Hi
I really hope anyone can advise us as we have tried everything.
We have the neighbours from help. Old brother and sister and one is a councillor as she likes to tell us!
We wanted to build a conservatory with decking area so applied for householder development. We didn't realise the party wall act existed so dug some soil away to put in a minor retaining wall so we can have a decked area, this is about a foot high, madd from sleepers and goes up toour neighbours existing wall that is in a bad state of repair and falling apart. Hope this makes sense.
Because we didn't know about the party wall act they have been very controlling and got us to change our plans to suit them. They wrote a 2 page complaint letter about the conservatory- generally irrelevant stuff as they won't be able to see it. The planners visited and told us we need planning permission for consrrvatory which is fine. But that the gardening is ok to continue including the sleeper wall.
Our neighbours are extremely unhappy even though we changed our plans and it doesn't affect their wall in any way. They are rude and always watching us. They even complained about the planner and told her they were watching her out the window. So the planner told us the best thing would be to erect a fence which we were planning on doing anyway.
So we wrote a letter to notify neighbours- trying to be nice. They wrote back saying they might sue us for deliberately damaging their wall and trying to hide it with a fence- some of the render has come off but the whole wall is falling off including the capping stones so it wasn't us doing any damage. They have made all sorts of horrible claims. I have offered for us to either:
- 're render the wall ourselves then erect the fence
- Give them a bit of time to fix it
- If they aren't going to let us fix or them fix then we erect the fence anyway
So my actual question is:
Is there anything they can actually do???
I know the fence is ok to put up but I don't want to get into worse conflict as we have 2 young children. Can they sue us for anything??? Would they have a leg to stand on??
We can try the following if you think it's a good idea:
1.Complain to council was she keeps trying to use her position as a councillor to intimidate us
- Get solicitors involved as step dad is a solicitor
- Get a surveyor in to help with the party wall problem but ££££ and I'm on maternity and broke. ( conservatory is second hand and self buikd)
- Tell them to leave us alone and sue us if they want to
This is stressing me out and as I'm at home all the time it's making me really angry having to watch them