After most of the year having a crappy washer and DH fixing it once when it wouldn’t drain (an experience which will be giving him nightmares for decades), it stopped agitating. So we emailed the landlord and zie emailed back a day or two later telling us to buy a specific model at a specific store and to deduct the cost from next month’s rent. (The specific store didn’t take credit cards over the phone or online and was far away so I asked if we could just get the same model at the same price from home depot and zie said that was ok, so yay.)
This is very different from #2’s experience wherein when her appliance breaks, the apartment manager sends someone to fix it right away and then takes care of everything, but #2 lives in a really nice apartment building and we have a somewhat scattered landlord who sometimes takes months to cash our checks (which are still being made out to, “The estate of” the previous landlord because zie hasn’t told us to do otherwise).
The new washer actually gets clothing clean. It’s pretty amazing.
What do you do when a major appliance breaks?
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
April 25, 2016 at 6:13 am
I am counting down the days until my washer dies. It is the type that “locks” after you turn it on, and I hate that. I always turn it on with the goal of waiting 5 minutes for the water to get a few inches high so I can add detergent, but then forget altogether and run a completely empty load. It makes me crazy.
April 25, 2016 at 8:08 am
Mine locks after I turn it on too (which is super annoying if I forgot something!!) but there is a separate compartment in which I can add the soap.
April 25, 2016 at 7:47 pm
I set a kitchen timer for these sorts of situations. Because grrr!
April 25, 2016 at 7:48 am
When we were renting the house that we currently own, we had two major appliances break (dishwasher and dryer) and the landlords replaced them both. It was nice that we didn’t have to pay for them, but we didn’t get to pick out what we wanted (and we were already sort of thinking we might buy the house so we would have to live with them for a while). The irony is that we no longer have either appliance bought by the landlords. When we bought the house, we asked them to take away the crappy (new) dryer they had bought us and we installed the nicer dryer my parents got us as as wedding present that we had brought over from our old house. It’s currently at year 13 or so and going strong. Last year the plastic door liner broke on the dishwasher and since Whirlpool apparently doesn’t expect its appliances to last more than 5 years, they couldn’t get us a new part. So even though the dishwasher worked fine, we had to buy a new one. I think the appliance experiences sum up my feelings about renting. It’s nice that you don’t have to pay when stuff goes wrong, but I place a high value on controlling how things get fixed, so I would rather own.
Congrats on the new washer that washes your clothes!
April 25, 2016 at 8:09 am
Yay for the new washer that actually washes your clothes! That is exciting. It also seems slightly crazy that you can deduct the cost of a washer from your rent and still have a non-zero rent to pay.
April 25, 2016 at 9:21 am
Less than 1/4 of the rent even.
April 25, 2016 at 10:25 am
We own our refrigerator and had our old one for a lot of years. It started to fail cooling and I got it fixed once. The second time it started to fail, we went and got a new refrigerator. One $250 repair of a $1000 appliance = reasonable. Two, not so much. :-)
btw it is effing hard to find a refrigerator that does not have a lot of unnecessary “features.” We found ONE side-by-side model that did not have a door-thru water dispenser. I mean hello, we have a water dispenser. It’s called a faucet.
Our landlords would “fix” or “replace” (with something equally awful no doubt) our awful gas oven & cooktop if we demanded it. I am holding out for choosing my own.
April 26, 2016 at 11:49 am
This reminds me that one of the things I find bizarre about many rentals and for sale properties in CA is that they don’t include a refrigerator. I think hauling around a refrigerator as a renter is outrageous. As a buyer, I’d like to move into the house and have working appliances that I can choose to replace if I wish. Plus, why only the refrigerator? Why is a range considered “attached” and stays with the property, while a refrigerator is considered “movable?” Weird.
April 25, 2016 at 2:17 pm
HUZZAH to the new washer! Our washer and dryer are playing games with me. The washer will occasionally not spin and claim it did, then run an extra rinse cycle when I tell it to just spin. The dryer refuses to actually stop when the timer tells it to. I haven’t had time to research how to fix them yet, they’re not that old, so I have to keep a weather eye on them. Meanwhile, had a really bad moment last week when the fridge died for maybe half an hour. No reason, and just turned itself back on again after. No clue what happened there but I suspect that after my work tech failed, the appliance tech wanted some attention.
April 25, 2016 at 3:07 pm
A new washer that gets things really clean is so awesome.
Since we aren’t renters, what we do when something fails is print out a thing from Consumer Reports and then go to the scratch and dent appliance store and get an appliance that CR says is probably not a lemon. Sometimes it is a lemon anyway – my last washer (before the one I have now) was.
April 25, 2016 at 4:49 pm
Washers definitely fall into that category of things that people use a lot but often limp along with a subpar system for way too long (myself included). It’s like a mattress. Yes, you can still sleep on a crappy one but its so much better with a new one that’s right for you.
April 25, 2016 at 7:51 pm
We haven’t had any major appliances break at this house (*knock on wood*), but if one did, we’d do what #1 did. Except our landlords would probably let us get a new one at the “crappy and doesn’t work very well” stage rather than making us wait for it to completely die.
April 25, 2016 at 7:53 pm
Our current landlord might have. Our neighbors said getting things replaced from the late landlord was such a hassle they just bought a new dishwasher themselves. So we’ve been fixing what we can.
April 26, 2016 at 11:54 am
Since I know the landlord/owner of this house I’m renting, I would hope they would approve replacement with a decent appliance. After all, they hope to live here one day. :-)
April 27, 2016 at 6:57 pm
When our dryer died, we went to Sears and organized a new one to be delivered. We depressed the salesperson by opting for a very barebones model.
We’re hoping that the refrigerator lasts until we’ve saved enough money for the kitchen remodel. The kitchen has a built-in area for the fridge which is annoying and limiting. I’ve promised Mike that when we remodel, we’ll design so that we can accommodate a slightly larger and much more ergonomic fridge. So fingers crossed that it lasts!
April 27, 2016 at 10:49 pm
We need to get a new fridge, but the space for it is just under 67″ high, which severely constrains choices (new models are all too tall). We don’t want a lot of space-wasting features (like ice makers or water dispensers, since we use almost no ice and generally boil water for tea or coffee when we want a drink), and about the only model we’ve found that fits is LG LTCS20220S. Anyone know a better choice in the old-fashioned shorter models?
April 28, 2016 at 12:21 pm
we had to replace a fridge pretty early in our home ownership, and in replacing it we learned that the outlet it was in wasn’t grounded! It was sitting on a coil of extension cord that plugged into a nongrounded outlet (which was extra scary, since part of the fridge failure was that it kept melting on the inside and dripping water into a puddle on the floor through a vent). The previous owners hadn’t told us (or maybe didn’t know; the fridge was old enough it might have predated them in the house) and the inspector didn’t move the fridge to check how it was plugged in.
So I measured the space, and we went and bought a fridge that fit there…except I hadn’t left enough space for the heavy duty plug to go into the electrical outlet. My partner had just rewired the outlet to be grounded, and then he had to rewire it AGAIN to be up above the fridge instead of next to it, so the fridge would fit. Oops.
Custom cabinets and built in things are cool, when they’re new, but they really limit future choices (we have also replaced a built-in oven and separate, built-into-the-counter cooktop with a regular stand alone oven/stove).