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

The downstairs toilet. You can lock the door, but you can't unlock it again, you WILL get stuck and will have to shout for help.

Toilet seat in the en suite - it’s a soft close but somehow got knocked off its bracket and now won’t go back on properly so it hovers about 2 inches above the bowl until you sit on it!

Sliding shower door - one of the rollers has sheared off so you have to use both hands to tilt it to slide it open/closed.

Kettle - the switch has broken off but you can put it back in and still use it as long as you hold it right!

Toilet seat. I did actually buy a new one but it’s been sat in the hallway for 6 months 😬

Bath plug kept popping up after being popped down. (Hate those stupid pop-up plugs.) Plumber was £80 call out + cost of materials - cheaper to measure and get a replacement, but have lacked the strength. So we've been plugging it with a wash cloth wrapped in a ziploc bag.

The security light at the back of the house has been hanging off the wall for about 15 years

Shower curtain pole that falls down every five mins in the kids bathroom.
Why we don't replace it with a glass door, I have no idea...

Just read PuppyMonkey's post above. I think we have the same downstairs loo.

Not broken as such but when we bought the house the old owner locked all the windows until we moved in
We unlocked most of them but 3 are still locked-weve lived here almost 6 years...

We have a mixer tap on the bath which only runs hot, or cold. This means the boiler has to be fiddled with to control the water temperature.
It generally sits at shower temp but this means doing dishes requires at least one boiled kettle.
It also means if I want a bath, I have to adjust the temp upwards or it’s no more than tepid.
Not good if I have a bath of an evening and then forget when I have an early shower next day.
Oh and the lever on the tap is back to front so when you want cold you have to turn it to the red dot and the blue dot is hot.
Also every floorboard upstairs creaks and drives me bonkers. Every one

My driveway gate has fell off so its propped up against the side of the fence and the dog keeps pissing off dog the street

I’m always jealous when l go to someone else’s house and evything works perfectly.

Excluding Sil’s, who hadn’t had a side on her bath for 6 years

Hey wobbly loo seat people - this was me for more years than I care to admit - and a thread here 6 months ago sent me towards Bemis self tightening thread loo seat. Got it at B+Q - very life enhancing. And doesn't budge a mm not even with my elephant arse. 👌🏼 Best £40 spent in a long while. The bits at the end of the threads snap off when it's the right tightness and that's that. No faffing about and also easy to clean as not loads of fiddly bits.

Oh yes the loo seat.. lovely new bathroom fitted 2 years ago.. with a seat you can't replace..have to put a whole new loo in. DS2 broke the seat fixings within a month. I keep popping it back on but sometimes I just dump the seat on the floor...

The oven grill works ...when it feel likes it!
You can't shower AND use the microwave at the same time... no idea why!

Ceiling lights on ours and DD1's bedrooms. Been several years now with standing lamps.
Extractor fan in bathroom. Drips on you after a shower and trips the electric if you turn it on.
Bathroom light pull is choosy when it works. I have a spare waiting for when it finally fails!
We've just replaced the downstairs bathroom radiator after freezing in it for 7 years. It's toasty now.

The wobbly toilet seat - no matter how often it's tightened or replaced.
The light at the front door that has started strobbing madly as you try to get your key in the lock.

These are so funny!

Months ago I got home to find our letterbox on the floor outside, and a large rectangle shaped hole in the door.

I came in the house to find a large Amazon envelope that the delivery driver had clearly been overconfident about fitting it in. The other side of the letter box was wrapped around the parcel.

It's low down on the door so each time we tried to fit it back on, whichever side we tried to fit would push the other sided half of the letter box back out again, so to put it back on securely we had to open the door half way, crouch down with the door clamped between our knees and 'bash' at the two letter box halves together for them to fit tightly. We left it like this for months, and every time we got post it was followed by a rattle of either one or both the halves falling off.

Funny thing is I work from home in the living room so every time I saw the post man or a delivery person come up the street I would be there on the other side of the door listening to the gasp of them thinking they had fucked our letterbox up and watch as either they made a half arsed attempt to put their hand through the hole to pull the letter box back or just not give a monkeys and walk off 😂

DP glued it back on just before Christmas and although it's surprisingly stuck, it's not half as fun

Loo seats are the WORST! I didn’t realise there wasn’t just a couple of standard sizes. Last time we had to replace ours I ended up having to buy 5 (4 online) because they were all slight off fitting.

In the end the kind man in Plumbase took pity on me as I went in with the old loo seat to find a replacement, and he found me one that fit. I have never cleaned a loo seat as throughly, as when I had to take it into a shop

My list is LONG!!!

