Author Louise Candlish on the perils of moving to a new home - that's unless you've staked out the area first...
Louise Candlish
Neighbours - the good, the bad and the ugly
Posted on: Thu 21-May-15 11:27:26
(21 comments )
Nosy neighbours - always a risk when moving to a new home...
The smell of burning brought me to the window one Monday morning in June. To my alarm, a fire crackled in my neighbour's garden, its flames dancing perilously close to the wooden fence that divides us. Two minutes later, next door's front door slammed shut and I watched my neighbour walk off up the street, briefcase in hand. This outrageous man had happily lit a bonfire in the middle of a street of terraced houses and left it unattended while he went to the office.
And you know what the truly surprising part was? I judged this turn of events preferable to having him at home all day! Because at home, just a brick's width from my desk, he'd be drilling, hammering, tile-cutting and all manner of other ear-bruising renovation tasks. (The bonfire, by the way, was to save money on a skip.)
I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one to have been victim to the power-tool neighbour. Some of us have also been unlucky enough to have all-night party animals, squatters, keepers of Pit bulls and/or boa constrictors, growers of 50ft conifers... Unless you are lucky enough to live in a detached property with parkland, then you are at risk of exposure to something you'd rather not experience - even if it's only a child's daily violin practice.
Before you make that crucial offer, make yourself a packed lunch, park in the street and watch.
What interests me is that such dangers often don't occur to us until after we've moved in. Be it a starter flat or a retirement cottage, we spend years saving and planning our move and yet we give precious little thought to the people who'll be living a few feet away on the other side of the wall.
So what can you do, other than the obvious steering clear of any property with a declared dispute attached? Before you make that crucial offer, make yourself a packed lunch, park in the street and watch. Go at different times of day and night. Introduce yourself to your prospective neighbours and see what kind of a feeling you walk away with. Find out if there are residents' committees, community forums, street parties - all the kinds of organisations that promote neighbourly goodwill.
Once in, you're at the mercy of serendipity. Fingers crossed, it might go the other way as it did one friend of mine, who lives on a street of like-minded families who've become so close they all go on holiday together. Their children are like a clan of cousins, wandering through each other's homes as they would their own, and visiting grandparents have forged friendships. Even an overactive imagination like mine can't find the dark side to their idyll.
As for my own pest: after a little over a year, his renovation fever broke, the last bonfire died and he sold up for a tidy profit. Now we have a lovely couple whose idea of a power tool is an electric toothbrush and who don't even complain when our cat breaks in at 6am to paw them awake. Remarkable. And in no way to be taken for granted.
Louise's book The Sudden Departure of the Frasers is published by Penguin and available from Amazon.