Balconies: the Dummies Version

Juliet balcony

We've said it before, but we'll say it again: anyone who depends on eHow.com for how-to instructions on anything more complicated than making toast is... well, they're toast. From the site's halcyon days (according to archive.org, originally posted in 2007), here are some instructions of the finest kind posted by the site's anonymous "home and garden editor."  Without further ado, we give you "How to Build a Balcony" at HomeSteady.com. If we wrote this kind of rubbish, we'd certainly want to remain anonymous, too!

Editor managed to shrink a pretty complex problem into a mere nine steps, of which two devolve into "design your balcony and buy the materials." The rest of the remaining seven steps, except for one, are between six and twelve words long. Far worse, the instructions are utter bull:

The balcony attaches to the building with a ledger. Cut it, nail it in place, and secure with "lag bolts" (we think editor means "lag screws"). The instructions also say to cut one 2 x 12 floor joist - one! - to length and secure it with nails. And then with joist hangers. That's it for framing - no rim joist, no joists, no blocking, no nothing; just a ledger and a joist. After adding a plywood subfloor, you are instructed to add a hand rail.  We're still not certain what "Establish floor with desired materials for this step" is supposed to mean... The final instruction is to "sand and seal the hand rail."

What a dumbass set of instructions: they leave no doubt in the mind of anyone who's ever done any construction work whatsoever that the writer didn't know which end of a screwdriver is the handle and which is used to drive nails. The instructions; which, for what it's worth, appear to be for adding a deck, not a balcony – balconies are framed as part of a building's walls and floor instead of tacked on with a ledger – are so incomplete as to be dangerous.

eHow has let this article stand for more than a decade -- yet people wonder why our staff here at the Antisocial Network think that eHow.com is the worst nest of dumbassery ever to come down the pike! Here, eHow: add this Dumbass of the Day award to the roomful you and your crack team of freelancers have already collected!

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DDIY - CONSTRUCTION