What's the broken thing in your house that everyone just puts up with?

[Yebbie]

I'll start. We have a three legged Henry Hoover, and any time anyone hoovers you hear lots of banging and "fuck offs" as it falls over every 3 seconds. It's been like it for five years and rather than replacing it we all have just grown to accept our disabled Henry.

What's that broken thing in your house that everyone just accepts and lives with, despite how annoying it may be? I feel every family must have one

OP you can get a new mail order leg here. Hopefully he'll enjoy many more years of housework without the cursing in his ears!

www.spares2you.co.uk/henry-hvr200/?gclid=CjwKCAiAz--OBhBIEiwAG1rIOglWmWW6a8vc_IXPhP19aX58R-gCLQyERfWKeZop8OXqpA-Pnf5HfxoChlEQAvD_BwE

The bedroom roller blind. The cord popped out of its fitting shortly after it was put up and I just can't be arsed. It can still go up and down, you just have to hold it a certain way to make sure the little beads on the cord are aligned with the mechanism.

In our old flat only two out of the four hob rings worked. We were there for seven years and I grew so used to it that even now, two years since we moved into our house with the brand new cooker, I don't think I've ever used the left rings

@ProperVexed

Me!

Our hallway light. It's those 4 pin clip on types, one second it's on, then off, on again for long enough to think it's working properly, then off it goes!!! So frustrating!

@TupilaLilium

Bathroom light on a string. You have to pull the string between 1 and 500 times for it to catch and the light comes on.

Our bathroom light won't turn off.

@Clovacloud

The floor. In a moment of lockdown madness we ripped up all the shitty laminate to get to the floorboards and I then painted them white because I saw it looking fabulous in magazines.

Turns out white only works if you have killed your whole family and don’t own a dog. It looks so beyond awful now, think shitty white - we’re just ignoring it. I miss the laminate

Colour swatch your dog’s hair and your local mud. Repaint the floorboards dog-mud shade. Simples! 😁 (We tiled a bathroom completely white to sell it. It was a constant battle keeping it pube hair and dust free for viewings. We tiled our next bathroom floor dark grey. 😉)

@SilverHairedCat

Henry is an utter bastard even with all his wheels intact. We traded him in for a new super powerful trades vacuum. Looks similar, but is suitable for cleaning up an actual construction site. I fucking love it.

Currently, the broken thing in the house is the curtain rail above the the patio door. It's hanging off precariously but it can fuck off until I think of a way to deal with it as it's the second time in a month with completely different drill holes each time.

Which vacuum did you get please?

The washing machine leaks every time it’s used.

@Yebbie

I'll start. We have a three legged Henry Hoover, and any time anyone hoovers you hear lots of banging and "fuck offs" as it falls over every 3 seconds. It's been like it for five years and rather than replacing it we all have just grown to accept our disabled Henry.

What's that broken thing in your house that everyone just accepts and lives with, despite how annoying it may be? I feel every family must have one

Sorry, this made me laugh out loud..... ..... Thanks....

I've got an oven with a broken top oven/grill, I miss cheese on toast (it's possible in the oven but not as good) but will prob keep it until it completely dies.

One of our taps is a bit loose in the hole and turns if you're not careful, tried tightening, no improvement, can't be bothered to take it apart.

I've also got a garage roof with a hole that I keep forgetting about and then remembering and thinking "oh yes I must do something about that" and then forgetting again over and over, I must admit I enjoy the forgetting times. The garage isn't attached to us and we only use it to store our lawnmower (also broken, now I remember, the handle comes out unless you hold it one particular way but it still works and I hate gardening so don't want to spend money on anything related!) so it's quite easy to ignore. I hate the garage, I'd rather have a parking space.

We used to have one window with an inch gap at the top and another with a bullet hole (a kid shot it with an air rifle we think) but I finally had those done this year after 10 years putting up with them! I was even surprised how cheap the repair was! Why do we do it?

Leaky kitchen tap. I've tied a bobble from one tap handle to the other so it's shut off tight

Love the variety of this thread. A lived-in home is one that's slowly falling to bits

Most of ours involve the kitchen.

Light bulb in the extractor hood is dead.
Back rings of the gas hob haven't turned on in over a year.
Handle on the oven door keeps popping out at one side.
Kitchen lights either flicker or don't work.
Basil plant should have been put out its misery 4 months ago.
And smaller scale - my noise-cancelling headphones are badly shedding around the padded ears and drive me mad.

Dh and I moved into what was the attic space. As the attic room the windows just had those office style blinds that don't really block any light so we put cardboard up to as a temporary measure while we decided what we wanted.

Yep.

Still got cardboard curtains two and a half years later.

@minipie

Dodgy flush which sticks Radiator in the downstairs loo which doesn’t work so it’s freezing Mystery smell in the cellar Sash window which drops itself shut

We spent eleventy billion pounds on a house refurb and still have these issues. In fact the radiator was fine before

Me too! Had a huge renovation and there are still things that are not quite right including a cold radiator…

This thread has cheered me up as it’s good to know that I am not the only person who seems to always have issues with something in the hose not working properly…

So many...... In my first house I had the wall at the side of the staircase re-plaster-boarded - and then lived with it for years until I put the house on the market and actually got someone to come in and plaster it, then I painted it. At one point someone drew a wall and a 'where's Wally' head sticking over the top - it was there for years and I genuinely stopped noticing any of it! My parents always said they only ever decorated when they were moving, so maybe it's in the genes....

In our current house (now with a DH and two DC) there are still a few things. The utility tap is a single mixer and the left hand knob broke. The only spare DH had was the wrong side, so you have to turn that knob the wrong way to get water. We all know but it fools everyone else.....

