What’s your worst household mishap? Can you beat mine?

[Nitpickpicnic]

Oh Lord, give me your best ‘if you can’t laugh, you’d cry’ clumsiness stories.

I just plonked myself down on my new sofa, with my iPad and a glass of red wine in hand. Well-deserved 15 minute reward ‘me’ time during a very busy day.

iPad looked like it was slipping so I overcompensated with the other hand to steady it. The hand with the wine. Wine has tipped onto: the sofa, the carpet, me, the side table (with open bills on it), dripped onto the iPad and over the edge of it, down into the heating duct. It was probably only a small half full glass, and I swear not one drop has avoided causing problems. I don’t even have time to properly swab everything and spray the (various) fabrics.

Is this The Universe underlining to me that I should not drink wine, or can you reassure me it’s common to be this clumsy? 🤦🏻‍♀️

I once fell up an open-tread spiral staircase while holding a glass of red wine. Wall had to be completely repainted.

So many.....

Moved into flat with DP. Tiny bathroom, large Dp. First day there, he went for a tricky poo and pushed his shoulder against the shower screen so hard, mid strain it came off the wall, crashed corner first into the bath tub and left a great big hole on the tub. We had to buy a fiber glass boat repairing kit from amazon to fix it. It worked though, we got our full deposit back.

There was also the river of poo incident. Same flat, came back from Christmas at his parents to find that the sewer had backed up with litres of shit all over our garden. Our landlord had gone on holiday to Egypt for a month without telling us so our house stank of shit for weeks before it could get sorted.

All quite scatalogical I'm afraid.

Oh, and the time the kitten managed to eat half a tub of butter and puke all over the house, of course.

When I still lived with my parents, our cat came home holding a live mouse. My mother panicked and tried to wrestle it from the cat. The mouse escaped and dies somewhere in our house but we couldn't find the damn thing for months!

DP trying to put up a shelving unit in our beige carpeted living room. Rested his half opened can of Pepsi on said shelves (he did that thing where you crack the ring pull half open) then accidentally knocked it flying. The can fell in the floor and started spinning wildly, covering the whole room in tiny sticky brown droplets.

The time our cat climbed in through the window and landed on a pile of dirty dishes left on the draining board, smashing them all over the floor.

MIL trying to open a bottle of red wine without a corkscrew and smashing the entire thing on the kitchen floor.

Leaving the roof window open during the snow. That one was me.

When I was at uni I had a pet frog. I used to buy tubs of live crickets to feed it. One time I accidentally put my laundry down on top of the plastic box. I didn't notice for hours and ended up with - 100 escaped crickets in my room. Some of them were noisy fuckers too and I never managed to round them all up.

Burning down the kitchen

I remembered one from a few days ago. I opened the fridge and a packet of blueberries fell out. I bent to pick them up, forgot the fridge door was open and cloned my head so hard on the shelf inside the door that the shelf and all its contents (4litres of ordinary milk and 2 litres of oat milk) came off. I felt dizzy all day after.

We are all so fucking clumsy in this family.

I think one of ours was DD age 3 weeks or something like that. Needed a change in the night. DH gallantly got up to do it. He took her nappy off and before he had the chance to put the fresh one on she projectile shat horizontally towards him. With surprising reflexes for a sleep-deprived new father, he dodged it and it splatted all over the carpet and my lovely cream nursing chair I fed her in every day.

We laugh about it now, but exhausted and hormone fuelled, I screamed at him for not using his body as a "human shield" to block the poo as he was "a lot easier to clean than the chair and the carpet." He spent hours cleaning it up and then months later I was still spotting teeny yellow splats on the walls

My family had a twin tub washing machine when I was a baby - the washing went in one of two drums that opened at the top, you had to fish the clean clothes out of the washing drum and put them into the spinning one.

My mum was holding me in her arms while pulling the clean clothes out with a big pair of wooden tweezers. I vomitted profusely and aimed it perfectly into the machine

I used to think this was hillarious. But now I have kids I understand my mum’s despair!

My grandfather was a portrait painter of some talent (he was a member of the Royal Academy) and some of his work hung in our dining room.

One evening, I shook a bottle of Italian salad dressing not noticing that there was no lid...

Olive oil and vinegar do not add anything to the aesthetics of paintings.

