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Of course people have big problems with the plumbing or the roof etc, but this thread is about really trivial stuff.
In this house the cover on the fuse box keeps falling open. It stays up when I put it up but at some point later it falls open again.
The tsunami of shit from the manhole cover after a blockage last week has left me more traumatised than annoyed.
White. Why did I buy a white house?
Piss off, the lot of you.
😀
😳
It's in a cul de sac at the top of a hill, cold going down mornings, a killer after long road rides.
In my living room there are two ceiling lights. One close to the door (where the double light switch is) and one further away. The light switches are "the wrong way round" in that if I want to switch on the light closest to the double light switch then I have to flick the left hand switch, which in my mind should control the furthest away light.
I've lived in the house for 22 years and it still bugs me (and I've not yet been @rsed to rewire the switch 😛 )
The other adult that lives in it.
Light switch to the downstairs toilet is on the wrong wall - you can't actually reach it once you've opened the door.
You can't get from the kitchen into the dining room without closing the kitchen door first.
(It was built like this)
The draining board part of the sink should actually be called a pooling board.
Sinks have been made for hundreds of years and IKEA manage to make one without a fall back into the sink. 😡
A tiny kitchen fitted into a decent sized room - basically before it was sold the previous owners put just enough cupboards in there to be able to say it had a kitchen.
The plan was that'd be the first thing to get changed when moving in, but there have been 4 years of other priorities popping up and putting the kitchen on the back burner.
Fron 9.45am to 10.15am on a Sunday my road gridlocks as the local rugby club colt training session is on.
Cue stream of 4x4's, T5's and audis with single child in.
Repeated at 11.30am when they all get picked up.
The doorway into the second bedroom is ever so slightly narrower than the master bedroom. Consequently I keep stubbing my toe on the way in.
The 2 picture lights in the lounge stopped working so i took them apart.. then forgot where i put some of the screws and now they are half dangling off the wall.
In this house the cover on the fuse box keeps falling open. It stays up when I put it up but at some point later it falls open again.
Blu Tak
....nope....
About to start posting but realised there are too many of them and it will wind me up!
They'll get sorted one day...
The shower drips too. Not enough for you to notice when you've finished showering, but in the night it drips about once a minute.
Ours faces west so we don't get the sun in the garden on an evening & my mrs thinks you can only have a BBQ in the sun.
I may have to start having street BBQ's.
We also don't get the sun out back in the evening. The side of the house faces south and we have a huge 3 storey wall with not a single window. Stupid bloody builders used the same plan for every house in the row, rather than fitting stairwell windows (as per the plan we actually saw) on the end one like they did at the top of the street.
The door to the cellar is in the dining room.
Then it's a 90 degree turn to the stairs.
PITA when getting bikes out.
Kitchens cheap and worn out.
Bathrooms small.
Other than that i cant complain.
It's too big
Too much unpainted woodwork.
The previous owners had a wall in the living room skimmed but didn't do behind the radiator!!! Lazy bleeders!
The effin shower screen in the effin bathroom leaks like a ****.
That it's not possible to have conventional doorframes around most of our internal doors as the doorways are as far into the corners of rooms as possible.
Emphasised further by the two main bedrooms having a 20cm long 'alley' into the rooms, which also results in rooms where you need to do 10 corners when fitting coving or skirting board
Creaky bloody stairs..
I have walls and doors, that may not seem trivial but it is a one bed council bungalow (semi-detached) and for a house this size to have internal doors and walls is ****ing stupid, No mater where i am in the house if you turn around there is a door within one step away, and that door will open into a small room that will at most take 2 or 3 steps to cross till you hit the opposite wall. An open door will butt out into the room and take up space, and the width of the internal walls take up space. I've removed the doors so at least that's one less thing to piss me off and i'm about to remove the partition walls between the sitting room to hallway then hallway to kitchen - this will give me an open plan area for the above which is still less than the walk in pantry in my mates house 🙄 .
Whoever said small is beautiful wasn't describing 1990's council builds that's for sure.
....nope....About to start posting but realised there are too many of them and it will wind me up!
They'll get sorted one day...
This.
