To be fed up of renovations on a nearby house

Hetty58

I think some of us are discussing totally different types of 'renovations' and there is just no comparison.

Minor works, like a quick loft or garage conversion - or a small extension are one thing, tolerable and a brief disruption.

What I'm talking about (and what happens here) is the original house being demolished down to just a few feet of walls (endless skips and massive clouds of dust) then half the garden's excavated - more skips and mud everywhere. Next, the suspended floor (and half the garden) is replaced by concrete, pumped in through a big tube from the mixer lorry.

Walls go up, including the 8 meter extension, the two storeys become three, roof dormers emerge, windows doors etc. - and we think it's nearly over - but no. The concrete floors are then 'drilled out' for underfloor heating (horrendous noise and more dust) and they begin to build the garage. We start to lose the will to live.

Meanwhile the owners live elsewhere, the builders break all the rules - and the local council simply don't care. They have private (lax) building regulations inspectors. An injunction (obtainable from the magistrates court) is the only way to stop the work for a few weeks.

The plans are ignored (that's if there's any planning permission at all), there's no consultation with neighbours, no fines for ignoring it all - and a retrospective grant of approval. Any hitches and the owners just plead poverty (can't afford to change it now) or wait 4 years and it's 'legal'. They know exactly what they can get away with!

Yes I agree.

Anyone who lives in a house for years will probably, at some stage, extend a but or put in a downstairs loo or convert the garage.

That's very different from people who buy a house That's absolutely nothing like what they want but on a road they'd like live on and then turn the place into a building site for a year, causing huge inconvenience to neighbours while they live elsewhere far away from the noise and dirt and the whole road being taken over by trucks and diggers and lorries.

Some residential roads have to deal with this over and over so that their once quiet residential road is now permanently in a state of messy upheaval.

That program Grand Designs makes it all seem so glamorous!

I think some of us are discussing totally different types of 'renovations' and there is just no comparison.

Minor works, like a quick loft or garage conversion - or a small extension are one thing, tolerable and a brief disruption.

What I'm talking about (and what happens here) is the original house being demolished down to just a few feet of walls (endless skips and massive clouds of dust) then half the garden's excavated - more skips and mud everywhere. Next, the suspended floor (and half the garden) is replaced by concrete, pumped in through a big tube from the mixer lorry.

Walls go up, including the 8 meter extension, the two storeys become three, roof dormers emerge, windows doors etc. - and we think it's nearly over - but no. The concrete floors are then 'drilled out' for underfloor heating (horrendous noise and more dust) and they begin to build the garage. We start to lose the will to live.

Meanwhile the owners live elsewhere, the builders break all the rules - and the local council simply don't care. They have private (lax) building regulations inspectors. An injunction (obtainable from the magistrates court) is the only way to stop the work for a few weeks.

The plans are ignored (that's if there's any planning permission at all), there's no consultation with neighbours, no fines for ignoring it all - and a retrospective grant of approval. Any hitches and the owners just plead poverty (can't afford to change it now) or wait 4 years and it's 'legal'. They know exactly what they can get away with!

Try living in Australia, where a common model is to demolish. In my immediate area, i.e. backing, neighbouring/opposite side of road, four houses have been demolished and re-built and five have had lengthy and noisy renovations. All this in ten years. I should add all the properties are detached, and it's still annoying.

I eye the properties left, and predict which will go under the bulldozer (three) when the current owners leave, with trepidation. The road has lots of older retirees so it will go on and on. And the ugliness of the new houses! The least offensive have been bland; most look like hospitals. One cheering thing lately has been an increase in renovating, keeping the older, outer shell, so much more in keeping with the earlier aesthetic of the neighbourhood.

All keep within Council rules for working times, but the worst are absent owners who don't have to live with the consequences of their endless building.

I used to have an underneath neighbour who complained that I was walking around my flat upto 1 am! She liked to go to bed early and even though I had carpets down she could hear me flushing the loo, boiling the kettle, and so on. Normal household noises and in no way a breach of my lease. I told her that when I was on a late shiftt she often woke me running the hoover. So I offered her a compromise that if she left off hoovering til 10 am I would be extra quiet in my flat after 10 pm. At first she just carried on hoovering at 8 am but on those nights I used to bang about, slam cupboard doors, and run the shower at midnight. She eventually learned.

SIL was woken at 5am yesterday by a neighbour scraping flaking paint off window frames and sanding them, not major work but annoying at that time of day.
He went and told them it wasn't neighbourly at that time of the morning, they thought that as they were awake they would get on with it

Oh no! The house two doors away from us has been sold. It was completely gutted previously, a two storey extension built plus loft conversion as well as a one storey extension to the kitchen. The the work took over a year before the current owners moved in. Inevitably the new owners will decide that the layout is not to their taste and start knocking down walls, refitting bathrooms and the kitchen with all the noise and dust that entails. I really dread houses being sold in our road

Check with your local councils for when builders etc can start noisy work each day, and when they should finish! There are laws about them using noisy machinery. And if these rules are ignored, the council can stop them working - not something the new people would want, so they should keep within the working hours!!

