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?

We're just back from a long weekend in the peak District staying in a beautiful barn with wonderful shower, top quality bed linen, top line kitchen equipment, fully functioning and immaculate hot tub, lovely food and wine provided etc.

But the washing machine is an old washer-dryer and for the life of me I cannot get it to just dry our wet things and towels. I set it, it runs for the requisite time and the stuff is as damp as it started. I just drape over the heated towel rails now.

BalloonSlayer - how annoying... bet you had to be inventive ..:

A stair gate that defied all sense of how to open so we had to climb over it all week (where is a toddler when you need one?)

An electric tin opener that was far too clever for its own good - I shouldn't have to google instructions for how to open a can of soup

I do a lot of private chef work going to top priced holiday homes and while most are really well equipped some are woefully lacking which is a bloody pain when I’m there to cook a few different courses.

I feel the pain with induction hobs and top of the range kitchens with no instruction books. It’s my nightmare going into a place and spending the first hour trying to work out how to actually turn the things on.

I did a job the other week in a gorgeous house that was £10k a week to rent. The kitchen looked amazing but the hob was like a cross between an air hockey table and a ouija board, you had to move a disc all over the place to get things to work.

I was baffled!

We stayed in a beautiful house as a group once that had the most stunning kitchen. But we couldn’t work out how to open the velux windows that were way up in the eaves.

We got hotter and hotter until someone discovered that what we thought were 60 gajillion light switches were half for lights and half for windows!

Crispbutty - wow!! Never seen one like that. How did you figure it out?

Olennas - did laugh at the stairgate - I’d have classed that as a workout!!

Everybody cooks bacon when they are on holiday don't they? DH starts up a cooked breakfast while I'm in the shower. He commented that there wasn't a hush button on the smoke alarm and keeps the windows open. Then just when he's finished the smoke alarm goes off. So we're flapping a newspaper and opening the doors. We can't stop it.

We run across to the on-site owners but they aren't in. It was still going 40 minutes later so we phone the contact numbers in the welcome book. They didn't know what to do either but suggested we went out and it would be sorted by the time we got back in the afternoon.

Apparently the alarm was still going at lunch time when the owners got back. They removed it from the ceiling and replaced it with one with a hush button and left cake and wine for us by way of apology.

Now we are very wary of cooking a breakfast in any holiday cottage just in case we trigger the smoke alarm.

Missed the toaster complaints section - this cottage sleeps six and yet they have managed to find a toaster that only does ONE SLICE at a time. Where did they even get it from 😭 Also it burns every time.

Also since the other socket is being used by the gro clock (see previous post), we have to unplug the kettle / microwave in order to use it.

A hush button?! Never heard of this before. Admittedly I have never bought smoke detectors either, but have spent the last 20 years living in various properties with them in. Maybe it has always been there and I've never noticed...

Xiaoxiong - on phone at the moment but will let you know once I'm back on the laptop.

@Xiaoxiong - have PMed you!