I sometimes make big lists of [u]Things I Am Going To Do![/u]
Then I apply a technique I adapted from PJ O'Rourke:
[img] 
[/img]
Non of the light switches are quite where they should be. They're not in weird and wacky places there just not quite where they should be. After 5 years living here I still have to pat around the walls to find them, the one at the bottom of the stairs I have to put a light on in another room otherwise I can't find it at all.
The other adult that lives in it.
This.
Then I apply a technique I adapted from PJ O'Rourke:
I have to dig that book up again!
[img] 
[/img]
A work of unbridled genius!
Lots of things annoy me about the house, many of which could be solved by me actually doing something about it. Usually though I find excuses not to, family stuff, bike stuff, rugby is on, I'm washing my hair etc.
there's a ridge in the living room carpet, the sofa is saggy. and the hall wallpaper is coming off. the bathroom and my bedroom are freezing. (frost in the morning on the inside of the window 😯 )
but it's free, and Chris is lovely ( in a far too large eats everything rugger player drunk sort of way 😆 )
😀
In this house the cover on the fuse box keeps falling open. It stays up when I put it up but at some point later it falls open again.
Mine does just that - found it vented to outside at some point in the ducting - so when the wind blows - clunk. The panel fell out- and I often lay in bed - wondering who/what was downstairs!
Blutack was the cure here!
I have a large French window that leads into the garden.. There's a small (stupidly small) when'll on the underside of the sliding door that keeps coming off the track and jamming. If you could see the size of the sliding door you would wonder why such a small wheel would actually hold the door up never mind on the track.. 🙄
The door into the living room is a French but each side is that bit too narrow to enter the room without hitting the door. A normal door with a latched side light would be so much better.
The tiles in my shower keep ungluing themselves ... 😡
It's rented, whilst half the country appears to have applied the N+1 rule to houses instead of bikes 😯
Not that trivial!
The kitchen floor tiles, which I helped choose and helped lay, are ugly. And the grouting, which I did, is rubbish. And all I can do is dislike it and think about how much it cost (too much) and how much time it took (too much).
However, before it was badly laid ugly tiles, it was carpet. In a kitchen ❓
The door into the living room is a French but each side is that bit too narrow to enter the room without hitting the door.
There's a load of houses round here with front doors like that... it would drive me mental! Squeeze awkwardly through half the door or faff around opening and closing both every... single... time...
Our house was plastered by a rubbish plasterer... there are hollow sounding raised patches everywhere. I've fixed a few of the bigger ones where we've redecorated, but the rest annoy me even though they're not really worth fixing on their own.
Plus the previous owners were enthusiastic but crap at DIY, but I get the impression that that's not unusual...
We have more light switches than lights. I know not why.
And the wooden fllors creak like a mofo!
The way property developers seem to think our little village is a good place to build lots more houses.
Actually that's not really a trivial thing at all.
[quote=stany ]We have more light switches than lights. I know not why.
Fairly normal isn't it? Off the top of my head I think we have 3 more switches than lights. Or do some of yours not do anything?
There are many small things and a good number of big things. So let's just settle on the electrics for now:
- Kitchen light is in the hallway. Which requires a trip through the sitting room….
- 2 x sitting room ceiling lights are wired "backwards" like allthepies.
- Stair light switches are wired so that one switch is always in the "on" position, even when the light is off.
- We can access the garage from within the house. The light switch for the garage necessitates me walking across the unlit garage to the opposite corner
- No light switch is like any other in the house.
Time for a rewire!
Ours faces west so we don't get the sun in the garden on an evening & my mrs thinks you can only have a BBQ in the sun.
I may have to start having street BBQ's.
So does ours and that's what we do.
Thankfully most of our niggles are just about gone, will look forward to burning the cholera trap we call a carpet in the living room, only kept because the (pet) rats liked to eat it, they're on their way out so new carpet time soon.
Have a few wonky light switches and some things to sort out but by and large the biggest bugbear is the 90% completed extension at the moment.
1. How much in debt is had made me.
2. How small it is.
3. Lack of room for any workshop.
Plus the previous owners were enthusiastic but crap at DIY, but I get the impression that that's not unusual...
I've addressed it now. But the previous owners blocked off the single toilet and made an opening for it into the bedroom, fine you say.
But, blocking off meant removing the door handles, leaving the door in place and wall papering over it.
