10 Home Repairs That Can Seriously Break the Bank It's fun having your friends over for a cookout on your deck. It would be less fun if the deck collapsed under them. How do you prevent this? See home construction pictures. As I write this article, there is a man named Bob hammering large holes into the plaster ceiling in my entryway. If you were here, you'd smell what I'm smelling — the acrid odor of wet plaster, rusty pipes and the decades of black goo that has clogged them to a standstill. Bob is breaking up the ceiling to remove a few feet of 85-year-old cast-iron plumbing that's leaking tub water from the upstairs bathroom. With every strike of his hammer, I see dollar signs. As a homeowner, your greatest fear is that some unnoticed issue — a clogged gutter, a cracked foundation or a leaky roof — will snowball into a catastrophic fail that costs you thousands of dollars. Lucky for us, we invested in a home warranty that covers most of the major homeowning headaches, but not all of them.