A water leak, an appliance that breaks down, a lamp that falls from the ceiling - and all on the eve of your home exchange! Has this ever happened to you? 
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Yes! Our AC broke with very loud bang just a couple of days before our exchangeā¦ 
We scrambled to find a company that could do the repair, but in a touristy area in the middle of summer it was very complicatedā¦ In the end, the repair would have to be done while our guests were staying in the house. The people we exchanged with were super understanding, and preferred not having to deal with the repair people during their stay (since they were out of the house for most of the day anyway), so we postponed the fix for our return.
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We are on exchanges now and the week before we were heading out, the window of a bed room on our attic broke! It couldnāt fully shut down anymore. It couldnāt be repaired before we went exchanging. However, we were lucky, because not all our bed rooms are going to be filled with guests. Itās a swing window and we put a ladder underneath it, so it canāt open, and we told all our guests about it. It will be repaired shortly after our return. I was very relieved we wouldnāt be haviong full houses!
We had it the other way round one day. We were staing in a home and when we got home after a day out, a really loud alarm went off! It turned out to be something about a new water system, Iām still not sure what it was exactly, but we contacted our hosts and they contacted friends, who had a repair person come over. It was in Germany and our German is not very good, hence the friends were asked to help (also not to cause us too much trouble, I think). So it all went well in the end, but we were quite startled at first, especially when we couldnāt locate the source of the alarm at first ā¦
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We arrived in Paris in December to a very cold apartment. We soon realised the heating wasnāt working, something the cleaner should have made our hosts aware of. There was quite a tricky problem with the boiler but my husband together with our host, with the help of You Tube and FaceTime, managed to work out the problem and we were able to fix it at our end. It would normally have been something weād have called an engineer for but being new year that wasnāt an option.
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Twice, right before an exchange, our stove has broken down. Different stoves each time!
Adds quite a bit of stress, going appliance shopping and trying to get a replacement or repair in a tight timeframe. Both times, we managed to get the problem solved. But, when we advised our exchangers of the potential problem, they were so understanding of the situation.
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