They don't build 'em like they used to.

[Neil]

March has been a month of stuff breaking around here.  Three trips to the local mechanic has me on the road but financially strained and just to make things more interesting my domestic appliances are all thinking that they've about had enough.

Dishwasher has departed with a loud kind of whoompf! noise.  Cental heating pump sounds more like a loud clock and the door shelf in the fridge has finally departed company from the fridge taking the mounting points with it. The TV has developed a slight pink tinge to its pictures. ...  And to add insult to injury the kettle packed up yesterday.  This is severely hampering tea making and thus will need immediate rectification!

Yes I own pans but they're slow to boil in comparison and I drink a lot of tea

[dks]

March has been a month of stuff breaking around here.  Three trips to the local mechanic has me on the road but financially strained and just to make things more interesting my domestic appliances are all thinking that they've about had enough.

Dishwasher has departed with a loud kind of whoompf! noise.  Cental heating pump sounds more like a loud clock and the door shelf in the fridge has finally departed company from the fridge taking the mounting points with it. The TV has developed a slight pink tinge to its pictures. ...  And to add insult to injury the kettle packed up yesterday.  This is severely hampering tea making and thus will need immediate rectification!

Yes I own pans but they're slow to boil in comparison and I drink a lot of tea

I feel your pain...
Car needing 1000 euro to get fixed, TV (CR tube!) on its last legs...dishwasher fixed by me after the "engineers" failed..

as for kettles, I have gone through all the major brands Tefal, Philips, Morphy richards and they all break in a year.. I now have a too expensive siemens (bought a month ago..)

Really I found that Bosch/Siemens lasts better, for me..

and the women too.. they are not how they used to be...
They used to have a job and clean and cook but now they can not do both...

[Grant Lamontagne]

I know where you are at Neil- the handle on my screen door broke two days ago but since the whole door needs to be replaced I can't be bothered getting a new handle for it.  The Jeep is eating brake fluid and should probably see a mechanic, but I have other, higher priorities- for example the air exchanger in the house needs to be replaced and in the last year I'd replaced the washer, dryer and two fridges.  Oh, and my laptop is just about ready to give up the ghost after almost 5 years of faithful service (and a fair bit of abuse!).

My dishwasher has been limping along for months- I could replace the motor in it, but that's $100, so I might as well just spend the $300 and get a whole new one, but that means I have to tear apart my cabinets and countertops too, which also need to be replaced, plus now that the nice weather is coming I need to give serious thought to digging up my garden so I can increase the amount of parking I have so I don't have to park the Jeep on the grass or on the road.

Hang in there buddy- life has a way of throwing snowballs at you.  You just have to be ready for the frozen dog turds inside them!

Def

[Santos]

i buy alot of second hand items just for this reason. good example, $50 washing machine thats 20+ years old, has plain analogue twist dials, going strong last two years and probably will keep going for another ten. I only use cold water and if i was to get a $200+ modern one it last 3 years, which despite being more water efficient . My mother sunk just over $500 on a premium one and its being serviced twice, once at her expense in the last 6 years.

To be fair they did make C-RAP in the 50's,60's,70's,80's and 90's. Its just that all the junk has been tossed long ago leaving us with a warped view that the remaining surviving items are testiment to the quality of yesteryears.

A good analogy is in music. So many time i hear the cries that todays music is rubbish and the previous generations was better. They used to say it alot in the 90's, now i read the same thing about todays music and praising the 90's. The fact is their is alot of quality stuff coming out of the music industries all the time, its just that its one gem in admist a sea of smurf. The smurf washes away and is forgotten and little gem stays sparkling with memories.

The other thing is the shift from servicable to replacable culture. As a rule of thumb items made in the 80's or earlier were design with simplicity and repairability in mind, after that its a case of 'It dies its cheaper to get a new one'
Its why i like vintage rugged second hand items, they have undergone the culling process, survival of the fittest 

You can now days fill a whole kitchen full of appliances that back in the 70's that if you adjusted for inflation would get you a single low-end fridge, a fridge that only function was to make smurf cold, no energy efficent systems, no mechanism to stop ice forming in the freezer, no dual temperature zones etc etc

[Santos]

Grant if it was me i think i would go with the $100 motor option for the dishwasher and learn something new. Or better yet keep an eye on a functional 2nd hand unit of the same model to replace/repair (often with appliances the guts remain unchanged for even decades and the units just undergo external facelifts and cosmetic changes)


But then again i'm really lying cause i dont believe in dishwashers unless its for a comercial/industrial business and am a certified stupid hippy hand dishwasher, but you get the idea 

[Grant Lamontagne]

Grant if it was me i think i would go with the $100 motor option for the dishwasher and learn something new. Or better yet keep an eye on a functional 2nd hand unit of the same model to replace/repair (often with appliances the guts remain unchanged for even decades and the units just undergo external facelifts and cosmetic changes)


But then again i'm really lying cause i dont believe in dishwashers unless its for a comercial/industrial business and am a certified stupid hippy hand dishwasher, but you get the idea 

I thought about that- it's not really a new skill though as I am quite capable of replacing a motor.  The big issue for me is buying a used motor- you have no idea how much life is left in it.  The new motor is $115 plus shipping and to be honest the dishwasher I have is a little small for my needs anyway.  It runs 3-4 times some days, and that is consumptive and wasteful.  I would like to install a full sized built in unit to replace it not only for my use but because it also increases the value of my house and the rental units.

