I just can't tell if I'm BU. Maybe more of a 'What Would You Do?' kind of dilemma. I feel like I am going to be unreasonable whatever I do.
Last year, a new family moved into the house next door but one to my mum's. It is a mixed estate, my mum owns her house and the new family are council tenants.
They're really difficult to live near (my house is just a stones throw away on the other side of the road). The family consists of a mum, several teens, two pre-school aged children and two dogs. There is a dad around occasionally. Nobody works or goes to school, so they're in all day, every day.
They are so noisy, and it's driving their immediate neighbours potty. In this heat, with windows open, our whole end of the street can hear them. Whether indoors, in the garden or hanging around outside their house, the shouting, swearing and arguing, seemingly between all members of the family is incessant.
They have a weekly dog poo and household waste bonfire in the garden, which really stinks, and one dog in particular escapes all the time, wreaking havoc in neighbouring gardens.
Add to that lots of vehicles and motorbikes gathering on the pavement, verge and sometimes even obstructing the road on evenings and weekends.
My mum is so miserable about it, she doesn't want to be in the garden or have the windows open. She says she wants to move to get away from it.
My problem is that I could just go and talk to them, were it not for the for the fact that I am too chicken as they are quite fighty, and police have been around, once for a big brawl out in the street, but also because I hate the idea of a woman who is as good as on her own in difficult circumstances, and gets treated like shit by her partner, feeling even more stressed harassed, especially as she has two really young children. Their next door neighbour, who is trying to keep relations civil, was told by the mum that they were relocated from their previous house because of complaints from neighbours, and that she is so relieved that nobody here has complained. But it is just that everyone is too scared.
Has anyone got any experience of addressing a problem like this and for there to be a constructive, win-win resolution? WIBU to complain, either directly to her or the council? l feel that, by comparison, we are all really lucky to live where we do, and that we should have a bit of a "There but for the grace..." attitude to this family, but I also feel awful for my mum and the other immediate neighbours, all of whom are pensioners who are too scared to make a fuss.