Whats your biggest mistake you ever made while DIY?

[DeX]

I was waiting for my roommate once in the driveway and she was taking too long so I started picking at the dealer sticker on the back of her car and by the time she came out I had the whole thing peeled off. There was just a bit of glue left on the paint so I handed her the sticker and told her that some Goo Gone would take the rest of the glue off. This is a bottle of Goo Gone, it'll remove anything....notice the lack of warning labels on it, it's safe to use on paint: I saw her car a week later and there was a rather large area where the paint was a few shades lighter and she complained to me that Goo Gone had done that, it had actually removed some of the paint and damaged her car. I thought that was pretty odd but didn't pay much more attention to it as it was her car. 2 months later we're in the house and she's got a new set of rotating spice racks but there was a sticker on the plastic and she was wiping it with a rag. I said, "What's that smell?" She said, "It's the Goo Gone, I'm trying to get this sticky stuff off the spice rack." I knew Goo Gone didn't smell like paint thinner so I took a look at what she was using and this is the bottle: No joke. When you turn it over it has all kinds of explosive and flammable warnings on it. I said, "This isn't Goo Gone, this is some weird product called Goof Off, it's flammable!" She says, "Goo Gone, Goof Off, same thing!" This stuff was so potent, it actually melted her spice rack into a single round piece of plastic and I had to use an exacto knife to separate the 2 again by cutting the plastic down the middle. She won't be using that on her car again.

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[gearbox]

haha yeah you really need to be aware of different product strengths. i found this out when i was trying to clean dynamat tar out of my trunk. i tried all sorts of those cheesy products which did not even leave a brown residue on the cloth i used, then i finally found some "3M adhesive remover" in the metal tin and just a small amount started dissolving the tar into liquid without even wiping lol. worked great on removing wheel weight foam sticky pads and didnt really hurt the wheel finish. so yeah you gotta be careful with the hi strength stuff.