Def

[Grant Lamontagne]

BTW, this is the unit I have:



It's the size of a large microwave unit and I've had it for about 8-9 years now.  The poor thing doesn't owe me anything now, and will probably live on at a friend's place as she needs a dishwasher and has been encouraging me to buy a new one for a while now so she can have it! 

Def

[Syph007]

Neil, do you live above a large magnetic anomaly or something?  I know how it goes though, one thing always seems to lead to another and you never get caught up...

[Santos]

I thought about that- it's not really a new skill though as I am quite capable of replacing a motor.  The big issue for me is buying a used motor- you have no idea how much life is left in it.  The new motor is $115 plus shipping and to be honest the dishwasher I have is a little small for my needs anyway.  It runs 3-4 times some days, and that is consumptive and wasteful.  I would like to install a full sized built in unit to replace it not only for my use but because it also increases the value of my house and the rental units.

Def

In that case i think going with the bigger unit makes sens... but please go and fix the brakes in your jeep.. brakes are important.

[Grant Lamontagne]

No they aren't- brakes just slow you down....

Def

[MultiMat]

Yep our main family car is trying to bankrupt us  . Leaking radiator , easy fix  nope made of plastic you need a new one  $500 latter  . Before we braved Kangaroo Island's horrible roads we thought we should get the thumping gear changes from the 4 speed auto sorted. $600 latter for shifting solenoids & pressure governer  .

Our dishwasher finally gave up the ghost a month ago. I had cobbled it to try & get it too last till after our North American holiday , thankfully it made it.Before we left on holidays a tiny valve on it got blocked rendering it inoperable , the service guy fixed it easy enough but quoted $350 for a new latch & seals  . So many new products are controlled by complicated electronics that make them very hard to problem solve & or fix or the cost of the parts to fix them make fixing uneconomic-able  . Throw away not fixable 

Our 70's vintage toilet is holding together 

[Santos]

No they aren't- brakes just slow you down....

Def

i once drove my car 35kms home across the city of sydney with no brakes as i ignored the whinny noise that sounded like railrod tracks (missing a brake pad) Its extremly hilly terrain with bendy roads. Did it all with combination of engine braking and hand emergency brake

Sounds wreckless but i did it at 1am as i didn't want to pay parking fine or tow trucks.

Not really difficult but would recoment it. Besides apparently you guys get ice in canada which is upping the ante. Go fix dem brakes 

You can handwash dishes much more readily than scape your own brains off a windscreen 

[Sazabi]

As I'd posted over in the Hijacking Thread, the house's fridge either needs a new compressor or a freon recharge; as of Saturday, the fridge got up to 50F, and the freezer is just at freezing; we're using the freezer in the capacity of what the fridge should be doing, but when we get it fixed, hopefully sometime this week, we'll still need to throw out the vast majority of the stuff in both the fridge and freezer.

And here I'd been complaining about it and trying to get my dad to call someone for the past couple months.   

Not to mention that we have a drip in the bathroom's shower; due to the bloody use of tile and chicken wire (the house was built in the 70s; the shower's pipes are sandwiched between the tile and the exterior brick of the house), we can only access the piping through a small hole through the basement.  Due to the amount of corrosion of the pipes and fixtures, what we need to do is just rip the shower's pipes out completely, divert the water pipes in the basement, and completely rebuild the shower so as to have pipe access upstairs.  That'd be several thousand dollars, though, simply because dad doesn't think we have the know-how on how to rebuild the thing; our usual handyman is getting too old now, too, being in his eighties, and his memory and speed is starting to go. :/

[Threeme2189]

Our grandmas old TV just died 2 days ago, so we gave her our oldest one, and will upgrade it.
We have had bad luck with our refrigerator, oven, kettle, TV's, computers, deep freezer and the damn house has leaks when it rains a lot...
The only thing that hasn't been fixed or replaced is the dish washer.

[Neil]

Not even rubber gloves are made to last   I managed to pull apart the the pair my wife bought me.

