Trivial things that annoy you about your house

pictonroad, will be immensely cheaper if you can get replacement sealed glass units for the existing frames.

But even then, £2.5 k to replace two normal windows?! That seems a lot when I can get a window knocked into a fully glazed door and made good for £1k.

Loft lights should be high up so only be reachable when up the ladder – or in the loft like mine.

Totally agree, and when a qualified leccy is in the house this will happen, but until then the tape is staying 😀 .
I don’t do electrics, since I witnessed my dad being launched off a step ladder whilst fitting a ceiling light.

I thought this was normal TBH.

Mainly the floor boards upstairs, they are cracked, creaky and in desperate needs of replacing or repairing. Not enough to pull all the carpet up and start again though, not quite…

Toilet roll holder mounted on the only wall available which is behind you when you need it.
Shower drips and is corroded in place at one temp which is very slightly too hot for summer so I have to change the boiler settings instead.
Garden is shaded by a neighbour’s Eucalyptus tree which sheds lots of leaves that don’t rot and need sweeping off my grass.

I’m moving, it’s all too much.

Toilet roll holders seem to be a minefield.
If it’s fitted in a convenient place for me, Mrs TTP and Miss TTP will not be able to reach, or get burned by the radiator when reaching for the paper.
If fitted in a position for the ladies I knock the roll off the holder with my elbow and I have to root around on the floor to retrieve the paper.
Guess where they are fitted in our house?

pictonroad – Member

£2.5k to replace them though, can’t bring myself to do it whilst the windows are otherwise fine.

That’s quite some cost! We had new double glazing put in our house last year and it came to £5k including a new front door, a new skin for the back door (so we could put a cat flap in it), decent size French windows and every other window in the house.

Reading this thread has made me feel better about the state of our house, to be honest!

jfletch – Member

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.

Ours has this too. Just assumed it was normal, but yeah it does lead to the odd ‘bollocks, forgot to turn the hall light off’ moment….

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.

You can keep your current frames and just replace the sealde units. We did the same job at our last house. The units themselves cost very little – I am having some 2m x 1m sealed units made and they only cost just over £100 each.

You can prise the beading out with a flat scraper or something similar, and remove the unit intact. You’ll need to measure the length, width and thickness of your current unit, and then order un-leaded replacements from your local glazing company.

Suddenly I’m interested.

Quote was for complete windows but if I can just replace the glass myself then that would be brilliant. I’d probably just do the large panes.

off to investigate.

The door on our fuse box is too tight, so it only shuts if you thump it. One of these days it’ll crack when I do it…

Swap it for one of the “too loose” ones? 🙂

It worries me that if dodgy DIY – either in the planning or execution – is so common, are we unintentionally, unwittingly doing things that some owner down the line will look at and think “what the *** were they thinking?!”? I don’t think so, but presumably the previous owners thought the same…

Norfolk Latches on every single door. Only one of them fitted properly to gracefully close.

We have some capping on the framework of the conservatory which is loose, two glazing units have just started to get condensation in them, the oven trips the main RCD if switched off too quickly.

The pipes in the second bedroom rattle if number one son jumps off his bed (being five, this happens a lot)

We’ve got a price for the glazing to be replaced, and at some point, I will get the pipes fixed, but the carpet was new when we moved in (less than two years ago).

The kitchen will hopefully be redone this year so that should solve the oven issue 🙂

I’ve got to be honest though, I love our place 🙂

PictonRoad – be careful when you prise the beading out – it is very easy to mark the UPVC. Attack the longest length first, and try for the middle of the length so there is some flex. I’d link to a YouTube vid but I’m at work so can’t find something suitable…

No hose-tap outside… When we bought the house I wasn’t into mountain biking at all, the lack of it didn’t really seem like an issue… 😐

Moss falling off the roof.

But the main one is… SEAGULLS!!! 👿

The landing floor is not flat so if you make a visit during the night, the floor makes you feel woozy whether you are or not.

