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

Not much as DH likes to deal with things.

The boiler however likes to drop pressure every few days and needs topping up before it comes on. DH has arranged for the boiler man to do umpteen things to it to no avail.

We also have a door handle which falls off and has done for over 10 years but it’s on the spare room so we forget about it for months at a time. I said I would find a handyman to change all the doorknobs so that hasn’t happened of course, DH is the only one who does all his jobs, I only do the ‘top of the list’ jobs.

Extractor hood. It doesn't stay closed after use unless you hold it in place for upwards of 10 minutes. We've taking to tying it closed using the cupboard handles either side.

We've had a toilet leak in the en-suite, a shower leak in the main bathroom and planned on retiling the downstairs loo flooring all prior to COVID. Due to lack of manpower we've now had no flooring down in any of these rooms since March 2020.

We had the plumber in before Christmas and he fixed the dodgy toilet, replaced the kitchen faucet with a much nicer one, unclogged a slow drain and fixed the two bathroom faucets that were slow dripping. It was heaven to have it all done!

Probably me!

@HesterShaw1

The oven. I have to keep it shut when it's on with a stool.

Mine was like that, I think I've fixed it (so far so good) but we'll see how long my 'fix' lasts

Tap in the kitchen. Constantly dripping. Has been for over a year. It needs a new washer.

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

Loads of silly little things - new build but missed off snagging list !

En-suite door has never closed
En-suite toilet seat didn’t fit (now broke)
Bedroom window won’t open
Hall radiator won’t come on
Half of patio door won’t open
Garden gate is stuck solid
Garage window frame is not attached
All plugs get stuck in place and need to be plungered out

I could go on !

All the door knobs in the entire house have to be turned the wrong way to open them. We moved in 2 years ago but haven't got round to sorting them. Some day. Maybe.

@PickAChew

Tiled kitchen floor that looks like someone has taken a hammer to it. Can't take it up and replace it without ripping out the whole kitchen. That's a project a long way down the list.

I feel your pain- I’m in exactly the same situation and can’t work out how to sort it out without causing complete chaos (and vast expense).

Floor boards outside DD(3)'s room. If you're in her room when she falls asleep, or you want to check on her in the night, it's a strange dance routine avoiding the middle of the floor as you go through the doorframe. I have successfully replaced my loo seat though. I got sick of DH saying it was fine when he wasn't the one falling off the seat.

Bloody hell what isn't?!

Two panes of glass in the porch door is broken
The front door is broken to a point you have to double check the barrel's not fallen off.
The bottom step's cracked under the carpet and I have to keep a plant pot on top of it so no one stands on it.
The radiator in the hall's bitten the dust.
The flint in the built in gas fire's broken so you have to light it manually and gas just free flows until you catch it.
TV cabinet glass is cracked and off it's runners.
Sideboard in the back room is so wonky that the door hangs at a 45 degree angle.
The back window's blown.
The chipboard wallpaper has never been replaced since we bought the house and our cat McFuckface used to scratch the bottom so it had to be cut right down.
The integral fridge and freezer in the kitchen are both SO OLD that the seals are utterly useless and have to be kneed every time you shut them.
The oven has to be turned off and on every time you use it.
The tiled floor underneath it was so damaged that we lay lino on top of it.
The washer's fucked.
The hot water tab is the wrong way around on the sink.
Two of the hobs on the induction don't work.
The extractor fan buzzes and doesn't seem to be attached to anything and the skirting board in the kitchen is glued on.
The downstairs toilet backs onto the garage and is so cold that you can't use it between October - March.
The alarm in the downstairs toilet intermittently goes off and despite having three different alarm men come out no one can figure out why.
The snug has an uneven floor to a point the children can't play on it without their toys rolling away.
God don't even get me started on the garden.

I begrudge fixing it because we want an extension and fingers crossed we'll hopefully be starting it this summer.

The boiler. It goes off ALL THE TIME! Easy enough to fix but it's annoying. It's been like that for about 10 years.
The metal joining floor thing between the hall and the kitchen. It's not attached to the floor so it moves around. We all just kick it back! That's been about 3 years.
There's quite a few other things aswell. Should just knock the fucker down really.

Rented flat, the landlord paid for a professional oven clean at the start of my tenancy and they cleaned the numbers off the dials for the hob and also the little diagrams which show which ring each knob is for. Actually took me a few months to notice so I felt too embarrassed to complain.
(Toilet seats are okay though)

Lots!
We do have someone hopefully coming to fix the leaky window. It's been leaking about 3 years and has had a couple of repairs, but we've now decided it needs a new one in.

Our boiler has an intermittent fault where it doesn't turn off. So the house heats up to sauna temperatures unless we manually switch the boiler off. After we've done that it works normally for between a couple of days and a few weeks. It's done this since we moved in 12 years ago, but I do think it's getting worse.
The problem is that we did have someone come to look at it. Apparently it can be one of several parts but they can't tell unless it's actually wrong at the time. We've never managed to get an engineer here when it's wrong.

Wobbly toilet seat too. It’s one of those all in one things that you have to dismantle the bathroom to get at. I tightened it up years ago as I found a video showing me exactly what to do but I can’t find it again and I can’t remember now.

Broken socket, I’ve even bought a replacement. I thought it would be easy to fix then I got caught in a YT rabbit hole of house fires caused by bad DIY and it put me off.

I’ve got 10 (I know) spotlights in the kitchen. Very rarely do I have them all working at the same time. 5 is my tipping point.

The toilet seat! You go for a ride on it!

@ooherrmissus14

It was the bath panel in our bathroom until our cat learned that if he sat on his back paws and banged on it with his front paws it sounded like one of those massive drums you get in an orchestra. Lovely being woken up by that at 3am every day. It had been broken for years but took just two months of our percussionist cat to force us to get it replaced.....

This is awesome!

The bathroom loo seat. It has never sat properly, despite buying the supposedly no movement seals, and slips sideways whilst sat on it. I hate it, we have a new loo seat to go on it, but dh won't replace it as it's a pain to do (it's a built in cistern so lots need to be removed just to get to the bolts) So we all just put up with it and get occasional surprises when it moves more than expected.
A kitchen cupboard door fell off its top hinge and hit me on the shoulder. It's a really well built 1980s kitchen, solid wood doors, so quite heavy. Dh did try to fix it but sadly the carcasses are chipboard so brittle and the hinge would come lose after a few weeks, so that was taken off and now we have no door.

Not too bad but one of the small door panels in the kitchen has fallen off. Needs to be glued back so small job really

@JorisBonson

The hot and cold on the kitchen tap is the wrong way round. We're just used to it now

We have this too! I have no idea why.

The flush button on the loo needs to be jiggled otherwise the tank doesn't refill.

Nope. Never do this. Mend everything straight away. All the above would drive me nutty : especially stubbing toe on bath panel, or pulling toilet light 500 times. Nope, would only do it once.

The shower handle - it’s an old fashioned style with a tap to turn for temp and a longer handle to turn it on or off. The on/off handle screws in, but the thread went and it no longer stays in, so whenever we want to turn it on you have to get the handle put it in the hole and then take it out once on. It’s really irritating, but it’s an old shower so there’s not easy fix and will probably mean replacing the whole shower system, so we just ignore it!

Everything.

The cold shower which Dd goes mad about. And in the same bathroom the sink tap which only runs hot ( great for doing teeth) if only the shower and tap would change places…..🙄

The kitchen taps l can’t even begin to describe. The freezer draw which has broken and is held together with parcel tape.