Top DIY Mistakes

After a friend of mine fell off his roof and broke his foot, I wasn't too anxious to crawl up on my roof with a circular saw and start cutting holes. I'm a bit afraid of heights, anyway. But I was determined to put in skylights, and there wasn't anybody else down on the ground whom I could sweet-talk into climbing around my roof.

Like many home owners who think they know what they are doing, I came up with this brilliant idea to tie myself to the clothes-line pole in the back yard. I securely fastened a sturdy rope to the pole and threw the rope over the ridge cap. Then I donned a harness, darted up to the ridge and hooked the rope to myself. At least if I slipped, I reasoned, I wasn't going far. What I didn't notice during the project was every time I pulled on the rope to keep it taunt, the rope was rubbing back and forth on the ridge cap. That motion left burn marks all along my roof line, down to the tar paper.

But there are worse DIY home improvement mistakes you can make, believe me.

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_{©Elizabeth Weintraub, Licensed to About.com}

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}