@donttellmehesalive - so you would be happy to have your brand new fence damaged then, would you? Have you ever been a homeowner?
@ElsLouise Had the exact same experience upwards of 30 years ago (wtf did that go!?). In our case, it was the culmination of various incidents of selfish, entitled behaviour. We were quite good friends with our NDNs, would have had them round for drinks etc, attached semis, two young couples, no kids.
They totally took the piss parking right in front of our house rather than swap around their cars in their drive. We also had 2 cars but never got the opportunity to park in front of our own house. We said nothing, just fumed a little quietly. Shit happens, maybe never occurred to them.
We'd had oil central heating installed by the builders (new build too - imagine it used to be an 'extra'!). We didn't have a garage so they'd built a little red brick boiler house, totally on our side. NDN DH was a crap plumber, so he installed theirs sometime after they moved in. Came home from work one day and he'd also built a little brick boiler house for their boiler - but attached to ours, without ever asking or even suggesting that he was going to do it, so there was no room for a fence in between.
We took that too, like mugs. Eventually we put our fence up, panels that had been pre-dipped. Because they'd encroached on our boiler house, the fence was 100% on our land, not down the boundary as we would have preferred.
Anyway, got home from work one night to find the dickhead completely stupid DH spraying their side of our new fence - with black bitumen!! It was all seeping through and dripping on our side. I was absolutely furious and yelled at him asking what he thought he was doing?! He had no right at all to have touched it, nor was there any need to - it had been pretreated, and if they didn't like the colour they had plenty of room to put their own up! He did stop then but the damage had been done and there was no colour on god's green earth that would have covered up black bitumen. So.... they stopped speaking to us!!! They moved not long later, went to Oz, and we moved too soon after. Our new house was detached thank god, and although there was fencing around the other adjacent gardens, we also put up our own. Wasn't getting into that one again! Also put a curve in the drive so no more car swapping!
You have every right to be furious @ElsLouise - don't blame you one bit. Could the builders help you out here? Maybe they would replace some of the fence for you if the arseholes next door pay for it?
I will never ever share a fence with a neighbour again. As an aside, we used posts rather than panels and they're still intact 25 years on.
Neighbours are to be tolerated IMO. We were friendly with another set from our first house, who then became very distant when we all moved, so far as we could see, because they moved to another semi and we moved to a detached. Then there was the NDN in current house, who was a nice enough guy, but we found him pacing his drive (semi) and ours (which we'd paid the builders to alter for us) because he was annoyed that ours was wider than his.... not to mention the married one who shagged our childminder and got her pregnant... messy!!