I am not sure if you remember my original thread but I asked people to let me know what would be considered reasonable in relation to noise levels of living next door to a Church.
The thread gathered pace and I left it just before we had a meeting with the Council, the Methodist Church members and the Seventh Day Adventist Members.
Just to let you all know that the meeting went ahead on Friday. The Methodist Minister didn't actually manage to get any representatives from the Seventh Day Adventists to the meeting - he said that he had been waiting for a letter from the Council before asking them. However, he sees them every single Saturday and the meeting has been booked for about 6 weeks so I am not sure why he found it so difficult to verbally tell them.
So there was just my DH and I, the Methodist Minister we deal with, the Council lady and one other Minister (higher up) from the Methodist Church.
Basically we all put our findings - which was mostly my DH and I because we are ones moaning.
There was no defence to the noise - just putting facts really. The Methodist Minister we speak with is a bit of a drip and didn't really have any solutions.
The Council however said that they were just here to fact gather and to see if a solution could be found through mediation.
She did mention that when there is a noise nuisance they usually monitor the property making the noise at the border. This means that any noise leakage at the border can be considered a nuisance.
Obviously the noise is leaking over their border, over our border and into our house so we feel cautiously optimistic that they are breaching "something".
The plan is as follows:
- We continue to monitor for another 6 weeks now the meeting has taken place to see if any improvement.
*We give a copy of our findings to the Methodist Minister every Sunday so that he can speak with the Seventh Day Adventists about the issues to see what he can do.
*Somebody from the SDA's to come over to our house and give us name and contact number so we can speak with them directly if there is a particular issue
First Saturday of the 6 weeks was the one just gone. Absolutely no improvement whatsoever - we could hear the lyrics of the hymns they were singing in our bedroom still.
Also we gave the copy of the noise diary to the Minister but nobody from SDA's came over to our house to give us contact details.
Will keep plugging at it but not sure how effective it is to have had the meeting when the SDA's were not there - so frustrating for the Methodist Minister not to manage to do this simple thing!
I'm going to now start to tackle the terrible parking to see if that helps the situation at all. I feel if there are less cars piled on the double yellows, pedestrian crossing, accross my garage and on the zig zag lines there may be less people milling around all together?
Who knows!