The worst renovator in the world has to be my dad. It isn't just that he doesn't have any experience, or that he thinks he doesn't need professional help, but there's something else too. For as long as I can remember, he's had a bad habit of starting new projects every time my mother left for a weekend.

When I was five he decided that the one thing our house was missing, was a nice set of bookshelves. Rather than buying a set of shelves, or looking for a professional carpenter, he decided to do it himself with a little help from his teenage sons. They couldn't find a level, so they used their eyes and "feelings" to place the boards. The end result was a floor to ceiling bookshelf that spanned an entire wall, created out of mismatched wood.

Despite his faults, he has had some good projects that he finished on his own, or with help from some decidedly unprofessional helpers. He and my uncle created a gorgeous deck on the back of our house, and then decided to try the same thing on the front of the house. Unfortunately they didn't use a sealant on the wood, and now over a decade later, both decks still look good from far away, but up close the slats are warped and green.

A few years after he finished the back deck, he decided that the one thing it was missing was a roof. He spent a few weeks looking at different ways to add a roof, before going his own way. My grandfather, his father, added a new sunporch onto the back of his house, and had to demolish the old sunporch. My dad drove over to his house in an old pickup truck, and came home with a load of plastic roofing material. Having no experience and no idea what he was doing, he started putting up the plastic roof haphazardly without using the proper equipment. When he finished, he proudly showed off his work, and I have to admit that we were fairly impressed...until the first rainstorm. Water poured down from invisible cracks in the roofing material, making it look like a huge monsoon was passing across the back of our house.

Even worse is that he tends to injure the people helping him. A few months ago while replacing an air conditioner, he dropped the new one on my brother's arm, who was then stung by a bee on his ear, and ended up in the emergency room that same night. When I tried to help him do the same thing, he ran over my foot with a dolly and broke my big toe.

Those reasons, plus a whole lot more, are why my dad is the world's worst renovator.

Learn more about this author, Jennifer Eblin.
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