So upset, neighbours from hell

[Dotheflossyfloss]

We spent every penny we have on buying our first house. We put everything into it.
We are in a semi detached. Next door neighbours have respectable jobs, nice cars, nice things. Their family live two doors down from us too.
They are the rudest, vilest people I've ever met.
Dh came home from work to find someone parked on our drive. He went next door to ask if the car belonged to their guests. One of the guests came out huffing and puffing saying it's doing no harm, he can park where he likes. My dh said I just want to park on my fucking driveway. The man then threatened my dh in the street and said he was going to kick his head in.
Next minute 7 of them including the home owners come round to our house, booze in hand and call my dh names, threaten him and get in his face, hands were also laid on him.
I called the police and they came out and said it's probably best we leave it to avoid the backlash. They noted it on file.
The police soon changed their tune about them when they found out their job title and what cars they had.
They have had a complaint from the council because they have built a massive metal structure in their garden, raised decking and benches too which means our privacy is invaded. Everyone can see into our kitchen....so they are obviously angry.

The music went on to 12.30am and it was so so loud. We have a young daughter who was scared and couldn't sleep. Their disco lights flashed into our house.
I fucking hate them. They upset our daughter yesterday, she was so upset.

It may well calm down but they will still be bastards. The OP seems like a sensitive person, so is likely to be aware of the possibility of noise, trouble or incursion most the time. Staying is bad for mental health, even a long-term plan to move can help.

It’s sounds like they’ve been used to using your drive if the house was empty for so long. That’s no excuse for still doing it, but if it was a guest they might not have realised you lived there and then got drunkenly belligerent.

I would let the decking roof go, it’s hugely unlikely it was designed to piss you off.

I’d probably shrug off the odd party as well as it’s been a long hot summer.

Basically, don’t take isolated incidents and string them together into some kind of targeted campaign. They are probably just a bit thoughtless.

Try and be the bigger people and build bridges, because the alternative is years of petty crap from both sides.

I honestly think the best approach is just be polite, accept you'll never be friends, say hiya when you see them etc. If they have a go over something listen to them and say "I understand your POV" and walk away. They can t argue if you give them nothing to argue with. WRT the noise my neighbours are noisy, they also like garden parties (but on the whole they are nice so never complained) I thought DD would be kept awake but she isn't she got used to it after a couple of weeks. Don't show your DD you are upset if she can't sleep just go through the motions as if there was no noise and she will get used to it.

Or move. I don't think you will win if you try and "fight back" but on the other hand I'm an anything for an easy life type of person.

OP, we have a neighbour who tried to move the boundary and punched my husband when we stopped it happening. Since we got big dogs he has backed right off. For those who don’t have allergies, I can’t recommend big dogs enough for dissuading bullies.

We had this. Moved rather than get the police involved.

It’s wrong that you have to do that to protect your investment.

Send a card with a note saying you all seemed to have started off badly and would like to start again. They have a baby (the 1 year old?), you want a baby. Wouldn't it be nicer to become friends and in 25 years time when the babies are grown up and marry each other you can look back and laugh at "that dreadful first year".

Try to de-escalate the situation and get back to a point where you are just basically ignoring each other over the next few months. If you can live with it, stay. If not, when you sell you can say the initial dispute was caused by your dh swearing at their guest. Do not take them on. They are well connected, well off, and bullies.

Successful drug dealers have nice cars

@Onedayy well this was a year or so ago but I'm pretty sure it just asked us if there were boundary issues but not personal issues. It was pretty vague. So the issue we had was a personal issue not to do with the house and as far as I'm aware they've had no issues.

oh OP, it is so awful isn't t? but I really would see if there is any way to move. We had a very difficult neighbour once, it began in the same way (no eye contact, no saying hallo), when we moved in, I saw him coming up the shared stairway and so introduced myself and said we were moving in, his reply was "yeah? and what's it to me?"

Anyway, it rapidly escalated, complaints to the units managers about us (completely unfounded), verbally aggressive etc.

It came to a head when he overheard my husband having a conversation with another neighbour, it was a young lad who was terrified of him, and whom he had also been persecuting, the lad was just asking my husband whether the problem neighbour had any plans to move, my husband said he did not think so.