We also inherited a wooden corner cupboard when we bought the house. Somehow the lock was fitted so you turn the key towards the lock to unlock it, and vice versa. Always catches me out!

The shower doesn't work in our family bathroom. It never gets used as kids have baths and DH and I use our ensuite, and fixing it would mean redoing the whole bathroom as the old owners did that moronic thing of tiling over all the plumbing. I do try to remember to warn guests and invite them to use our shower instead, but there have been a few occasions where someone has suffered through stone cold water but been too polite to say anything!

Currently, the broken thing in the house is the curtain rail above the the patio door. It's hanging off precariously but it can fuck off until I think of a way to deal with it as it's the second time in a month with completely different drill holes each time
Yep same in our house, the wall above the french doors looks like it's been shot at with a machine gun with all the bloody holes where I've tried to refix the curtain rail . Finally managed to find a bit of wall that actually holds a screw. Dd informed me a couple of days ago that the curtain rail in her bedroom has come loose .

Two of our toilets don't have toilet seats. They broke and are not having easily replaced due to type of toilet. Have been this way at least two years.

Oh god EVERYTHING

The tumble drier that lives in the side porch because we never got round to plumbing it in (so to speak) so it vented out the back door, bust by DS and his autistic tumble drier fixation. That was about 3 months ago.

The fridge that does still keep things cool but now ALL the door pockets/shelves have broken off so we have a row of teetering milk and juice bottles lined up against the salad drawer, which have to be removed each time you want a carrot. That's been months too.

The kitchen floor tiles are crazed and one or two have missing chunks. Every so often I use some spare grout (I make mosaics, sadly not with kitchen floor tiles) to fix the wobbly bits but it never lasts long.

One of the kitchen cupboard doors lost a panel years ago - handy really, you just reach right in for what you want rather than going to the bother of opening the door and at least half the crappy knobs have fallen off, necessitating opening the adjacent drawer or door in order to get into the one you want to. 11 years we've lived here.

The radiator has some sort of loose metal surround that DS likes to clang while he's having his tea. I don't know why the radiator has this metal grille thing anyway, none of the others do. Oh maybe because it's in the (possibly illegal) extension. This is a shitey house.

DS (yes him again) has picked some loose or crumbly plaster away from around his windowsill and now there's actual exposed brick. In his bedroom. Sometimes I think this will somehow get reported to social services.

the toilet seat in our en suite is the cheapest crappiest one imaginable - I think it came with the loo that was installed a few years back when we had a new suite put in and I would imagine the understanding was that the customer would replace the flimsy plastic seat and lid ASAP with something nicer. We didn't. Lid is now broken.

When we moved in there was a surfeit of those horrible vertical blinds made of stiff scratchy fabric that I always associate with dentist surgeries. I hated them so much I just went out to John Lewis in a panic and bought armfuls of ready-made curtains that looked like they might fit. They didn't and I turned up the bottoms with dozens of safety pins. They're still there, some of them have rusted in. One of the curtains was never fitted, can't remember why, it's still under the stairs.

There's more, I'm sure. God this is a depressing thread! But sort of cathartic.

If the shower points at a certain angle the water comes out under our son's skirting board. It would take literally 3 minutes to reseal it but instead we're just careful which way we point it....!

So many to choose from here at chez moneypit:

The door handle fell off the inside of the bathroom door 18 months ago and has never been replaced -door left ajar when only us at home

The bathroom lock (useful for trying to pull the door to close it in the absence of above handle) doesnt actually lock but looks like it does

The doorbell which worked for a week then gave up the ghost and cannot be revived as electrics too confusing

The cistern that wouldn't fill up so bought a replacement push thingy and now it takes 30mins between flushes to work again

The intermittent leak under the kitchen sink

The shed door that expands and gets stuck so we can't ever lock it as we needed prise it open

The glossed anaglypta in the porch which is bumpy and cracking in places

Oh god...this is quite a list and sounds like we don't care but having bought a georgian probate property that hadn't been updated since the 70s we've done well in the 5 years we've been here - when we bought the house the washing machine was outside in a perspex lean-to laughingly called the utility room on the particulars!

Bathroom door latch. The door has a handle but the latch isn't there and hasn't been since we moved in 5 years ago. The door has a separate bolt lock, if needed, so we've never bothered to fix it. It does irritate me a bit though!

@Vapeyvapevape

Currently, the broken thing in the house is the curtain rail above the the patio door. It's hanging off precariously but it can fuck off until I think of a way to deal with it as it's the second time in a month with completely different drill holes each time Yep same in our house, the wall above the french doors looks like it's been shot at with a machine gun with all the bloody holes where I've tried to refix the curtain rail . Finally managed to find a bit of wall that actually holds a screw. Dd informed me a couple of days ago that the curtain rail in her bedroom has come loose .

Yep. We have two curtain rails like this too. One is sometimes so slopey the curtains draw themselves open! The wall above DS's bedroom curtain rail similarly resembles the wall in front of a firing squad and I've sworn that once it comes off the wall again, that's it. It's curtains. For curtains.

A fridge freezer with split door seals meaning the doors don’t always shut and we get icebergs protruding from the ice tray or warm milk.
Also the door opens the opposite way it should to sit where it is.

We have a really huge , random nail in the bedroom wall over our bed left by the last owners five years ago, not a broken object but why don’t we remove it?

We have just replaced a toilet seat after 3 years by having a complete new toilet as the seat was a specific, weird shape and would have cost £150 just for a new seat.

Oh shit, I know another one which is a ticking time bomb - the overflow hole thing in the bath. There's a metal fixing over it which has come unglued and I think the pipe behind has too, so any water that sloshes out is probably going straight onto the cement floor under the bath. That's not good is it?