I'm going to force OH to sit and read this thread so he can see that far worse things happen to others!

The other day I opened a kitchen cupboard and the top hinge came away, I had to try to support it and grab something to use as a screwdriver to tighten the screw. Managed to prop it closed and went to get a screwdriver, eventually I tightened it up, it was a top corner cupboard which made it harder to reach. When he came in it wasn't Oh, poor you having a sore shoulder, it was How many times have I told you not to leave the doors open?

Why is it an accident when he does something and it's incipient alzheimers when I do it?

Did the school run with an egg in my pocket. Managed to get to the school gates without noticing. Then felt a weird damp feeling in the hip area. We had chickens at the time and I'd dashed out to collect eggs before leaving for school and forgotten to decant one from pocket to fridge.
Coat was dry clean only :(

Our traditional xmas dinner is duck. I always cook/bake. It's my thing :) One year my DH decided to help as I was quite sleep deprived with our 3mths old DS.
Everything fine until it was time to take the duck out of the oven. DH put the duck breasts in the shallow big baking tray. He did see that a lot! of fat melted out, but thought he could manage. We had an open plan kitchen/living room and my parents were there as well. I came into the room seeing my mum holding our son and saying to my DH: "Look, he is (DS) sooo cute!"
On cue, DH looks up, tips the baking tray and spills hot fat on his feet. Obviously he lets go of the tray making sure the rest of the dinner -ducks and grease alike- ends up on the floor. The whole kitchen and more than half the living room was covered in grease.
It would have taken me 15 mins to set up everything in a ROASTING PAN, but I ended up having to clean up the mess for more than an hour while DH was nursing his not too badly burnt feet.

but I do have a favourite....
I was 23, it was summer and I had to go appr 100 miles to my diploma ceremony. Dressed for the occasion, my parents coming, my dad driving and my to be husband sitting at the back with me.
Almost there when we decided to stopped to get drinks. I got a can of coke. Once on our way again I opened the can just to shower basically everyone in the car. My dad was great, kept on driving in a straight line just wiping coke dripping from his hair.
I was drenched in coke. Got to the uni, went in the bathroom basically washed my hair, I even washed my white blouse thinking it is 35C, so it will dry in the next 30 mins that we have until our class comes up.
Well they changed things around and we were the first class to get their diplomas :) I have lovely photos of me with dripping wet and flat hair, runny make up, totally wet and see through white blouse (of course black bra) and leaving a trail of water once I went up on the podium to shake hands and get my papers in front of about 2000 ppl.
The dean congratulated me quietly on my unique style.

I got home from work one afternoon, pulled onto the drive and there was a random brick on the drive. There were 2 houses being built next door and the land was being excavated so in a bit of a temper I went to throw the brick over the dividing wall however it slipped out of my hand and went straight through my own cars windscreen.

I was hoovering DD's room, we had a old drop side cot. I was hoovering underneath and noticed some toys and dummies under there, so crawled under to get them out. The side dropped and trapped me under there. Poor puzzled DD who was crawling around the room cried for about 30 mins then came and lay on the floor next to me took one of the dummies from me and went to sleep. I was there for over an hour before DH came home for lunch and rescued me.

I tried to gently melt some cracked shoe polish on the gas hob to re-set it. It set on fire, I panicked and threw a tea towel on it which was dry and also set on fire, I put the lot in the sink and put the tap on but the water flow was too fast and blasted hot blue shoe polish all over the kitchen.

The kitchen sink was blocked so I carefully put a bowl underneath and undid the pipes, it stank and was grim all kinds of filthy water and slimy crap.
The bowl was getting full so like a complete goon I carefully lifted it out and tipped into the sink. The sink with no pipes attached so all the grim shit I'd collected went all over my cupboard and me.

I thought I was clever and tried to unblock a drain using one of those wire things - to use it i had to loosen the plug hole.
After what I thought was unblocking it, the water drained beautifully so I had a bath.

Turns out I hadn't tightened the plug hole properly so the water just drained straight through the ceiling... straight into our lodgers room that's directly below. He got SOAKED as he was sleeping and had no electricity and a sodden carpet for a week

A Christmas one from many years ago when I was studying: a friend was staying in a shared (rented, furnished) house and I offered to come over and do the Xmas dinner for everyone in the house, everyone chipped in for supplies.

