A man in the middle of renovating his home was waiting for a final piece to be installed, when he finally realized what had caused the delay—the new countertop had broken apart in the workmen’s hands.
John Marcum, 53, an IT worker living in Alabama, bought his new home in October 2023, and “began a large renovation project almost immediately.”
“I bought what I could afford knowing that I would essentially do a complete renovation,” he explained to Newsweek.
What was already set to be a large project became even more difficult when Marcum found it hard to find tradespeople in his remote area, where he said it’s also “typical for contractors to double their standard prices.” And after starting the renovation, Marcum was hit with major health issues, being diagnosed with heart disease and requiring a triple bypass, which he said put things “on hold for a while, of course.”
But after a long road, things were finally coming together, and Marcum was preparing to get a new countertop installed, which he called a “major milestone.”
“That was the last major thing remaining in the renovation of the main floor living area.”
The day his countertops were due to be delivered, the workmen suddenly disappeared, and as Marcum told Newsweek: “I thought the guys had gone to lunch or maybe they left for the day due to the weather. It had started snowing.
“It wasn’t until they returned a few days later that I learned what happened and went and pulled the video.”
That footage made its way to Reddit, where Marcum posted r/Countertops on his account u/pjmarcum, writing: “Bad day for my installers.”
The short clip shows two men each picking up one side of the countertop and walking with it to the front of the house. But just as one man gets through the front door, the entire thing folds and collapses in their hands, and one of the workers completely freezes as he looks at the damage.
Home improvements and renovations in the United States can be costly: in 2023, home improvement sales in the U.S. reached $544.6 billion, and that’s projected to rise to $602.5 billion by 2027, according to Statista.
Marcum’s video proved popular on Reddit, racking up hundreds of likes since being posted on January 28, as one in-the-know commenter despaired: “Sink saver and cart would have prevented this post.”
“Rods in the stone would have helped as well. That’s a lot of weight on either side of the cutout,” another suggested.
Others shared their sympathies with Marcum, as one wrote: “That is terrible. Ouch,” and another looked on the bright side as they said: “Good thing it broke when it did instead of inside on their finished floors.”
Marcum wrote in a comment: “I like how the one guy just freezes in-place. I should have left the clip a little longer, he stays in that position for 15 seconds.”
And he told Newsweek that despite the delay: “I found the video to be incredibly funny.”
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