Sure this is a common problem. We have lived in our house 4 years. Our neighbour is a lady who lives there with her adult son. I guess he’s in his 30s.
our 7 year old loves football. He plays football outside for perhaps an hour a day maximum on the days we’re home. In the summer holidays we’ve been away for 3 weeks. The other 3 weeks he has played outside. We are a family who go out a lot and he does multiple clubs, we’re always at the park etc so it’s certainly not excessive. 2 weeks of the holidays he was at football camp all day ever day in the week.
since we’ve lived here he’s knocked on her door to ask for his football back maybe 6 times in total. The last time he asked she said no. Balls do go over her fence sometimes, not every day. But unfortunately we don’t have a large garden and it does happen. We have asked him to try not to do it. Usually we just wait for them to be thrown back.
he’s never broken anything in her garden. She doesn’t have any plants/pots or anything like that. They just land on the grass.
she’s posted a very long letter though my door this morning saying it’s very disruptive when he knows on the door and can I stop them going over.
so my solution is I stop him playing football outside or I try to put up some kind of net? Has anyone done this? Any recommendations? Or ways to make the fence higher?
in total I would say she throws a ball back once a week in the summer and never in the winter since the garden gets too muddy to play. He’s a really polite little boy. We have a little girl who causes her no issues at all. We’re not a noisy family, as I say we’re detached anyway.
shes never ever complained about it at all to my face, just posted a letter and ran off. She’s also complained about us parking outside her house which I don’t understand because we don’t do that. And we live on a quiet road with hundreds of parking spaces. She lives next to the circle at the of the cul de sac which is always empty and she has a driveway. I can only assume perhaps someone visiting me has parked outside her house but that would be on occasion only. She says she needs the parking space for the kids she teaches (very loud and annoying) violin. I don’t want conflict but this seems so petty.