Dealing with Troublesome Neighbours

 

Buying a house is one of the biggest decisions that you can ever make in your life. When you are in the process of buying a house, there are many questions that you can ask and things that you can check. For example, you can get scans of the building done to make sure that it is structurally sound. You can do so much to make sure that you are making a good choice with your cash. One thing that is not guaranteed though is what your neighbours are going to be like. When buying our house, we asked what the neighbours were like and the previous owners said that they were great. When we moved into the house, we did not find that to be the case. From there, we had to learn about dealing with troublesome neighbours. I thought that I would share things about this now.

 

The issues that we had.

The main issue that we had was with one of our neighbours that was having parties every single weekend. She was around 55 years old at the time. We later found out that she was recently divorced after being married for almost 30 years. She was reliving her youth and as happy as I usually would be, the parties were going on for 2 days at a time. On a Friday, the blasting music would start around 4pm and would stay on and get louder until around 6am the following morning. It would then start again at 4pm on the Saturday and go off again at 6am the Sunday morning. The music was bad enough, however there was so much more that annoyed us. We would wake up to bottles and cigarette ends in our garden, takeaway wrappers on our front garden and there would be banging and shouting in front of our house all night long as people were coming and going.

 

How we approached the issue.

For a very long time, we allowed the parties to happen. We didn’t want to be grumpy neighbours. She could have always been the same and we were quite new to the neighbourhood at the time. However, the first time we decided to speak to her about it was a Sunday afternoon. She had a three-night party that went on from the Thursday afternoon. It just made us so angry that over the weekend, we didn’t have one single evening of sleep. We wanted to do the fair thing rather than just phone the police, so we knocked on the door and explained that even though we understand it is her house, we would appreciate some notice to any parties. Little did we know that another neighbour had been reporting her to the police. That same week, she was served with an antisocial behaviour notice and naturally, she thought it was because of us. This lead to her screaming at me in the middle of the street and kicking my car. We later found out it was an elderly couple that called the police, so we kept that to ourselves and were prepared to bear the brunt of the anger instead of directing it at them.

 

What happened next.

After the almighty argument, there was a lot of silence and dirty looks. I would pull up on my drive and she would be in her window just staring at me. For a 50 year old woman, it just felt crazy for her to be acting like a child. There was a turning point when I booked an appointment at the doctors and I say that because she was the receptionist at my local surgery. When I booked in, she was on shift and incredibly rude. So, I did something that I never thought I would do, I put in a complaint. I said that I wasn’t happy about her knowing my medical history. That evening I got a letter from her basically apologising and stating that she could lose her job and she won’t cause me issues again.

 

How we built a bridge.

Moving forward for us was very hard. For many months, there was hell of a lot of animosity. Things really changed for us when our divorced neighbour met somebody and started a relationship. The parties seemed to stop almost overnight. One evening, I was pulling up on my drive and her new boyfriend was just leaving their house. He shouted over to me that he wanted to chat to me. I was nervous because he was a big guy. But, he basically said that she had told him what had happened and he gave her a telling off and it won’t happen again. He saved the day for us, but I just dread if the relationship fails and she is back to her old ways once again!

 

Our long-term plan.

I think that long-term plan for us is that we ultimately want to move house. Even though this place is so special to use and our little castle because we adore the décor. I think we will always have niggles. We are in a new build estate, so there is not much privacy in the area. Not only that, but even in a detached, we are that close to others, we find that people will always be loud and disturb. Our ideal home would be somewhere with some land to it so that we get the privacy and the quiet that we want. Still a bit of saving to do before we get to that stage!

 

I hope that you guys liked this blog post and it helped you. Like I mentioned above, buying a house is such a big thing. It really is a lottery not knowing the people that are going to be living right next door to you. Especially when it comes to an estate like where I live full of new build houses as they tend to be close together. There are things that you can do, but it is such a shame that it can ruin your time in a property. I would love to know if any of you guys have had any experiences with troublesome neighbours and what you did about it. As always, leave me a comment and lets have a chat about neighbours and the whole house buying process.