Funnily enough they're sort of back today! A surveyor went in to see what's going on and if their plans can even be done. Apparently they're trying to find a new contractor to do whatever work, but it's the same owners and management company still.
I suppose the thing is, there's a limit to what you can do with a terraced property. I mean, extension, two storey extension, roof extension. And then you get into issues with planning consent. But there's no limit to the problems that a yippee-yi-yo posse of builders can cause.
Next door, a more down-to-earth pair of builders have become regulars. They've already done more in a week than Patrick managed in two months. I was very impressed yesterday. Two of them manouevered a huge new roof steel in through a tiny hole they'd cut in the wall with no more than well-placed straps. By evening the hole was patched. The neighbour says it's all in place and they've already started on new wooden joists.
You can build a bungalow, sorry a home gym, in the back garden of a terrace!
Our issues with neighbour's building work have been mild, compared with yours. When we moved in here, just over 6 years ago - also a 1930s semi detached chalet bungalow, which we love because we have 3 small doubles upstairs and downstairs is massive - there was an old guy with what I suspect was parkinson's next door. He was past being lucid. After he died, the house eventually sold to the same wannabe landlord who also bought 2 other nearby houses. He's a cheapskate, taking advantage of eye watering rents here, near the hospital and university, so thankfully wasn't so ambitious with his plans. He employed some seasoned bodgers to tweak it and literally paint over the mould, though.
The first we knew of them was a day of guys bringing the crap out of the garden across the road and dumping it in the front garden next door. Oh, you should expect some mess with building work, they said to Wib. Wib is too nice because the pile got bigger and bigger and they only got someone to take away what they couldn't hide in or behind the shed when they needed room for an estate agent to take pics.
They paid someone to spend a day bagging up all the red gravel in the front garden, after that, so they could replace it with grey gravel. Within a month you couldn't see it for the weeds they hadn't touched.
They badly painted the ugly grey pebbledash. To do that, they removed the guttering and didn't put it back at all for weeks and then eventually put it back badly. The result was all that heavy rain from those storms at the end of last summer pissed all over our front wall with the inevitable consequences.
Some mugs did move in, back in October. Our front doors are at opposite sides of a 50' wide building so they have managed to avoid us in all that time.
As well as a leaky roof (not fixed by the bodgers even though the bedroom ceilings were badly water stained in the estate agent pics) they had obviously complained about the crap in the shed because a hippo bag appeared in the front garden at the start of this year. They're no better than the landlord and his bodgers because they seemed to be using it instead of the wheel bins for their own rubbish like shoe boxes, yoghurt pots, bags of carrots, the packaging off the flat pack they assembled at midnight, one Sunday....
Wib has stopped being too nice and complained to the council about that mess, as it was blowing into our garden and we already have too many rats around here, so that finally went last week. The poor guy had to use his wheelie bin, like the rest of us.
