Hi,
Apologies for a bit of a long rant, just need to get this off my chest...
Background, we finally managed to get our loft conversion started. It's a 1 bed terraced house in southeast London.
It's taken nearly 2 years to get here due to it being located in a conservation area, the council didn't want us to do a dormer at the back (not visible from public realm) but we got it through on appeal.
We got all our papers in order, freeholder's agreement, party wall consent from neighbors/freeholder, planning permission with no objections from neighbors.
We found a good builder who is diligent and responsive. I popped by site Saturday morning to check up on them and check so they left on time, which they did. They were polite and helpful, didn't play any music and were working away as expected.
The build will take 12 weeks, whereof 3 are done, i.e. most of the big noisy works. I'm also pregnant, 29 weeks so we're tight on time and wished we could have started sooner, almost lost our slot with the builder due to the freeholder delaying. But we're getting there.
In theory all good.
The thing that stresses me out is the neighbor under us rents his flat, he's retired and spends most of his time at home or at the pub. I understand that it must be awful with all the noise but we're keeping the works within the council's permitted hours for building works as we should.
We've done everything we're supposed to do regarding trying to keep the neighbor happy, let's call him Bob for now.
We've him informed, apologised, giving him a bottle of wine, listening, explaining, invited him to come and look at the works etc.
He's said that he doesn't want us to do any work weekends, that would mean delaying the project almost 2 weeks and we can't do that because of the baby and because of the builder's time slot.
We've explained this to him and apologised again. Spoken to the builder to try to avoid them doing noisy work on the Saturday morning but especially now the first couple of weeks the vast majority will be noisy by default.
When we've spoken to him on the phone he says he understands and mainly moans about the builders being foreign and that they shouldn't be here. He's got both our phone numbers but hasn't called us once.
On Saturday I left a pack of nice beer, cheese and crackers with the other neighbor and a little note apologising again and thanking him for being so patient.
He didn't except it and said that we'd been lying to him, he was under the impression that there wouldn't be any building works done on a Saturday which we certainly didn't say or promise.
It's starting to feel like whatever we do he'll be unhappy. He doesn't come to us either but instead complains to the neighbors and says he's going to contact his landlord which is the same company how's our freeholder who's given us consent.
The other neighbor say that perhaps we can pay to send him on holiday but we'll be skint after the build and will only have one salary to live on when the baby's here.
Does anyone have any advice on how to handle the situation?
Xx