I’ve noticed there have been a lot of posts about inconsiderate neighbours of late, so I’m hoping any of you can help with my situation please.
NDN is a woman who lives alone, she rarely leaves the house and doesn’t appear to have friends. The only visitor I notice is a young girl with a child (who is also the same as NDN.. bare with me while I explain)
NDN seems to have an issue with noise and will make her presence known at all times. For example when she wakes up she makes sure we know she’s awake and making meals throughout the day (slamming of kitchen cupboards, hard thud from crockery etc, stomping, scraping of chair), if we use our garden she will go into her garden and bang things against the shared fence, move around plant pots etc, then stops when we go inside. When the child visitor comes over they will bang on our walls with toys and run all over the house for the entire day without stopping, the mother I presume, laughs and encourages it as we can hear every word when we’re in the garden and their windows are open.
I have severe PTSD and banging/thumping sounds are hard triggers for me, it results in non stop panic attacks and high blood pressure. My husband got fed up with the noise and the effect on my health so he installed white noise machines throughout the house, which also connect to our tv surround sound speakers and drowns out the noise very well, although we can still feel the vibrations as it’s that loud.
NDN put a note through our door saying she will report us to the police for a noise disturbance unless we turn the white noise off. We wasn’t aware she could hear it through the walls as it’s just white noise and not voices for example, but we knocked in hope we could make peace. She didn’t answer so we sent a response letter asking her to consider her own noise as this is why the white noise is necessary. That she wakes us constantly through the night with her banging, disturbs us through the day while we work from home, and that we’d appreciate her toning it down.
The noise stopped instantly. We had a week of bliss. Then suddenly out of nowhere all of the noises began this morning but much worse than previously. We hadn’t made any noise nor used our white noise machines up to this point so it wasn’t caused by retaliation.
I’m in absolute bits that she could be so selfish when she knows it bothers us and that we respectfully turned the white noise off and yet this is how she repays us. I have no idea what to do next. I looked into reporting it to the council but they advised they cannot act on it because it would be considered usual household noises as there’s no proof it’s deliberate. So it seems we have to put up with constant noise as if there were a building site next door, and our right to peace is ignored. I don’t have the energy to fight it, it’s something most people put up with but for me it’s particularly difficult due to my past. She won’t communicate with us or open her door so there’s no way of coming to a civil agreement. We’re both home owners so it would affect future sales. I want to move house because of it but we can’t afford to.
Has anyone been through this and can advise the best way to deal with it please?