I arrived and everything was great. The owners son was there and showed me around then finished playing with the boiler. He said everything was fine. About an hour later I noticed that there was no hot water or heating and the boiler wasn't firing up. I read the manual I could find but it wasn't clear so I left it alone and contacted the host. Her son came back and couldn't get anything to work. Later in the evening a repair person came out but still couldn't get anything to work. Over the weekend various people came and nothing was resolved so we had no hot water or heating in a pretty large house all weekend. The problem seemed that it was ongoing as at one point the hosts son apologised and said they'd been having problems with the neighbour. This didn't make any sense until the following day.
Several of the maintenance people had gone outside to the side of the property that was locked over the weekend until on the Sunday morning we realised that there was raw sewage flooding a paved area to the side of the building. This was probably what the neighbours were complaining about!
The kitchen was very new and it looked like the extension was pretty new as the plastic was still on some of the cupboard doors, but this extension clearly wasn't done to a very high standard given the clear significant plumbing problems and the fact the floor in the kitchen was extremely uneven and a lot of the laminate had cracked.
We were only there for two nights so we mainly just stayed in the kitchen to keep warm. Luckily we are having a pretty mild December. We all had to go and find a public swimming pool though to have a proper shower.
After we returned I contacted the host to request a refund for just under half the amount we payed as I thought this was reasonable without heat, hot water to wash or wash up and the raw sewage. I did this 4 days ago now and haven't received any response at all. I wanted to give them a chance of resolving this before I left a review (as I did appreciated that they did seem to be trying to fix the boiler problem) or escalated the problem further through Airbnb but this hasn't happened and I fear that I will never see any of that money again and this listing may just disappear.