#22

A pointlessly small cupboard in the wall (seriously I think I could maybe get 1 shoe in there) in my dining room. I think it’s just a way for spiders to come into my house. It’s like a tiny Alice in Wonderland door, only instead of leading to a whimsical adventure it’s just dirty, dark and spidery. The door always stays closed.

#23

My bathroom has a porch.

#24

In a previous flat, which the landlady used to live in herself until her children had left home. The rest of the place was mostly fine, but she’d tried to do a luxury bathroom with twin sinks and stone tiles but got a total bodger to do it:

  • Extractor fan that was put in backwards, so if it rained it sprayed rain into the bath.
  • Shower that was set into the wall with the tiles, with no access to the shower mechanism. When the temperature control broke, it turned out that to fix it, all the tiles would have to come off the wall and be replaced and the landlady couldn’t be bothered. So you had to adjust the water temperature on the boiler
  • Toilet cistern was behind a wooden panel covered in the tiles, which was an improvement, but then some idiot had grouted over the screws to open it. So one day when there was a problem with the toilet, we had to chip off big chunks of grout to get it open
  • Fancy stone-effect tiles which turned out to be porous, but were also a magnet for picking up soap grime. They had some kind of coating painted on them, which had eventually worn off, and water was going through and leaking through to downstairs, and it took ages to figure out where the water was coming from. Rather than replace the tiles and fix the shower at the same time, the landlady bought a big tin of special tile varnish and repainted them. Seemed to fix the leak at least.
  • Two really tiny marble bowls on top a counter (of course made of the porous tiles) as sinks, instead of one normal sink set in. The taps didn’t work on one, so it was pointless really. The taps were also huge and set high above the sink, so it was really easy to accidentally spray yourself or the bathroom with water. Total pain to clean, and the water was pitting the marble on the working sink, making it even harder to get properly clean.
    *Bathroom door was also warped, and people would regularly get stuck inside.

Pretty much everyone who visited said “oh this place is so fancy! It seems so cheap!”, and then after they’d used the bathroom it changed to “I hate your bathroom”.

Several of the windows were also painted shut. Also, when the boiler was being serviced, the thermostat turned out to not be connected to anything. When we told the landlady, she said “oh I always wondered what that did. It’s really ugly anyway, maybe I should just get rid of it” and was surprised when we wanted a thermostat fitted.

4 Likes
#25

Had that for the first year of our current tenancy, such a pain in the arse.

Sorry, but that made me laugh a lot

3 Likes
#27

The extractor fan was like something out of Laurel and Hardy. One of my housemates fixed it, and then got a rent discount off the landlady, which encouraged him to fix other problems round the house. This would have been great if it hadn’t have taken him about a week to do each thing, and not emboldened him that he was the landlady’s favourite, so he could just move into the living room and stop everyone else using it.

Everyone else moved out in the end. It was a great flat at a good price apart from the stupid bathroom, but there was probably no getting rid of the other guy once he started fixing stuff.

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#28

yeah I got this - disposing of up to 3 baby slugs a night at the moment

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#29

House I lived in when I was in my 3rd year at uni had a basement kitchen, and a slug problem in winter. We used to put a thick line of salt all round the edge of the room at night. It must have looked like we were doing some kind of dark magic.

That house was grim. I lived in a nice place the previous year, and expected to stay there, but the landlord was very old and probably had the beginnings of dementia, and kept harassing us about imaginary unpaid rent/imaginary housemates, so we found a new house at very short notice. It seemed fine in summer when we moved in, but come winter turned out to have a serious damp problem and very dodgy plumbing. I was so glad to move out.

#30

Bars across the windows in the front room.

It’s a first floor apartment and there’s supposedly some HEALTH AND SAFETY GONE MAD that meant they had to put this bar across the window while they were building it. It’s only about an inch above the windowsill, so not a chance it would stop anyone from falling out, just seems completely pointless. The lady upstairs asked them to remove hers, but we completely forgot about it until we moved in.

It’s not an awful feature, it’s right at the bottom of the window and it just looks like a curtain pole, but can’t be arsed to remove it and have to fill the holes, etc cos it’ll just look a mess.

#31

Add the world’s shortest lace curtain to it.

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#32

The extractor fan :smiley: Proper Chuckle Brothers that.

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#33

I think that’s who she got to fit that bathroom. Now I recall, the bath panel often used to spontaneously fall off with a slapstick noise too.

#34

We’ve got an 1970’s style serving hatch between the kitchen and front room. I’ve hardly ever used it as normally we just carry the food between rooms rather than poking it through the hatch.

We decorated the front room a few months back, and I kind of wished I’d bricked it up and wallpapered over, giving us more wall space.

#35

Also we have a phone socket (sometimes more than one), in every room, including the bathroom and downstairs toilet, Really weird.

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#36

My grandparent’s house had one of them, also never used. They assume that one person is in the kitchen cooking, and another person is in the living room eating or at least dishing up, and how much does that happen these days?

The cat used to love dramatically leaping through it though, and threw a major strop when it was bricked up.

#37

Maybe a really important 80s executive lived there before, who needed to close the deal with Tokyo NOW.

#38

Our cats do this too. Although its good to catch them out, quite often we’ll be eating and you can hear them jump on to the work service. So I open to hatch quick to catch them out, but instead of jumping down they just nonchalantly walk through, purring to themselves.

#39

We also have one between kitchen and dining room - useful when we had the table against the hatch but now has just turned into another dumping shelf as the table is away from the wall now.

Also want it bricked up so we can move the piano against it.

I do like passing cups of tea etc through it though

#40

did a lol at the extractor fan thing

#41

We have our dining table next to it, mainly as it feels right for it to be there, even though we don’t use the hatch much.

I want to rearrange the room a bit, but it would just feel weird having a random hatch. I should have bricked it up.

#42

It works well doesn’t it? Always did in the flat I had.