And the opening? made the opening far too wide so no door would ever fit. Instead they fitted saloon bar style double swing doors. Louvred they were and didn't reach the floor or ceiling by miles.
put back to original state now.
Another fuse box niggle;
When a breaker trips, it hits the cover of the fusebox so although luckily it cuts the circuit, when you glance through the cover it all looks normal. (not really trivial, more dangerous so ended up prising off the cover)
My drive is about 1 in 4.
Previous occupants fitted a breakfast bar above the washing machine position, making it impossible to use the detergent tray. (now removed and a bit of rounded edge skillfully bodged into the cutout on the remaining worktop!)
Kitchen floor (laminate sheet style stuff) has been fitted so the pattern is repetitive and they must have done the measuring with a tape measure that only had marks every 10mm. Half the door frame cuts are about 5mm too big and not every the right shape (rather than cutting off the bottom of the door frame) and they cut out a big rectangle under the radiator, roughly cut it to fit under the pipes but put the wrong way round, so the pattern doesn't match.
Built a kitchen cupboard around the boiler in such a way that I have to dismantle it before it can be serviced.
We have shared parking area and the neighbour rents part of his to a mate to store his caravan, it's sat there for 3 years without moving (owner is pretty much on deaths door now). But it blocks our light in summer evenings for the last 30 mins while we should be enjoying the last beer.
Downstairs toilet is tiny. As in your shoulders are touching the walls when you stand up to pee. Useful if you've had a few drinks though, easy to stay propped up 🙂
Carpets are stained and marked but too expensive to replace right now. And one of the pipes in the wall makes popping/cclicking sounds when the heating is on. I don't always mind it though sometimes it's strangely satisfying to listen to when tucked up in bed on a cold morning with the heating on.
There's lots of little (and not so little....) things that we inherited when we bought our current abode.
Firstly the tiling in the downstairs toilet. It looks as though it was done by a five year old who had practiced with fridge magnets.
Secondly, we have a double power socket in the kitchen, recessed into the wall, tiled (better than the loo) on all sides. It's set vertically so that the sockets are one above the other, I just have no idea why this is the way it is.
Theres a corner of my garden cut out and given to the rear neightbour. Its not big 1m x 1m probably but because the fence comes in now it feels much bigger.
Another fuse box issue! When it rains from a certain direction, the water comes through the joint between the garage and the house and over the electrics/fuse box thus tripping it out. Not only effecting us but the house next door as we supply them too.
In winter our garden resembles a swamp as it drains so badly.
Mrs M loathes the checker plate tiles in the bathroom as they hold mud and look dirty all the time (I love them as they are very non slip).
(currently in rented whist we do up our new place, but...)
Our bathroom is really small, but has a bath, toilet, huge sink, bidet, and is very draughty...
Trying to bath a newborn (in a baby bath rested on bidet) and 5 year old in this hellish space is the sole cause for my agonising back ache I suspect..
This is why our new bathroom we're building should only have a hole in the floor and holes in the roof for water/excrement etc to fall out of and into...NO CLUTTER....
DrP
Previous owners extended our house adding a dining room making joining it to the sitting room with double doors. The light switch to the dining room is by these doors but in the sitting room. Best place for my TV is in front of these doors so can't use them so to turn on the lights to the dining room have to go down the long way around to the switch in the sitting room.
Our house's previous owner annoys me every time I go to do any work on the place. I'm very thankful he got someone in to do the roof, wall ties and windows. The coil of live wire dangling from the ceiling in our pantry being the least dangerous of his forays into amateur wiring.
Loo roll holder loose
towel rail loosa
front door frame needs replacing
back windows need doing
shed needs rendering
Oh yeah and 4 years ago we spent £25k on converting the attic to a master bedroom of a standard comparable with a boutique hotel with ensuite and views over the crake valley. We currently use it to store massive quantities of child related plastic shite.
We bought a project house, there are so very many things which annoy me, but the minor niggle that gets me every day is the pull switch for the bathroom light is about 3 feet from the door against the side wall, even after 6 months I still find myself scrabbling around just inside the door before I remember where that bloody switch is!!
This thread is actually having the reverse effect and making me grateful for some of problems I [i]don't[/i] have!
We have a breeze that comes from the back to the front of the house, through the gap in the living room down and straight onto my neck.
