Two of my neighbours are currently having building work done on their houses.
My immediate neighbour has worked on his for some time. The poor guy is working on it alone and as he’s self-employed he has to go off for a few weeks to earn some more money before he can carry on! It’s been a long old process.
The problem we have, is that he works on it over the weekend! That means early Saturday and Sunday morning starts, often finishing late in the evening.
He’s a lovely guy and we’re very tolerant, especially as we had our own house knocked about a few years ago, which I’m sure didn’t best please some of the neighbours. In fact I know it didn’t! I still remember a very angry daughter of one neighbour almost breaking my front door down to have a go at me about something that was easily resolved….people eh!
Anyway….I decided early on in my neighbour’s renovation process that I wasn’t going to be like that. We are flexible, understanding and as a result when my OH pops ’round at 7pm on a Sunday to ask very politely if he could stop now, he does and everyone is very friendly about it.
Next door to him are my other neighbours and they are having a big kitchen diner put on the back of their house. I feel really sorry for them because yesterday the builders, having finished the extension, knocked through into their house. My neighbour shouted to us over the fence a couple of days ago…’How did you guys put up with all this when you had it done?’
Great question….how did we? We had a double height extension, which meant knocking through both upstairs and downstairs. We had bathroom walls moved, an en suite fitted and a brand new kitchen. At one point we only had one inhabitable room!
Amidst all of this, I went into hospital for an emergency caesarean and came home to chaos, bringing our new bundle of joy into a dusty, noisy environment. At least he can sleep through anything now!
It’s all worth it in the end though, we have a great house and soon our neighbours will be just as lovely and pretty soon they will barely remember all the mess and noise they went through.
I’d do it again, though I’d probably just erect a purpose-built metal building the next time.