This really triggered something in the guy, some form of paranoia I think, he started screaming we were all against him, etc., we noticed he was waiting outside in the dark for us to return home of an evening, it got so threatening that in the end we just broke the lease and fled (literally, the kids and I stayed in a hotel for a week while DH organised the move). The guy even picked a fight with our removalists, it cost a lot, but I was really scared by then.

Sorry, that was long, but we were all rather traumatised. When we bought a house recently, we made sure to knock on all neighbours doors, and came around at week-ends to check for noise and things, I was that worried!

Do it by the book. Record a log of all incidents, and get your drive covered by CCTV and put bollards there to stop others using it for parking again. And complain to the council about their structure in the garden. Put something into your kitchen window ie a blind or net to stop them being able to see in.

Don't be bullied into misery. If you can't move, make it better. For you, not them.

I can't even begin with someone who parks on a driveway that they know isn't the driveway of the person they are visiting. I would have blocked them in.

As for the fence! Well, when moving into a new build there was an awful fencing situation between us and our neighbours. We went to them and had a chat about it and said we were willing to put up a fence because they said it wasn't possible for them to do due to lack of money, understandable. We put up a fence just within the law regarding height. It was high, but not as high on their side and we were positioned on a slope. They were not happy. The husband used to come out and peep through the holes in the wood saying loudly, 'We can still see you!' I replied 'Are you a voyeur? A creep?' He soon stopped doing it. I know the saying Good fences make good neighbours, but in this instance we felt justified in putting that fence up.

In the end the only solution was moving. That was a happy day!

But even with all of this, there was never an issue with our driveway.

This is just awful, you poor thing. How can anyone think parking on someone elses driveway is ok.

I have been forced to move by encountering neighbours from hell (in a different way) 20 years in my beautiful house and these arseholes have ruined it. Despite having built a monstrous extension they said they would do everything on their poeer to stop us building a very small extensiin that they would not be able to see! It has been heartbreaking to be honest. Whatever the circumstances, it is about living next door to bullies.

We declared our dispute, we were very open about it and said it was personal. We had 3 buyers, all of whom proceeded knowing all this. Chains collapsed for very different reasons. I honestly stsrted to think we were cursed!

What did the people you bought from say about them?

I would always say move
But as moving isn't possible then I agree with the poster upthread who suggests trying to get back on a friendly level with them

If it’s continues and they are firefighters I would report it to their boss at the fire station to be honest. They work with vunrable people and are supposed to set a certain image not be trying to start drinking fights etc.

I wonder if the house was empty for a year previously was it anything to do with them? Maybe the sellers went into rented to get away?

If you can’t move, which it sounds like you can’t then you have two options:

1. Be quiet and polite and ignore them.
2. Do your best to get them to move or behave appropriately.

If you opt for 2, check out this link here which shows a firefighter’s code of conduct and how they are expected to behave both when they are at work and in their private life. Keep a list of everything, report to the police and the council and write to their employer.

It sounds a little like they are 'testing' you to see how much they can get away with - like an abusive man does at the beginning of a relationship.

Difficult with their family also living very close nearby and standing up to belligerent people can be extremely stressful.

Have you started to keep a note of each incident just in case it continues? Is there no chance of you moving at all - even if you rented your current house out and rented somewhere else.

The usual shift system pattern doesn't help either as they have a lot of time not working unless its in Kent where do they different shifts. I'd agree with reporting a log on incidents to the station but it would depend on what the station manager was like - you may need to take it higher.

Move. If it goes too far, it will impact the sale of your house, as you have to record neighbour disputes. We were in a similar situation through parking, and we went . You can't win, and it will affect your health through stress to stay - just go!

Nice cars and nice things are not what make people decent. Is this what our society has come to? Even an impressive job title is no guarantee of a good neighbour.

They could be testing how far they can push you - but of course having to declare neighbour disputes means we all end up suffering in silence (I've had ours keep me up till gone 1am this morning singing along full blast to "oooh eee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep" under our bedroom window). If you can at all (and we can't so I do empathise) I'd just get the hell out to be honest - it's really not worth it... we've had 8+ years of this so far and it hasn't improved.

