Neighbours constant house improvements

[userbrains]

Anybody else wish their neighbours would give house improvements a break for a year. Our neighbours are constantly having work done over several years. It's nice that their houses don't look horrible but there is never peace.
There seems to be no regard for people living around them as long houses are constantly improving and I mean constantly!
Don't get me wrong we have had work done and plan to again in future but with our neighbours it's all the time.
Then it starts all over again constant vans and workmen.
Is it just me?

I'm on your side... my neighbour who's elderly on her own, never stops. I think she likes the company... but it just never stops. She gets the noisiest things done. Right now all her paving stones in her back garden are getting pneumatic drilled/smashed. Fk knows what she want now...
She's a lovely neighbour, but her building work is infuriating... This isn't about "keeping up the standards" as most comments state. For example, 2 months ago she decided she wanted decking built, that came a month after she wanted a mega structure of a lean to built (my detached now looks like a linked detached...
Please just stop!

You are not alone that would piss me off as well.

We've extended, converted the loft, taken a wall down inside. Refurbed every room. I'm sure it's annoying for our neighbours. If it's any consolation, I bet it annoys me more. I fucking hate it and just want to live in peace. But the house is looking pretty great now.

Yep I'm with you.

I have had 3 neighbors in the house next door in 15 years.

First was an utter twat that constantly did noisy DIY but aggressively tried to control everyone else's on the streets 'noise output' including telling people when they had to be in bed by and when they could use their cars. Absoloute psycho, constantly sounded like he was taking a sledgehammer to walls, I was for a while scared it would fall down because how many walls can you even remove? He went on to working in buying up properties.

Second, he sold to a builder/developer who moved in and did work for a year or so doing it up as a full reno. He was pretty quite during the week but weekends full of DIY.

He then sold to another builder who has again changed lots of things (for example: the boiler has moved all over the house on our shared wall but we constantly hear it in the room its adjoined too). They seem harmless enough but at least every 3 months theres drilling and banging for a few weekends while they do something new.

Honestly they update it for the sake of it, nothing NEEDS doing its been fully renovated more than once. It's men that have lived there and they seem obsessed with constant tinkering with it though.

Neighbor on the other side is a lovely little old lady that has lived there over 50 years, she has basic maintenance done like roof tiles fixed etc... (quick and quiet jobs) but otherwise you wouldn't even know shes there. Utterly silent neighbor.

So reading your post, it's not one neighbour going hell for leather at doing up their house, is it, it's more that one person finishes a project and another starts one and it's a bit of a cycle and you're hearing this from multiple houses? So no single neighbour is being inconsiderate, just like you weren't being inconsiderate when you had your work done, you're all just part of the general cacophony of life.

Never satisfied 😠 must be very stressful competing with the neighbours.

Why don't you just move away and be a little less selfish

That's the problem with living amongst people, something will always be getting done.

We are going to be spending the next few months being noisy, ripping out and replacing the bathrooms one by one and the fascias getting sorted. I'm not slotting it in with my neighbours, it gets done when we have the money/time and the professionals can fit us in.

I have no idea what the neighbours have had done recently, I've never been bothered by any DIY in the 11 years we've been here but someone must have had something done in all this time, there are several houses on my road and there are several I can see at the back of me.

Nah, I’d sooner they get it done rather than spread it out over years and years.

We moved into our property a year ago and began the renovation work almost immediately. Our cottage is Georgian but was last renovated by builders in 1965, then lived in by the previous owner from 1970 till she died in 2023.

Every last internal original feature had been comprehensively removed in/around 1965 and as we prefer character in our period properties, we're gradually reinstating what we can...But, doing it mostly ourselves, this has to be carried out during weekends and occasional evenings. We don't have a bottomless pit of funds to pay trades and as we've gained a wealth of experience renovating several previous houses, we now feel confident to save £££ by DIYing as much as we can.

This obviously takes time - our last project (a converted 400 year old mill) took 5+ years to complete. You never know what horrors you're going to uncover, either. For example last week the heating engineer was lifting some replacement Victorian floorboards on the ground floor and discovered rotten joists. So this weekend we've had to take the boards up, remove the joists - some of which were completely severed - and replace/sister in new ones where necessary, involving the use of power tools etc.

Fortunately, our new neighbours are lovely and most have renovated their own houses/are currently in the throes of doing so. Plus, they seem to appreciate that, once finished, our cottage will improve the overall appearance of the conservation area, as the exterior hasn't been touched for ages. I did overhear someone refer to ours as being 'slowly' done up the other day, but no actial complaints about noise or anything else...so far 🤞

Our neighbours have a sixth sense for copy-paste.
New car? They upgrade within a fortnight.
Festive lights? I blink, they sparkle.
It’s not flattery - it’s mirroring with a delay.

Honestly, I should start doing weird stuff just to test the limits 😔😑

Our previous neighbours were like that. The lady of the house would be hammering something at 11pm for weeks on end and they did a loft extension (no permission) and her family member was doing the works so we would have banging and hammering on Sunday mornings for months as they were only working on it at weekends. Then they laid wood flooring across the whole house so you could hear everything next door. It was a walls attached semi. It was so exhausting. I wouldn't mind but the renovations were just so awful it didnt actually improve the house at all. Then when we did our extension she had the flippin cheek to complain about the noise - I said to her ' yes thats how we felt when you did your loft extension' no complaints after that as she knew if she pushed it we could complain to the council as it hadn't had planning approval. (not that we would have but it was good to have it hang over her), awful woman