No visitor parking. Went from a house with a driveway for 5 cars… to room for one.

Light switches in front room are off in the wrong position (compared to pretty much every other simple switch in the house) – but as I fitted them that’s my fault.
The state of bodge of the whole house tho really. Stuff worked for years after I bought the house but as I’ve had to fix things the faff involved is a pita. Trying to fix a section of overflow pipe yesterday, he’s used various size of pipe and connectors and sanded down the end of plastic pipes to fit smaller connectors. Grrr.

Quote was for complete windows but if I can just replace the glass myself then that would be brilliant.

Haven’t done the work myself but watched some glazier mates replace the blown units at my house (quite a few of them) looks a piece of piss to do.

We also have a light switch that does nothing. At all. It’s live, but buggered if I can find what it switches!

I used to live in a cottage that had a fused switch in the kitchen that seemed to do nothing – switch it on and a little red light came on but seemingly nothing else happened.

Ignored it for years then one day got curious and switched it on and off a few times – nothing, but this time left it on

Got home from work to discover that

a) after years of having to light fires winter and summer to get hot water from the back boiler…. it turned out I’d had an immersion heater all along

b) I was able to ascertain that without even entering the house because the thermostat on it was obviously borked the water tank was on a rolling boil and steam was billowing out through the roof

If the beading on the windows is external, you will probably find the glazed units are glued into the frames. I tried to get one out recently and then had a google, looked like I would have to break the glass to get it out…

The handle on the door to the utility room is designed in such a way that unless you are careful you take the skin off your knuckles on the frame when you open it.

The exposed/polished floorboards in the hall are not straight. Whichever victorian originally did them got them wonky so that at one end there is a wedge shaped one so they match up to the dining room door. In fact very little of my house is straight. The lounge is not square, and many of the picture frames and door frames aren’t either. It is ok except if you actually use a spirit level things look weird so I end up doing everything by eye so it matches the wonky angles.

😯

People have died in that scenario before*, which gave rise to the requirement that immersion elements have their own internal ‘stat as well as the cyclinder ‘stat.

* plastic loft water tank collapsed due to the heat and a large quantity of boiling water came through the ceiling and onto the unfortunate sleeping residents below 🙁

The draining board part of the sink should actually be called a pooling board.

+1

Kitchens cheap and worn out

kitchen isnt cheap but is starting to show its age. we were supposed to get it done before christmas…even had the price quoted and everything was picked out but we’ve had to cancel it…in the meantime the burn mark on the worktop next to the sink stares back at me (wife put a hot pan on there without realising…or so she says)

Bathrooms small.

cant even swing a cat in there

Creaky bloody stairs..

some of the are staring to get this way

Garden is shaded by a neighbour’s Eucalyptus tree which sheds lots of leaves that don’t rot and need sweeping off my grass.

neighbour wont trim it down so when the branches lean over my fence i always have to cut them back. then when the leaves fall off they land on the canopy and then clog up the canopy drain. one day i’m going to clean out the guttering on the canopy and dump the remains on his garden to teach him a lesson
kitchen door keeps sticking in the frame. no matter how much i skim off the edges it still does it like as f the wood is still alive and growing
door threshold strips keep popping up no matter how much i screw them back down
bedroom and bathroom door hinges screws keep coming loose
light switch at bottom of stairs…the one on the right controls the light at the top of the stairs and the left switch controls the light at the bottom of the stairs…i’m sure they should be the other way around
some of the floorboards in the main bedroom and box room are loose…whenever you step on them the heating pipes beneath them rattle

other than that all else is ok. but i kind of forgive the house for some of its issues as its over 100 years old….plus its up for sale at the moment

cant wait to get it sold

My current house is a modern townhouse, on the end of the block, the architit added a nice protruding box window in the living room, with a lead roof to it. This means all the rain that drips off the side of the building falls onto this and at times is so loud you have to turn the radio/tv up v loud,t hat and becuse it is a hoose over 3 floors every door has fn closure on it!