I made a highly complicated dinner of roast goose and all the trimming (quite a large group). Thought I was super-impressive. Took me all day, involved complicated recipe cards, minutely detailed timetables of what I had to do and when etc (pre-internet). Unfortunately by 3pm when the goose was ready and everything was perfect I was pretty sozzled. As I came in to the dining room with the whole goose and all the veg on a platter, I dropped the whole thing onto a (cream-coloured) couch (belonging to the landlord). It landed square on the couch and then bounced from there onto the (cream-coloured) fitted carpet. Goose is very very oily...

The rest of the day is a blur but when my friend moved from that house she did not get her deposit back...

Too many to remember for me.... I remember as a kid dropping the most enormous bottle of "Jucee" cordial. It was blackcurrant. The end hit the floor and blackcurrant juice rained all over.

I have slipped on the stair, caught my hand on the banister and broke a finger. Then a week later, slipped again, this time landing on my arse and breaking my coccyx.

Came round the corner too fast in an underground car park and hit my 3 month old car on the steel upright caving the door in.

I'm the clumsy one at home so I savour the ones that DH does.

Doing something with the tap - tightening it? - and bang. The mixer came off in his hand spraying water every where all over the kitchen.

Carrying in part of our new sofa he managed to stand in black car polish and walk the length of the hall and into the lounge before I realised it was on our lovely biscuit colour carpet.

And last night whilst eating a chip flew off his plate covering the carpet in BBQ sauce.

I was reminded of this story that went viral, about what happens when a roomba meets puppy poo, in the middle of the night, and continues on around the house.....

@Notso - my dh once tried to warm the shoe polish (his brother was in the Army and so he knows you get a really good shine if you heat the polish) - only he decided to use the microwave, and it set the microwave on fire - we had to call the fire brigade! DH managed to put it out with the extinguisher from the car before they got to us, but they still came and checked it - and leaked the story to the local paper.

Only a little one, I've done worse, but I do love the pic.

Made a pot of filter coffee without putting the pot under.... 2 litres of coffee all over the kitchen at 5am, had to get dh up to clean it up as i was rushing out to work

In a terrible storm our shed door blew off and while I went to fix it my daughter decided she needed to rescue an old cat bed from outside. The back door wasn't closed properly and the wind caught it buckling the bracket on top so the door couldn't be closed. The bracket was held on with rivets so it took me an hour standing on a chair in rain and wind to force the bracket off both the door and the door frame. In the meantime my toddler to the opportunity to pour his sippy cup of orange juice in to the computer keyboard and mash banana into the carpet.

DH - followed directions to boil an egg in the microwave, having done so successfully a couple of times before.

Egg exploded, blowing the microwave and its brackets clean off the wall and smashing two dishes on the draining board, scaring the shit out of the dog and spraying partially cooked egg everywhere.

He used our new Dyson handheld to clean it up, but didn't empty it. Went to use it again a week or so later...smelt like mould and vomit.

Me - at friends house for dinner. Went outside to play with their dog and unbeknownst to me, stepped in dog shit. Tracked it back through their conservatory, kitchen and onto their living room carpet. Upon discovering the shit trail, I stepped back in horror and kicked over a glass of red wine which had been set on the floor.

I got called clown feet for years afterwards, and DH still sings a little circus clown tune if I knock something over.

my best was supergluing both feet to the floor.

This reminds me of a bf who did similar. Except, luckily, he was wearing trainers. I thoroughly enjoyed his dawning realisation on his face when while he panicked, and his brother was laughing hysterically, I pointed out he could just take his feet out of the shoes, and we'd probably have an easier time sorting it out that way. (He's now teaching some of your children!)

All my own mishaps sound pretty boring. I did once chuck a full, large pot of yoghurt on my DF's home office floor, in a stupid fit of impotent teenage rage, and watch it explose everywhere, though. Parents were not impressed, and I obviously had to clean things up. It got on the ceiling somehow, and poking it with a rag on a stick only spread the stain all over. I think DP didn't notice the ceiling spillage at the time, and were later puzzled by the mystery stain. I never confessed, but I did spend weeks helping them paint (including said ceiling) and redecorate 20 years later, when they were selling the house, so I feel I've done my bit.