About 2 years ago, the very nice elderly lady next door fell down her stairs and died. It took about a year but finally around this time last year the house was sold. The new owners never introduced themselves and even when we put notes through their door about an alarm going off for 2 days, never bothered to come and say hello or sorry. The only time I've met the owner (bloke in his 30s), he refused to speak to me and told me his dad would come and find me and neither of them was prepared to give me a contact number (they weren't always present in the house).
About 4 months back they were given planning permission for fairly huge changes including one which could have caused problems for my house. When the party wall act paperwork dropped through my letter box I went to a local surveyor with the neighbour on the other side to ensure that everything was above board. The surveyor was quite clear that the plans were not sufficient to start work and started to work with the neighbour's surveyor to get it sorted. I've personally never been rude, I've said hello to them on a couple of occasions but I wasn't prepared to have the structural integrity of my house undermined by them without getting everything checked out.
Fast forward to yesterday, there's a knock on the door and it's the son of the family. He opens with "Just to let you know, I'm cancelling the proposed building work. You've made me feel so unwelcome in this street I'm going to sell. I hope you're pleased with yourself" before turning around and walking off.
Now, for a bloke that never once spoke to me of his own accord and that never even tried to discuss the plans, I think this is a bit rich but in a Saturday early morning bout of introspection I wonder whether I should have done more to talk to them about their plans? My personal feeling is that it's their house so they should have come to us but I was interested in the STW massive's opinion.