“Creaky bloody stairs..”

i used to have creaky stairs….

clad them in oak ….- they are silent now !

In fact very little of my house is straight

my place was built in 1994

one wall is 17 degrees away from 90. no idea why, it makes no sense, always realised it was a bit squint, but the exact 17deg was confirmed when I got the plans for the building.

next niggle is going to be replacing the balcony, which is basically decking suspended out of the 3rd floor, supported by 2 steel beams about 80cm apart. all modern decking recommends 40cm (iirc) centres, and I need to screw it from below. that’s gonna be a complete HSE scaffolding job to affix a total of 20 decking planks that are 180cm long.

The kitchen is too far away from the lounge, wifey can’t hear me calling for a beer.

The “pooling board” woes remind me of another mindless thing the former owners of our house did.

They installed a kitchen sink with absolutely zero draining area, just a standard stainless sink with a lip above the work surface, that’s it. So when you do the washing up there is nowhere to put anything to dry unless you want a pool of water on the work surface and floor.

Cretins

We now have some hidous bettaware contraption the suposedly drains into the sink but in reality just pools water than then goes minging.

The insanely narrow, badly-carpeted, broken-floorboarded and assymetrical perfect storm that is the squeeze-space we call the ‘lobbypassagewayboxcupboardbathroom-kitchen-thingy-intersectionbastard’ and it hosts sharp-cornered picture rails, doors that open upon each other, a head-height giant glass globe in a fishing net, a ball-high collapsible mop-cum-trebuchet and other hellish devices. All part and parcel in our badly-converted victorian madhouse.

So how is it annoying? Well, 8 out of 10 elbows, shoulders and ribcages detest it. It’s a fekn russian-roulette/pinball/gauntlet wormhole where physical forces collide with laughing madness – suitable only for stumbling, loud cursing, unamused funny bones and swelling hematomas. Abandon vain plans of getting where you wish to go, just set off and expect bother at best, a trip to the docs at middling. Add another person to the mix and it’s a literal war of flailing, apologies, more injuries and very, very frank disappointment.

The bathroom floor tiles laid on top of fibreboard without the use of tile spacers.

The gloss paint applied to some 120 year old sandstone window frames causing the surfaces to ruin and spall.

The render on the exterior walls of the extension that not only continues below the DPC, but about a foot underground!

Stop me now…

The bastard starlings traipsing about on the roof and guttering right above our bedroom.

I don’t get a view of the lake from my study. That and a daft entrance hall design for a large house.

I too have leaded effect double glazing, I also have the stupid white plastic dividers inside the units of some windows to make them look fake oldy worldy…..

Why!

When we refurbed the kitchen we bought some blingy lights that were not cheap. Blingy light 1 blows the little halogen lamps in it faster than an uzi fires bullets and Blingy light 2’s transformer has gone pop so at least it doesn’t expend lamps likes its brother.

The kitchen is too far away from the lounge, wifey can’t hear me calling for a beer.

God yes. That reminded me, the wormhole/gauntlet effectively traps 90% of soundwaves so verbal communication from kitchen to remaining household and back is just a constant game of increasingly angry Chinese shouts. Stress levels get HIGH way before we realise why. By then it’s too late, the wormhole has won, one of us has to risk navigating the squeezeway to make self heard, which is the ideal opportunity for the cupboard frame or picture rail corners or floorboards or carpet or mysterious glass globe (a gift from *maybe seafaring* Buddhist ex-neighbour) to get a few knocks in before you get a hard slap square in the jewels from the pop-up mop. “I said TEA, TEAAAAAAGHH!!*sob*!!’

Maccruisekeen – You’re lucky! I once got a BA crew to smash a door down to gain access to a house to check that after it was rung in as a roof on fire….