Have just found out my house requires a complete rewire which is noisy and messy. I am going to move into a house opposite for the duration. I will tell the workmen to be as noisy as they wish, bang and drill to their hearts content. And play their radio if they wish in order to annoy my whinging NDN.

GrauntyHelen

If only this was all there was to worry us !

Would you like me to give you a list of all my current worries, including bereavement?

Or perhaps you could give us your list of things we're allowed discuss on here?

Or could you just have some manners and let people vent about other things that are also annoying them.

All your stories are relatable, please pardon my long post: I have had 2 sets of neighbours doing building work on the same house on and off for 8 years!! The first couple with young children completely gutted the unmodernised house next door, in stages, over 4 years, so we had constant noise, dust, etc. At one point, I had just come home from hospital after surgery and was in pain; I texted the owner if the builders could please work away from the area near my bedroom window because the noise was terrible, but no luck. My partner had to call him to politely insist. They later sold the completely renovated house to another, even younger couple, who have decided to excavate their basement to build a playroom for their two children who are both under 5, because their parents said there were too many toys strewn around the house..the in laws also thought they should do some extra work to the wet room, do some landscaping, and so on.
I agree with the other posta above, especially with the ones about having an agreement as to costs for damage, as that is another issue I have to address.

If only this was all there was to worry us !

only thing I can suggest which might have been mentioned check your council's web site for noise times, mine allows building/DIY noise Mon-Fri 08:30-17:00 and Saturday 09:00-13:00, no noise Sundays/bank holidays, it might relieve some of the stress if you can get a quiet weekend/bank holiday

Thanks Maw.

Apologies Vintagejazz - that wasn’t how it came across

I don't think all the DIY TV programmes help either. Do they ever consult the poor neighbours?
One of my neighbours died recently so his house is bound to be sold. His only relative lives in the S of England. I am now scared in advance
I am scared because this corner of the town is older, interesting houses but they tend to be doer-uppers.

I wasn't criticising your opinion Maw. I was saying that what your daughters did sounded different to the major renovations I was talking about.

Can’t imagine why that was to me, Vintagejazz it has no bearing on a situation you know nothing about and I do wish people would not make sweeping judgements in ignorance of the facts.
Yes inconsiderate renovation work is annoying - I have no argument with that, as this was not, but so are neighbours who see plans, agree them, agree timescales, whose property is unaffected (apart from SIL’s offer to let the neighbour use the scaffolding they were paying for to do some very necessary repairs on the neighbours side) who then start raising spurious objections, fail to respond to letters, claim not to know who holds the title to the house, and generally do all they can to be unpleasant and obstructive without a leg to stand on.

Sorry that reply was to Maw.

It's about balance though. A neighbour building up into the loft to create an extra bedroom, or extending the kitchen (along with offering car cleaning vouchers and bottles of wine to households who have been affected by noise and dirt) is one thing.
People living elsewhere while creating lengthy periods of inconvenience and disruption for long suffering neighbours in order to completely change everything about a house, effectively creating a building site, and making no acknowledgement of this is another.

Sounds like you love be near me, Vintagejazz. The house, next but one to me is now enormous ( 6 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms and a dormer games and cinema room). It makes our little semis look like garden sheds and it has taken many months to get to a half finished state. Sometimes it’s abandoned for weeks. I’m just relieved that it’s not an HMO.

Hetty58

(and) it's not about renovations being cheaper than moving - it's all about how local extended families invest their money, always in property (and all off the books, I suspect).

Actually it often is,
You can’t generalise like this.
When you are happy in a neighbourhood, schools or nurseries right for the children and you have a supportive circle of friends as both my daughters and their husbands in Walthamstow do, renovating in one case and extending upwards in the other, is preferable in every sense. I’m not saying your experience is invalid - just not the only version.

MOVE into a new house.

People used to get concerned about making a good first impression on neighbours.
Now many people seriously annoy their new neighbours before they've even moved in. I would be mortified to live into a new house knowing I'd caused massive inconvenience and disturbance to everyone for over a year.

My parents suffered from this when the perfectly nice cottage beside theirs in the Borders was bought by a young couple with DIY ambitions and it was a building site with a junkyard for a garden for the next 20 years. Fortunately there was enough space not to be impacted , except aesthetically- and mum’s rhododendrons did a good job of screening them.
On the other hand though, D and SIL set things in motion over a year ago to do a loft conversion on their little 2 up 2 down Victorian terraced house in London. Everything was booked for it to be done before their second baby was born in September - or so they thought.
A stroppy neighbour on one side suddenly retracted her verbal consent to their plans, so an independent surveyor was called in (finding entirely in D and SIL’s favour) but it put them back by nearly 6 weeks, they lost their slot with the builder, then delivery times for materials started to fall by the wayside, and fortunately the baby arrived at 3 in the morning (September) or the builders would have been boiling the kettles and getting the towels. I believe the scaffolding is all down now, but the delays also put the project way over budget and D’s BP and post natal emotional health were a major issue.