What would you do?

[Bigoldhag]

The land next door to me is being built on. Its land that previously had a pair of semi detatched houses, that had been flattened to concrete some years ago and is now having a single detatched property built on it.

Work started this last week where some massive drilling machine (no clue but it looks like some sort of huge drill that’s digging deep pipesize holes maybe? The noise is awful, my whole house shakes due to proximity but I accept this is par for the course and they aren’t operating it out of hours.

However, I have two issues - I’ve just gone outside and my car is filthy. Literally like someone has dropped a vat of mud and dirt on it. Its all the sides and the top (probably due to the height the machine is at plus the power its working under). Its too dark to inspect for any damage but I’m hoping not! I’d noticed a couple of clumps of dirt hit my conservatory roof yesterday but didn’t think much of it! Am I wrong to ask them to clean my car? Or to provide a tarp or something? i cant move it due to having no on street parking and only one very small drive space.

Secondly, twice today alone my internet has cut out - it directly correlates to when the worst of the noise starts up and tends to reconnect after a few minutes - am I mad to think they are impacting the broadband cables?

I don’t want to be ‘that’ neighbour at all and I know the noise is making me more angry about it - but would be interested to see how others would approach.

To note, their planning isn’t showing as approved yet online and noone has approached me to let me know they are going to be disturbing me or the other neighbours.

thanks for letting me rant!!

To add, the reason I am mad about the internet is because I work from home and an on calls a lot of the day - I’ve also got some big presentations at the end of the week and fear I’m going to have to go to my sibling’s house to make sure everything is ok!

Firstly, make a phone call to check out the status of the planning application and inform them that work has started already.
Secondly, go and speak to your neighbours.
Tell them that dirt and debris is hitting your car/conservatory and the builders need to prevent this from happening.

Don’t sit back and say nothing.

I’m definitely planning on saying something, I’m really worried about it getting worse and causing proper damage (or injury - my dog spends half her day lazing in the sun by my back door which is direct line of mud splat fire!).

I don’t have details of the owner of the land first hand if you get me - I do have the application info, which has only his name and address. It does have proper contact info for the planning agent though - can I contact them?

There may be conditions on the consent. If they do not seem clear or are being breached contact Planning. Assume they are not digging close enough to you to warrant a Party Wall Agreement?

i don’t think so - I am ignorant to this kind of stuff though. My house is about 7 foot from the boundary, theirs will be about 5-6 foot from the other side of the fence so assuming thats fine? The machinary is currently parked for the night about 6/7 foot from my car, near their boundary edge though, hence the mud.

I think it is 3m from your dwelling, so sounds borderline for PWA.

Ok thanks, I will make a call to the planning department tomorrow to get some advice, and see what the construction folks say about my car I guess. Hate this stuff :(

They are doing the initial testing which will inform the foundation design and form part of the planning application.
This is something I do for a living and there is absolutely no way your car should be covered in muck or your internet be cutting out. Keep and eye out for them arriving in the morning, grab them before they start work and outline the problems you've had and ask them to sort it. Et the name of the person ou spoke to onsite. Also ask for a direct contact to their project manager. Email them directly, mark it as urgent, explain the conversation you had with their site engineer (give their name) and reiterate it to them... and make it very clear you expect them to act on this and for there to be no further issues. If possible take photos of your car and attach it to the email.
If it helps, for a single house I'd expect them to be there no longer than a week. Although going forward you may want to contact the company/ person in charge of the development as there may be further stages of work resulting in a similar situation for you.

@PlntLady thank you - good to hear this. Not sure how much of an operation they are to be honest, to have site engineers and project managers. There was previously a huge amount of overgrowth that was cut back by two lads and then i think its been about 5 working days of the noise machine (which peaked in loudness today and yesterday!) there seems to be two, maybe three men there.

when you say part of the planning application - do you mean they need to do some work to get their application approved or something? Its been in since about this time last year, i got the site proposal letter last september (they had to change the plan as they were enroaching on another neighbours land, plus wanted to put up fences that were not legal height) and then its been pretty much static since the revision, just those statutory letters from utilities/coal search etc.

I think you can also contact environmental health re. noise from building work and they use something to measure decibels of acute sounds as well as humming/vibrations.

@YouHaventDoneAnyWork i’ll keep an eye on it. I’m fretting a little as I work from home and worried its going to be untenable for months on end, and that I’ll have to keep the door shut when its warm etc, plus My dog is already stressed at the noisr so just on edge.

if this level reduces to regular building work shortly I’ll be far happier.

The application will have gone in but if it hasnt passed yet there may be conditions they need to meet for it to pass. Or it may just be that they need the information to design the foundations. If there were 3 ppl there, 2 will be operating the machine and the third will be the engineer (this person is usually much cleaner than the others so should be easy to spot). Either way you shouldn't be having these issues and they have a legal duty of care to rectify them.

You can check the status of the application online, and any documents and plans.