Neighbour is in his early 70s - wife lives with him and they have a grown up son (he is married but wife lives in Asia and has their three children there). We knew they were a bit brusque when we moved in but we always got on with them and rubbed along - we tried to. I do remember one occasion when we had just moved in and someone fell over on the path outside their house and was bleeding, I saw it went out and helped them.
These neighbours sat in their lounge watching me while I called an ambulance - I was actually a bit upset because they are able bodied and have children and grandchildren, but their call if they don't want to help. I thought 'what type of neighbourhood are we in' - during lockdown they broke most of the social distancing rules and had relatives in the house. So I knew then maybe they weren't our cup of tea and in fact one of their grandchildren stayed and he was only 7 and was out in the local park all day and tried to set fire to some of the playground equipment and also wrote in permanent pen on the swing and slides.
Anyway that's the background and he did also say when we moved in 'it's a quiet neighbourhood, we make the noise around here'.
So we got a dog three years ago.
The neighbour started complaining about our dog barking, our dog is vocal but and does bark, but only for a few minutes and she goes to bed when we do. It can be annoying but where we live there are much noisier and more persistent dogs barking! And if she does bark in the night it's because we have foxes that scream in the park near us. I'm woken by them first. We play music to make sure she can't hear in.
Neighbour starts banging on the wall, telling us to shut up our dog. Even when its just a few minutes. On one occasion they set off fireworks in their garden then when our dog barked they banged on the wall. It gets really nasty where he's threatening to kill the dog and us. Swearing in front of our daughter and calling us awful names.
We ended up reporting him to the police. He then reports us to the council for noise nuisance - he sends a diary to the council and the officer calls us to tell us that the noise the dog makes is not unreasonable and because it's not all hours everything is fine. He'd put 2pm barking for a minute on the diary.
These neighbours do play loud music and they do have loud music every afternoon. I don't mind this - but the previous owner of our house was an elderly lady so maybe he's not happy about having a family of five here.
Anyway it gets to the stage where a few weeks we slam a door (actually our teenager slammed it) and we have the neighbour's son screaming at me and my husband out of the back window. I end up writing a letter and posting it through their door - saying we love our neighbours we don't want anything nasty to happen and I also said if we had to move - the neighbour is shouting at us to move - then is no guaranteed it won't be a younger noisier family who might make more noise.
Apparently that was seen a 'threat' and the son threatens to beat up me and my husband! We report to them to the police who are now looking at prosecuting. while this has gone on (for nearly two years) the neighbour has followed me down and up the street and shouted at me behind my back. I'm at least a foot shorter than him and he does it when no-one is around.
He's also done some other weird things I confronted him a few weeks ago he'd been drinking and he admitted that the dogs didn't make that much noise and his wife was ill so she was in pain and that kept him awake most nights. He said his grown up son had to put electrical wires up and needed to go to bed at 8am and get up at 6am. He said he'd been living here 48 years and had bought his house from the council so he should stay and we should move - I pointed out I have a primary and secondary school child.
For the record I start work at 6.30am from home for my job and I also have chatted to neighbours who tell me he's known for shouting 'bitch' out the window at women he doesn't like.
This morning (we are waiting for the police to update us) he tells my husband we are selfish scum and only think of ourselves (he knows both DH do volunteering and he knows what job I do) and that all our neighbours hate us and we need to move. Our dog did bark at 11pm last night - as we were out at a very rare fund raising event. We don't hold parties and now don't any family or friends round as we are scared of making noise. We want to move and rent out our house and live with our family nearby - and then move when my daughters finish school (one will be doing exams next year). How can we resolve this, he wants us to move - but we can't. Should we go round to our neighbours and see what we can do?