I splashed out this afternoon on some posh Marigolds instead of the supermarket own brand.  Let's see if these last more than a couple of days.
All mine 

Three days until payday and a new kettle ... not that I'm counting or anything

[AimlessWanderer]

Yeah, I'm feeling the pain here too. I'm not even going to start listing the things I'm juggling - but I will say I placed an order recently to be "ready" for the UK meet at Easter that I could really have done with waiting 6 months for. It'll all get paid for eventually, it's all just a matter of priorities really  ... it's just that mine aren't in the right order at the moment. Far from it

 

[nuphoria]

Sorry to hear about your fuster cluck Neil



The newish car is the only thing I vaguely trust around here!

Everything thing else is prone to lapses in usefulness.... just like me

[Chako]

Neil, it sucks when the only visible law is that of ol'Murphy.

I had to replace my old washer and dryer. It took me a few months of research, but the new units, albeit pricy, are well worth it. I feel so domesticated, waxing poetic over a washer and dryer like that.

Def, get a bigger dish washer if you have the room...you won't regret it. I have a large free standing cabinet dish washer...love it to pieces. Mind you, the one thing I hate above all else in this world is that of hand washing dishes . I just can't abide by it.

[Mercury]

I feel ya Neil!  We are prepping my house for either sale or a Renter, and it's driving me nuts.  New siding in one spot, new paint downstairs, and I just found out I have to replace my tub in the master bath! 

On top of all this my new(to me) truck is making sounds that indicate bad ball joints, so it's going in the shop tomorrow morning for it's repair.  Expecting it to be worse than just ball joints so I won't be surprised. 

[Neil]

I ignore those noises until other people start looking at the car funny as I drive along

Man cave office chair broke today   Though to be fair it was only £20 for a full back swivel and I'm impessed its lasted the eighteen months it has.  I've bodged it back together "There, I fixed it." style but judging by its new jaunty angle I think I've extended its life by hours rather than weeks

Anyways, I hear standing desks are all the rage these days

[MultiMat]

So Neil what did you use to fix your chair mate  any gaffer tape  .


Standing desk  very go get-em, executive style mate   

[Neil]

Sorry, just glue and a strip of metal   Will try harder next time

Executive indeed Mat but the bricks under the legs to bring up the height may detract a little from any kind of style

[Sazabi]

As I'd posted over in the Hijacking Thread, the house's fridge either needs a new compressor or a freon recharge; as of Saturday, the fridge got up to 50F, and the freezer is just at freezing; we're using the freezer in the capacity of what the fridge should be doing, but when we get it fixed, hopefully sometime this week, we'll still need to throw out the vast majority of the stuff in both the fridge and freezer.

And here I'd been complaining about it and trying to get my dad to call someone for the past couple months.   

Not to mention that we have a drip in the bathroom's shower; due to the bloody use of tile and chicken wire (the house was built in the 70s; the shower's pipes are sandwiched between the tile and the exterior brick of the house), we can only access the piping through a small hole through the basement.  Due to the amount of corrosion of the pipes and fixtures, what we need to do is just rip the shower's pipes out completely, divert the water pipes in the basement, and completely rebuild the shower so as to have pipe access upstairs.  That'd be several thousand dollars, though, simply because dad doesn't think we have the know-how on how to rebuild the thing; our usual handyman is getting too old now, too, being in his eighties, and his memory and speed is starting to go. :/

Well the repairman just left; the compressor is shot.  The cheapest I can find one is about $305, plus another $100 or so in labor; dad says he just wants to replace it.

*sigh*

The fridge was built in August of 2000.  That's pathetic - KitchenAids are supposed to last longer. :/

[Gareth]

I had to cave in and buy a new washing machine at the start of the year.  Our 12 year old one had just had enough and no amount of tinkering was going to sort it.  I've also got a slow puncture on the car that's currently getting topped up every week, need to get that sorted as well.   Happily our 8 year old kettle is still going strong.

[Threeme2189]

Happily our 8 year old kettle is still going strong.

(Image removed from quote.)

Now you've done it.
I give it two weeks until it dies 

[Gareth]

LOL, probably true.

[jerseydevil]

I was reading this thread last night and thinking, "I'm glad I don't have anything like that happening right now".  So naturally, I wake up to find that my coffee maker has died, leaking water all over the damn place!   Then while walking to work I stepped in a puddle, and my foot was instantly soaked.  The sole had torn loose from the leather upper in one spot, it's shot!   Already got a new coffee maker, and I have a backup pair of boots until I can get to the store on Friday and get a new pair.  Even then, I break a pair of boots in for at least two weeks before wearing them to work.  If I didn't say that to myself last night, I could almost guarantee I would've had no problems today!

[Gareth]

I say it's all Neil's fault.

 

[Threeme2189]

I say it's all Neil's fault.

 

Nah, It's some guy called Murphy...

[valvestem125]

...and the women too.. they are not how they used to be...
They used to have a job and clean and cook but now they can not do both...

There is a saying that covers that.  A man told his son, "when you are ready to find a wife, remember this, choose her for the bedroom or the kitchen, it is rare there is a woman that is good in both rooms".