Have you ever got neighbours a thankyou gift after your building work has affected them directly?

[ilikeyoursleeves]

We are near the end of building our house extension and the neighbours, who were absolutely fine at first, are now getting well peeved at us. Mainly because they still have our scaffolding in their garden and today their garden is covered in 10000000000's of tiny white roughcasting stones! The scaffolding should be coming down soon thankfully but we want to get them something to say thanks for putting up with everything (the building work has been going on since July). Not sure what to get though? What have others done?

PS we are also obviously going to get the roughcasters / labourer to tidy up their garden too!

nice idea. A case of wine maybe?

We got the neighbours a nice bottle of fizz -went down well, I think.

Great idea.

Wine and chocolates, flowers.

If they are keen gardeners, then perhaps a nice shrub in a pot. You can say that you know they will miss the scaffolding and so that their garden doesn't look too empty, you bought them a little something.

When we had our kitchen fitted the noise was terrible, so as a good will gesture we bought a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers.

After our scaffolding went onto their land, went round with a bottle of something...

In our last house (a terrace) we bought our neighbour a huge bunch of flowers for generally putting up with us our renovation works. It hadn't directly affected her other than noise ie. there was no scaffolding or debris in her garden but she had been so lovely to us in general that it seemed a nice touch.

In this house (detached) we haven't bothered as they (on both sides) are also forever doing renovations/extensions/garden landscaping. We all get on OK, no falling out and keep each other informed of any major things that will be happening so it doesn't seem necessary.

Yes, 6 bottles of wine to either side of us! Don't think we had pissed them off too much but it was noist

Noisy

Funny you should mention this.

Last year we had an extension and our next-door-neighbours endured some of our scaffolding poles in their garden. Another neighbour let me park my car on his drive for months.

We gave both lots of neighbours six bottles of (good) wine.

They were chuffed, and so were we, as they'd all been so accomodating and nice about it.

We had a 9 month job last year, moved out for 7 months. Lots of noise/dust/vans parked everywhere. Neighbours were brilliant. We invited them all ( 6 houses )to a pre Christmas party to say thank you.

It was great, we were snowed in. They abused our hospitality brilliantly, the amount of alcohol and food they got through was quite shocking. I have never made so much mulled wine and jugs of sea breeze in my life.

And into the bargain they bought gifts for us and the DC.

I'd take them a big bunch of flowers right now, to apologise for the immediate problem of the stones and try and stem any building (ha!) resentment, and then get something bigger at the end. When you take the flowers you can also chat and show them that you are sorry they are suffering. Waiting till the end to do anything seems like a bad idea.

we got our neighbours wine, chocs and flowers towards the end of the building work we had done. They seemed really pleased and stop complaining about the noise!!