I’d literally do my best to keep out of their way and move as soon as I’d feasible for you.

I was quite friendly with old neighbours, I helped them out, but we actually became quite pally after they came to knock on my door about a physical fight he had with his sister. She was throwing stuff, smacking the doors off walls. Could hear the kids screaming.

I told them that I should have called the police as they’d woken all of our family up and I could hear their kids screaming.

So sister was banned from their house. All was lovely but the more I got to know the DH the more I became sure I didn’t want to be around him. He drank huge amounts whilst they were late with the school dinner money, and they weren’t allowed to turn the heating on because the bill.

So anyway. Another huge row started, sister was banned again.
Sister starts going around again, and the sister was known to also have problems with alcohol.

This time was different, banging and banging, then the sister knocked on my door at 1am screaming at me about how her brother had hit her back and they were keeping her son from her. They were both paraletic, social services were involved with her and she told them she had stopped drinking.
I the end at 2am the son was running around the driveway and they were just interested in screaming at each other. She refused to leave, but during that argument I heard that the brother- my neighbour was heavily into coke- there was no use trying to calm down the situation. I told her that she had her son, outside at 2 am. She needed to get him home, she had 10 minutes to be off my (it was shared!) driveway or I was calling the police who would involve her social worker.

She made an effort to quieten down then, but the relationship with my neighbours was damaged. I had little to do with them after that, they knew why I pulled away, but whilst I was out things started happening to my property, I’d come home to find that my Layz spa had been unplugged, or my bike was halfway through the woods instead of in my garden, once I returned to my bin having been emptied over the grass and a complaint from my landlord about a week later - about the state of my garden. The front of my house had been egged multiple times. my Door was vandalised, they parked so I couldn’t use any part of the driveway.

I had to start spending Friday and Saturday nights at my MILS house because I didn’t want to have to hear their loud parties that would often kick off in the middle of the night. It still happened during the week, but I got out as soon as I could. So happy to be away from them.

We were being harassed by a man who manned the phones for the police.
We emailed his boss.
Things changed.

Just an idea.

I feel for you, we have hideous neighbours, an A&E consultant and a nurse and a GP and a nurse.

Who would have thought?

One lot have a dog which seems to be home alone it barks an awful lot (every time we go outside in fact), they seem to be too lazy to take it for a walk to pee so out it goes into the garden and runs around at 10pm barking. It is just let loose to roam and has been in our garden digging up plants. When they moved in the Mother went up to my son and made a point of telling him she was too busy to say hello.

Who does that to a small child?

They shout, slam doors and yell an awful lot about things, tell their workmen to park in our front garden. I could go on but I'm sure you get the idea.

They are only marginally less vile than the lot they replaced but I wont mention them on here.

The other lot of medical staff have just built a massive extension which has completely taken away my neighbours sea view without telling her before they started work. They have also built (as part of the same extension) a massive picture window looking into her back garden and a window looking into her bedroom and a bathroom at the front of the house with normal glass in front of the shower i.e. you can see right in when you walk past.

CREEP

They are noisy, nosy and nasty liars. The second time they spoke to us in about 5 years was to come and ask us to pay for driveway work which they needed for the extension.

The building work went on for 8 months throughout that time they insisted in parking at the bottom of our drive instead of the bottom of theirs so they walked their kids up past our house all the time so when we had to park miles away from our house we started walking our kids up past theirs. One memorable occasion the guy came and asked me to move my car (from my drive because the builders couldn't get the truck past it) when I said I couldn't because there was no where else to park. He told me he couldn't move one of their cars (from the end of my drive) because they would need it in 3 weeks.

The only light at the end of the tunnel is we are all sure they will leave now the work has finished.

What has become clear to me however is just how few hours they all work!

Needless to say we're moving and when we sell I shall probably value looking for the nastiest noisiest most unpleasant person to sell my house to I can find. If you've got 15 kids and Rottie came make me an offer!

Maybe if you tell their family, your direct neighbours that you're renting the house out to whoever'll rent it from you and you are going to rent somewhere else their family will think crap this shit on all sides and they will ask them to be nice to you?