The refrigerator's ice maker, which we always keep turned off, turned itself on in the night and began making ice and never stopped when the ice bucket was full. So I woke up Sunday morning to the sound of my OH swearing and chopping ice out of the freezer. He filled the whole sink with it. OK, the ice maker is hooked up to the water pipes in the laundry room, not at the sink, because the crazy DIY former owners of the house had installed a water softener in the laundry room (not that a water softener is actually needed in the Bay Area), and had run the ice maker to it using a cheap plastic hose. We'd gotten rid of the water softener long before, but the ice maker hose was still there. So OH went to the ice maker line and tried to turn off the water to the ice maker, and the flimsy plastic hose broke and started to drip. So he turned off the water to the whole back of the house. And the ice maker kept making ice for about half an hour after that! (There was some water still in the line for it to use up, I guess.)

Anyway, one rather expensive plumber visit later, and the ice maker is now detached from its water source, and I am slowly drying a very wet towel that was soaking up the leak, and contemplating scrubbing the kitchen floor where there are dirt smudges because the plumber had to drag the fridge out of its cubby in order to get rid of the ice maker line.

Our TV turns itself on and off. It has an uncanny ability to turn itself off at the climactic moment of a movie.

It has...but so far I don't think the DIY-ism has ended up costing us more than we saved by buying a house no one else wanted, at the height of the market where pretty houses in move-in condition were all gathering multiple offers over the asking price. We were the only ones bidding on this house, and we actually bargained them down a bit.