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?

Heating or air con that’s always too complicated. TVs that you can never get to work. And wifi that never works.

I remember a LARP weekend at a scout camp. It was a bit rubbish since my role got screwed up and I got give the wrong character and I had to wear facepaint for it. It was also warm and who I finally got washing it off it was coin op showers. No knew had any 20ps so I still had to remain hot itchy and starving.

Longdistance - this one has a dualit !!

No batteries in most of the remotes or Hive control though .. had to buy some yesterday.

I’m feeling thankful that no 20ps are needed for the shower though.. and no mice either, phew!!

platesandflowers - so frustrating when a switch works fine!!

Is there a drawer in the kitchen/file somewhere with all the instruction leaflets for the appliances? I’ve had to google how to turn on a job before now.
We were in a very swanky holiday cottage, stuffed to the gunwales with all sorts of entertainment tech - but no colander or potato peeler. One had such complicated lights that it took us a whole week to work out which switch did what.

Stayed in a lovely cottage in Pembroke. The bedside lamps had a big shiny metal base and no on/off switch. Found out by accident that when you touched the base, the light toggled through dim, brighter, brightest and off.

Sooooo, about two in the morning, I was woken up by flashing lights, wondering what the hell was going on, and realised that DH had turned over with his arm out touching the lamp base and the light was whipping through its repertoire like a lamp possessed!

Newly- decorated Airbnb that had 'smart' radiators. I had to download a 40 page instruction book and try to make head or tale of it to switch then off. They switched back on every night, in spite of stabbing buttons and swearing, eventually we slept with the windows wide open, wasting all their electricity

I had a holiday cottage in Cornwall which had Dymo labels on nearly everything advising of its particular idiosyncrasy e.g.

On electric shower. "Push off switch once only! It will go off in 10 seconds"

On toaster. "Use on setting 4 or below only. Any higher will cremate bread"

On Freeview box. "If it doesn't work first time, switch it off and on again. A seagull may be on the aerial"

On inside of front door. "Window cleaner comes on a Thursday. Keep bedroom shutters closed"

JeSuis - brilliant - genius idea. I’d give 5 stars for that !

Freda - smart radiators 😱😱😱 bloody awful.. we’ve got all windows open upstairs too - even when dialling down temp on thermostat control it makes no difference.

Robot - we have those at home so that’s one thing I would have been able to work!

The cottage we’re in is really lovely though, and copious soap, dishwasher tabs, washing powder, loo rolls, bin bags, tea towels, cloths, cleaning sprays etc. , and an actual draining board 🍾👏🍾 (I’m easily pleased!).

Very pleased to not have to do a flipping cleaning supplies shop like we’ve had to in the past.

😂 the camping showers, one of the reason I would NEVER go camping.

Also in a holiday cottage at the moment. There isn't even a hook in the bathroom for a hand towel - We've had to balance them on top of the cistern. There's underfloor heating so nowhere to dry any towels except over the bannister.

The toaster hasn't got any writing left on it. There's two levers and 6 buttons. Fuck knows how it's supposed to work - We've had to resort to turning it off at the wall to pop the toast up.

The dishwasher also only has 3 wheels left on the bottom tray. Every time you pull the drawer out the thing falls off the rails. The drain was also clogged and so all the crockery is pebbledashed with shite.

And and and most evenings have been spent playing find the light switch. They are all in daft places - you turn the living room lights on from the hall and the kitchen from the living room, for example. But it's not like there's switches all over the place. The single switch is hidden behind a curtain, or behind the door.

WhoGivesADamn

That sort of thing really annoys me. A dishwasher that doesn’t work properly is worse one that does ..

explodingid did the holiday blurb not show the cottage being nestled in amongst lots of trees?

Cottage we stayed in on the Lleyn the owners helpfully left their cat in the eaves, locked the doors to the eaves, and then drove a long way away to somewhere with no phone reception.

I didn’t request ‘angry trapped cat’ along with bedding and additional logs for the fire so dh broke the door and the cat fucked off and so that solved that problem.

Showers are my nemesis, I always struggle for some reason. Never had an issue with other equipment though dodgy WiFi has caused many complaints from teens which I ignore and tell them to play cards - last time one dd spent hours sitting up a tree in the rain to get a phone signal (yes I knew reception was poor when I booked it, ha!)

We had a beautiful French chateau in the summer, and were joined by the kids and grandkids, so it was a big place, well supplied with bathrooms. It had been fairly recently renovated and had everything you could wish for on a big family holiday like that. Except toilet roll holders. The toilet rolls lived on the floor.

Puzzled me that did.

I stayed in an Air Bnb in France in September and just could not figure out the hob or the oven. So I basically ate bread and cheese all week. Really annoying!

My airb&b in the summer had one bathroom. That was in the middle of the house. You had to walk though it to get to the stairs. So it had one door. Then open to the stairs. You had to all sit in the front room while people went to the loo or used the shower. Why!!!!!

Then the lady had every piece of kitchen equipment u needed. But that filled up every cupboard. So we had no room for putting food away. It sat in bags on the floor.

Stayed in an air B&B in Italy. What swung it for us choosing this one over our other shortlisted ones was that it had a proper oven & hob AND a microwave (it's common in Italy to have a hob but the only ovens are little tabletop things). One of the DCs has severe multiple food allergies so we can't eat out all the time and NEED to be able to cook at home. The weeny little table top oven had been really difficult in Italy the previous year.

So we arrive, and I can't get the big oven to work. I press everything, try everything but no. The hob works but not the oven. But it turns out that what I thought was a microwave was actually one of the teeny weeny ovens, so we could manage a bit although fed up that we didn't have a microwave as we thought.

A couple of days in DH announces in triumph that he has solved the problem. The oven wasn't plugged in! Doh! So we plug it in and turn it on and five minutes later all the electrics trip. Reset, try again and the same happens.

When we finally manage to talk to the owner she says "Oh no that doesn't work. You need to use " Grrr!

We spent ages looking st airb&b for our holiday next year. I have lots of problems with foods. So needed one with an oven. Man ... I didn’t realise how hard it was to find one with an actual oven!!!!

Ours has an oven DontGive.. have you got a PhD? Because you may need it!

The shower. Always the shower.

@WillowintheUK sorry, off topic but where was your chateau holiday? May be looking for somewhere like that this year! (And forewarned is forearmed, we will bring our own toilet roll holders...)

We have those touch base bedside lamps. They are great till a cat jumps on the bedside table in the night and switches them on with their nose. Whilst simultaneously turning on the TV by standing on the remote.