We'd like to build a swimming pool in our garden. Our side access is not wide enough for a mini-digger. Manually digging and shipping the dirt out will add thousands to the cost.
Our neighbours have a wide side-access right next to us, and if we took the adjoining fence down it would mean coming over a few metres of their land, gravel and a bit of grass (not the perfect lawn type) and removing a woodstore (not the precious type).
We would commit to put all their land and the fence back exactly how it was before and build a new woodstore (this would still be much cheaper). The digging will take about a week.
We will tell them they can use the pool whenever they wish, as long as we don't have visitors. They are lovely people in their 50s with grown-up kids. We have a good relationship but are not friends. In the past we used a friend's pool on this basis so we know what it's like to be on the other end of this arrangement.
If they say no we will probably not go ahead, so it's not like if they say no we'll build it anyway and not let them use it! We would say there's absolutely no obligation and it's just at the ideas stage, just getting a feel for cost.
Personally, if I could have the luxury of easy access to a pool with none of the responsibility I would jump at the chance!
I realise this is a relatively first-world and trivial problem compared to what a lot of people are going through at the moment, but if we're going to do it then we should now, before another restrictive year in terms of holidays and exercise opportunities.
How would you feel if you were the neighbour? AIBU to ask them?