Please share your completely impossible holiday cottage complicated normal equipment stories..

[bbcessex]

Hello all 😎

We are spending half term in a really nice, quite pricey Hence lots of facilities - UK.-by-the-Sea holiday cottage.

Generally, place is really nice, but we arrived yesterday and have a list of niggles.

1: massive garden, as expected for dog, and yet not a single outside light. Arrived last night at 7.30pm and couldn’t tell if dog would be safe to toilet outside or not. Had to find the keysafe with torch on phones.
2: Three - THREE - remote controls to get the single telly to work. Guide book to walk through configuration. Have teenage daughter, so that and good WiFi is mandatory requirement. Despite numerous instructions, still unable to work it out.
3: Range oven - completely unintuitive . tried to use hob today... turned various dial options on to not avail. On googling, seems oven model needs to have pan on ring to ‘sense’ before it gets hot.

FFS - don’t even get me started on the Hive heating. Have just opened all windows to cool house down (i work in IT - am quite analytic - am
Flummoxed with their settings).

Will be on to rental companies on Monday. Anyone care to share their experiences in the meantime?

This made for interesting reading as we have been renting out our holiday let for two months now and the guests who left this morning left us a bottle of wine and some chocolates and a lovely note saying thanks. Reassuring that we must be doing something right! Although I bought some roman blinds from Dunelm which are absolutely hopeless - there are little clips on the back which are meant to grip onto the rods through the material but keep pinging off. Apologies to our guests, they will be replaced with curtains very soon!

We stayed in an air bnb in Minorca and the temperature and oven settings had all rubbed off next to the buttons that you turn. The first night my BIL had a go at cooking a pizza but managed to grill the top of it to a burnt crisp.

We stayed in a cabin in Scotland and the washing machine had a sticker near the start button saying “do not press this button, it will trip the power” so we couldn’t use it all week. I had to hand wash my sons clothes, I hadn’t packed a weeks worth because I knew there was a washing machine. We couldn’t get hold of the owner but she finally turned up as we were leaving and said “Oh yes we put that sticker on as it was broken but it’s fine now!”
The whole place stank of turps and the shower was blocked so it flooded after a minute. Such a shame as it was a lovely location.

I decided to drive early to a holiday cottage as my DH had to work an extra day. I went with my teenage DS 14.

The cottage was not described as down a country lane and then off an unmade track in the middle of a copse on the edge of a forest. Blair Witch came to mind.

Anyway plucked up courage in complete darkness to find keysafe around the cottage with phone torch whist hearing branches snapping and strange forest like noises! When I located the keysafe it was open and no key was inside!! I had no idea if someone had broken safe open and now there was a psychopath lurking in the woods! I called out of hours to help and he had to meet me in the nearest town as I was too shit scared to hang around.

He accompanied me back to the house and checked everything out and said we should be OK! Only some of the other keys were missing too!! I spent the evening barricading all possible entry points and listening out for noises whilst DS slept and I downed the welcome bottle of wine and stayed up until dawn.

When I could make out my bearings in the morning out of the window, I realised we really were in a dark patch in the middle a forest and it bloody did actually look like the set of a Stephen King horror movie set!

explodingind sounds terrifying - the sort of film you’d hear “and they were never seen again”!

We stayed in a holiday house recently that had laminated instruction sheets next to or attached to the appliances - not 'pretty' but very functional. And they were well-written and easy to follow.

Cortex - sensible owners, I applaud them & their laminator!

Another vote for TV remote controls.

Also we once stayed at a B&B where we couldn't work out how to use the shower. As in couldn't get any water out at all. We were too embarrassed to ask, so we just didn't have a shower Luckily we were only there for one night and it wasn't the middle of summer.

No corkscrew no vegetable knife

That is annoying as well as all the thermostat nonsense

A German woman explained the 'knack' to me on our last day re the coin operated showers.
Select cubicle
Get undressed
Leave cubicle dressed only in towel
Deposit coins
Run back to shower

I'd rather have paid an extra $5 for the campsite and had gratis push button shower rather than do the shower krypton factor every morning.

You'd see women emerging from the block looking royally pissed off, sweating profusely and with bubbles in their hair

Not equipment but still blooming annoying.

DH left his (very expensive) watch in the cottage. The cleaner didn’t find it, the owner couldn’t find it... DH drove all the way back and got there 10 minutes before the new family arrived... He couldn’t find it.

I was at home looking at the photographs we’d taken and zoomed in on one up see the watch very clearly on the bookcase half hidden by a book!

I rang DH and directed him to it instantly, I think the owner must have thought I was a clairvoyant

We hired a motor caravan and drove the scenic route from san Francisco to Los Angeles via Yosemite. When we got it we were told to turn gas off before travelling. Yosemite was deep in snow. Despite turning gas on we could not get heater or cooker to work. I was 20 weeks pregnant. We had no way of accessing internet or calling anyone. We ended up snuggled under duvet wearing 6 layers and still freezing. Turns out we'd been told wrong. Gas had to be left on at all times. 2 weeks and we could only get hob to work but we'd stocked up on food for an oven...

GreatThat. That would have really put a dampener on the holiday for me - did they compensate you ?

Naked & tectonic - our holiday cottage shower is actually very easy to work. And free!! I shall be thankful for that!!!

When we self-cater it is firmly on the basis that I'm going to do minimal cooking. So wanky range cookers with complex controls hold no terrors for me, I just refuse to touch them.

a coin operated shower? What fresh hell is that ....

I once lived in a very grim bedsit that had access to a coin operated shower. Many an early morning dash to the corner shop was made when I ran out of 20p pieces.

Not holiday cottage but hotel rooms with inoperable lighting systems that are not labelled. You think you're switching on the bathroom light for your 3am pee but no. That one is the master switch and every light in the room goes on.

Self catering apartment near Paris Disney with no cutlery. Had to buy a cheap set from the local supermarket.

Not quite the same but we recently had a hire car in the Canary Islands with a fancy in board computer thing controlling everything from the sat nav to the air con. Wonderful. Except it was set to German. Nobody in our family speak German. We had to put up with a cross German voice barking instructions at us for about 3 days until we happened by chance across the sub menu which allowed you to change the language to English, then switch off the voice.

I bet that was a mixture of annoying & hilarious, Piper!!

I once stayed in a hotel room in Lithuania where I could not get all the lights to go off at the same time. I slept with lights on for 3 fecking nights.

Not a holiday by any stretch of the imagination but my ds was once in hospital for a number of nights. The room had a ceiling light that stayed on all. the. time.
Who the fuck designed that?
It was right above the bed too. For almost a week we both had very little sleep in a very bright room.

air bnb in the Cotswolds. Had fancy computer lighting but half of the house was effected by the baby monitor so the lights (including bedroom would flicker everytime ds made a noise!

Affected!

I think I would take electrical problems over leaking roof which we were told was ‘just a problem with the shower’ and mice. Oh yes. Nice that just just ran across the edge of the tiles in the kitchen. My arse did they clean that place every time someone left or they would have seen the place and inside the kitchen cupboards were full of mouse droppings.

One thing that gets my back up about rental cottages/homes is that they have the cheapest and crappest toaster ever. I always burn the toast even on a low setting, it’s burnt or burnt toast.

How difficult is it really to invest in a slightly better toaster, not an Argos value range one?