dilemma relatively easily, but I suppose that the contractor didn’t want to infringe on the valuable sidewalk space for the kids to play hopscotch on. I guess they didn’t take into account that there soon wouldn’t be any kids left alive in the neighborhood after every car uncontrollably plummets into the sidewalk every morning on its way to work.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Unstable-bridge

In an ideal world, safety always would come first. But, unfortunately, we all know that this is rarely the case, as in this example of a home-grown solution to a rather large support problem. However, one has to wonder what sort of home-grown stuff the genius behind this quick-fix was smoking because the effort it must have taken to create that little monument to stupidity must have taken about as much work as just laying down a few sheets of metal.

However, the possibility remains that this is just someone’s idea of a more exciting version of Jenga, which I would love to see played with a crowd of spectators cheering over the side of the bridge.

But that’s it for now with regards to general contracting blunders, though with the world approaching 7 billion inhabitants and there being no sign of people getting smarter, I’m sure I’ll be back to write about more.

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