Can't locate the sauce. 😐
We have a nice big garage just to the rear of the house on the side. Unfortunately no modern car will fit through the gap between our house and the neighbours' fence to get to it!
Can't locate the sauce.
Don't think alcohol will help Kryton! 😉
Where houses are concerned alcohol ALWAYS helps.
Every time we spend money on anything in the house it takes MrsMC 3 weeks to damage, break, overload whatever it is. 👿
Height of me: 6'2"
Height of bedroom #1 and bedroom #2 doorways: 6'
Chances of fixing that: nil.
Bathroom fan always has an incoming draught, because it's located on a wall which forms a kind of alleyway which receives the prevailing wind. One day I might fit a flap vent. Maybe.
Number of sinks in kitchen: 0
The sink is in the "utility room".
Less annoying than it sounds, TBH.
Got a lounge which ticks all the STW boxes, i.e. woodburner.
It's perfectly sized for a room three times as large as our lounge.
Got about a million others.
Our burglar alarm has been going off for 15 months now. It went off at 2am on Christmas Day 2013 during a long power cut, we don't know the code, no one does. I removed the fuse for the siren, but you can still hear it in the cupboard under the stairs if you get close enough.
Ought to get someone out to shut it up.
This thread is actually having the reverse effect and making me grateful for some of problems I don't have!
Ditto (also bought a house with a "bit" of work needing done, your thread was inspiring...).
I see half of these and think "i'd just rip that out/deal with it". But that perhaps a side effect of living in an undecorated [strike]house[/strike] hole where every job for the last 5 months has ended up with "just get the jimmy bar and a hammer".
Still, moved onto positive "making things better" progress lately rather than ripping stuff out. Though having said that, all the windows are coming out this week (and hopefully new ones in!).
Oh, my fuse box lid does never stay shut mind 😉
We have more light switches than lights. I know not why.
Similar.
I have at least one remote relay toggle light switch that makes the remote relay toggle, but god knows what it's connected too.
I have 1 light inside the main door that appear to be permanently live with no switch. Fortunately it's all edison screw here rather than bayonet, so there's been a bulb in there not fully screwed in for 10 years. Proper 100W incandescent - may have to ebay that one day.
The double power sockets in the kitchen, I bet its an old cooker switch.
Our burglar alarm has been going off for 15 months now. It went off at 2am on Christmas Day 2013 during a long power cut, we don't know the code, no one does. I removed the fuse for the siren, but you can still hear it in the cupboard under the stairs if you get close enough.
You should be able to google the manual for your alarm and reset everything with the engineer code. Had to do this when the previous occupants didn't leave the pin.
Oo, that could work, ta!
We also have a light switch that does nothing. At all. It's live, but buggered if I can find what it switches!
Try looking outside for light fixings with no lights.
[img] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTRTD3K9QcsT6WS8mdrgWkQkav4oZwanScZ7BWdUNn9Gb9stogZ [/img]
My two front windows are double glazed white PVC, perfectly functional.
Except that, for reasons I will never fathom, they have this diagonal leading on them. They're large single units, it looks awful. It's inside the bloody units so I can't even pick it off.
£2.5k to replace them though, can't bring myself to do it whilst the windows are otherwise fine.
The light switch in the hall has one switch for the hall light and one for the landing light. Great.
The light switch on the landing has a switch for the landing light but none for the hall light downstairs.
Infuriating.
Everything else is a major niggle due to the generally half arsed nature of everything the previous owners ever did to the place.
It's not mine.....
Althoguh it is in 10 days time 🙂
The light switch in the hall has one switch for the hall light and one for the landing light. Great.The light switch on the landing has a switch for the landing light but none for the hall light downstairs.
This, except the landing light has one switch for the landing and one for the loft. I've had to tape the second one up to stop certain people leaving the loft light on for weeks at a time 🙄
My two front windows are double glazed white PVC, perfectly functional.Except that, for reasons I will never fathom, they have this diagonal leading on them.
Same for me but vertical/horizontal lines. Must have cost more but no point to them - the house is a normal looking 50s built one and not some sort of mock tudor thing which might be the reason some do it.
I've had to tape the second one up to stop certain people leaving the loft light on for weeks at a time
Loft lights should be high up so only be reachable when up the ladder - or in the loft like mine.