Sometimes, you do the right thing in the wrong place.
The normal situation is that the pieces fit together perfectly and make a joint you can only call beautiful, but when you go to put it in place, it’s altogether wrong. Imagine you make a drawer with perfect dovetail joinery. You glue it up and go to slip it into the opening, but it’s too wide. Or perhaps it’s too narrow. Well, depending on how beautiful the piece is, maybe you rebuild the chest instead of the drawer.

On a larger scale, I once worked on an addition where footings were dug, concrete was poured, and foundation walls were starting to go up, but all thirty feet away from where they were supposed to be. The person who did the layout based all his calculations off the wrong corner of the building. Whoops.
My friend Pete had a good laugh at that one. It’s always fun to see people make mistakes that cost a lot of money.
But Pete had a more personal reason to laugh, apparently. He was once recruited to build a small cottage on a lake. The client was one of the project managers who worked for the same company he did. So, Pete packed up his pickup and headed to the site. He got a little lost on the way but eventually stumbled on the location where he found material had already been delivered and two other guys were waiting.
Consulting the drawing, Pete immediately set the others to work. The cottage was not a very sophisticated build. In fact, it was to be built on 12×12 timbers that were just on the ground. There was no gravel or stone to spread, no concrete to pour. The ground was levelled and the timbres placed and the floor was made on top. By noon, they had the first two walls erected. Around one o’clock, the owner arrived.

He was a little confused and a lot angry. He took Pete for a very short walk (just on the other side of where the materials had been dropped) and showed him the concrete that had already been poured to support the timbres. He asked Pete why he had started building the cottage in the wrong location. Pete said, according to the drawing, he put the cottage in the right location. Also, he hadn’t noticed any ground work had already been done. (One of the other guys, apparently, had seen it but thought it must be for something else, so didn’t mention it. Pete asked what else it could’ve been for and the guy said he thought it was for a garage. Pete said that guy was like a bell with no clapper.)
So, they argued for a while. Pete pointed out various details on the site plan that showed he was right but the owner just kept pointing at the location he personally had directed workers to dig and pour. Pete told me that it was the first time he ever saw someone literally get blue in the face.

Pete stopped arguing and looked more closely at the plans he had. He then walked away from the project manager (who was at that time saying he was going to either fire Pete or make sure he only worked knee deep in mud from then on) and toward the road. He found the pin driven into the ground by the surveyor and sighted along it to determine the edge of the property. He called the owner over and pointed out that the property line ran through the middle of where the concrete had been poured.
What had happened was fairly simple. The owner had arrived with some workers to prepare the site. While walking around and admiring the view of the lake, he decided the cottage should be moved to see better through some tall trees. So, he directed the work to be done at the new location without bothering to check that it was still on his rather small piece of land. The guys doing the work didn’t know, either. They were just doing what he said to do.

Pete packed up his truck and left. He never finished the cottage, nor did he ever go back to see if it ever was . He said the timbres would’ve rotted and the cottage would’ve sunk into the ground after a few years, if it was finished the way he started it. But it wasn’t his cottage, he said.
The project manager didn’t talk to Pete after that. Actually, he quickly found another job.