Things that annoy me about renting a house

My girlfriend and I have been renting our house now for just about 2 years. While the place we live and the area we live in are nice there are still a few things that annoy me about renting a property.

1. Making Changes
2. Maintenance (or lack of it)

Making Changes

Over the passed few months I've changed all the light bulbs in the house that I can to power saving light bulbs. That is apart from two rooms, the living room and the room I'm currently sat in now writing this. The reason behind this is because in those rooms we have dimmer switches.

Many of you may already know that power saving light bulbs will not work properly with dimmers. I've searched the Internet and managed to find manufactures that produce bulbs that they claim will work with dimmers, however I don't seem to be able to find any suppliers that stock them.

Basically if I was allowed to in my contract I would have all the dimmers changed to normal switches. As I'm re-newing my contract soon, I might see if I can get it done but I've got a funny feeling that the landlord won't class it as money well spent.

The heating system we have in our house isn't the greatest either. The boiler is pretty old and judging from our gas bill not very efficient either. There seems to be a slight issue with the hot water in our house as well. Basically if the heating isn't on then the water doesn't get hot, which means in the summer we have to have the heating on to get hot water instead of just having the hot water part on.

So once again if I actually owned the property I would fork out the cash to get the entire heating system replaced with an energy efficient condensing boiler and call it money well spent. With the potential savings I could make it would pay for itself in about 4-5 years.

Maintenance (or lack of it)

The only problem with renting is your always working on someone elses time scale. If something goes wrong in your house and you own it then you either fix it yourself or you get someone in to do it.

When your renting however, what usually happens is something goes wrong then you inform the letting agent, who several weeks later (from my experience) get in touch with the landlord to find out if it's OK if they find someone to fix the problem. After this several trades people are contacted to assess the problem and give quotes on what is wrong and how much it will cost to fix. These quotes are then sent to the landlord, who takes all of the information in assess what needs doing and what will give the best overall result and then chooses the cheapest option that probably won't fix the problem properly. Eventually the work gets done, then six months down the line it breaks again and the whole processes starts over.

It gets to the point where if anything goes wrong and you can live without it, or get round it some other way you don't even bother going through the process except to report it to the letting agent so they know it wasn't you that broke it.

Anyway enough of my rant. If you have any comments on your experiences with renting then I would be happy to hear from you.