The plate rack beside the sink has several spikes that regularly slice open parts of my hand
The kick board on the bottom of our cupboards is loose and falls off if you touch it with a sweeping brush.
We live in France and managed to get pretty substandard but expensive bathroom furniture when we renovated two bathrooms - one shower doesn't work because the temperature regulator broke off, the other has a spray attachment that squirts water out everywhere but the part it should and the upright pipe that holds the main shower head is attached to the wall with string. The plug for the bath was totally the wrong size and the plugs in the sinks are supposed to be press to open and close, but they never open so mostly are unscrewed sitting beside the sink. The 'new' bathrooms are three years old.

We are so used to things not quite working that when we had a minor leak in the downstairs loo, i ignored it for 24 hours until I walked into the outside lean to where the boiler is, backs onto the downstairs loo.. there was hot water squirting out of the boiler and the room was inches deep in water which had found its way through a small hole in the wall into the downstairs loo.. oops!!
Our front gate blew off in a storm 4 years ago... still not fixed
We bought a kind of 'car tent' / temporary car port for our ancient camper van, it has blown across the road several times and the fabric is now completely shredded.. it's at the bottom of the garden so I ignore it.

We have a bell at our front gate - it has never worked... we often miss parcels because they ring and we don't answer... my husband got a new one, that didn't work either. i have now ripped them both off the wall and thrown them in the bin.. the gate is off the hinges so it's not like it is ever shut!! The postie has to walk the extra 12 steps to the front door.
We had a pleasant enough patio area outside our kitchen door, we spent a considerable amount of time and money taking up the patio slabs (there are in an ugly pile about 10 feet away, taking up space that would be filled with logs), moving the scree, adding compost and planting turf, fencing around it so we could get some rabbits. The area is surrounded by walls and gets very little light and the blithering rabbits eat every blade of grass in about 5 days so now we have a fenced in mud patch outside of our kitchen door and no where to eat outside.

During the bathroom renovation, we discovered a pump buried in the garden which feeds a garden sprinkler system with seemingly no way of turning it on or off, and the water doesn't stop when we turn the main stop cock off.. eventually we found another tap to switch it off but still have no idea how the pump is connected.

There is a useless annex that basically blocks our view of the mountains and blocks our access to the main part of the garden.. the wiring is dodgy and when we have people to stay there.. the electricity goes off in heavy rain.. we tracked this down to a circuit that probably feeds some wiring in the garden that was supposed to be for garden lights.. they wiring is covered by concrete slabs and the wires are all exposed and not protected by tubing.

In the front garden, there are several pieces of tubing which seem to have been placed in the ground with the intention of putting in outside lights.. another abandoned project by the previous owners.

We have a metal roller shutter to cover some sliding doors and an electrified canopy that extends over the patio... they are both seemingly wired to the same place, with one just not connected.. it's like they put the second one in and couldn't be bothered to add another set of switches so just disconnected the first one.
The previous owners planted rampant bamboo in the garden which I spent 2 years smothering with plastic.. it just snuck off under the plastic and reappeared halfway down the garden. It gives me nightmares. Much of the rest of the garden is a nightmare too, filled with lots of bramble, self seeding acacia trees which seem intent on taking over the world, laurel which shoots up everywhere and ivy on every single surface, wall, under hedges, taking over the lawn. I hanker after the postage stamp garden I had in London where I could pretend I knew what I was doing and it only took half an hour to weed the entire thing!

I could go on... but probably best that I don't.. I do love my house, but I wish I had a magic wand, a handy man, a bucket of cash and a trailer load of patience!!

PS.. it's not a Chateau.. it's just a 3 bed house!

The bathroom light. DS2 pulled the string so hard it broke and it's been on ever since. For months!!

Our back door doesn’t shut properly unless locked as the latch on the handle doesn’t quite match up with the fitting on the frame. It’s so annoying but we’ve never sorted it in the 8 years it’s been an issue.

Well, if I was the Queen I would say "My second son "

@OneMoreWish

Toilet hinge on toilet upstairs is loose. As we have toilet downstairs it doesn't get used much. Tried tightening in past and hadn't worked . Every time anyone uses it slightest movement ( normally to reach toilet roll ) causes it to slide slightly and then the little legs on the seat come off the toilet bowl rim and it bangs down an inch slightly jolting/ panicking you each time. Been like that about three years and it's on the list of things to get done around the house

Same here. It has a tool that you tighten it with which DH has put somewhere 'safe' so he knows where it is when it's needed. However, he hasn't been able to remember for 3 years where he put it and tightening it by hand is useless- it is slack again within a few days.

Our bloody bastard bath mixer tap has dripped for at least five years. We finally purchased a replacement about three months ago, which is still sitting in its box in the bathroom. DP is capable of fitting it, he's just psyching himself up for it.

Boiler. It needs a new vessel whatever the fuck that is. Every few days I have to go and manually refill it with a screwdriver because it has cut out again