come home to roost

Example: “Years of skipped maintenance came home to roost when the roof collapsed.”

Origin: Chaucer already has the underlying idea in The Parson's Tale, around 1390, comparing a curse to "a bird that returns again to his own nest." The image narrowed to chickens specifically by the 19th century, with an early form running "lies, like chickens, come home to roost" before "curses, like chickens, come home to roost" became the more popular version — the point in both being that whatever wrong you send out into the world eventually flies back to where it started, the way a chicken reliably returns to its own coop each evening no matter how far it wandered during the day. Robert Southey's 1810 poem The Curse of Kehama is generally credited with fixing the now-standard plural "chickens" wording, though the sentiment itself may go back as far as the Roman playwright Terence.