We moved into our house about a year ago. The fence that our neighbours are responsible for begins right next to our kitchen window and ever since we moved in, one of the 6ft high panels closest to our house has been slowly disintegrating row by row. It’s eventually started completely falling down last month when it was very windy and each time, the neighbours just pick it up and slotted it back in. It’s now being propped up on their side by a garden table.
The first time it fell down, we popped over to the neighbours and offered to pay half for a new panel. The disintegration hasn’t been helped by our cat jumping up onto it and we are very happy to help pay for a new one (we'd even pay for the whole thing). They waved us off (in a nice way) saying ‘no, it’s our fence, it’s our responsibility to replace it’ and said they’d get around to replacing the whole fence ‘at some point’. Their entire fence is awful, falling down and with massive holes in it, but we’ve planted a hedge next to rest of it so it doesn’t affect us - it’s just the one falling down 6ft panel.
It’s now got to the point that it looks really terrible - sagging, falling apart and now only about 5ft tall because so much of it disintegrated away. I wouldn’t mind if it was further down the garden, but as it is, it’s right next to our kitchen window and the first thing you see when you look outside. It also means we can see right into their garden, and they can look right into our kitchen, which just feels a bit weird.
They were pretty insistent that we couldn’t replace it ourselves, and I have no faith in them getting round it replacing it anytime soon - they're perfectly ok neighbours, but not the kind who seem to care about what their garden looks like very much. Any suggestions for anything else we can do? We can’t plant anything next to it to hide it because there’s patio there. Anything tall, freestanding and not too expensive we could put next to it?!