Hi everyone! Really hope you can help as this has been rumbling on for a couple of years now and it’s becoming quite stressful. We’re trying to do everything by the book but our neighbours are being very unkind at every turn.
We’re building a simple side extension over our garage. It’s a semi-detached house (non-attached side) and our neighbours built exactly the same extension about 5 years ago, before we lived there. Their property doesn’t touch our garage, there’s about a 50mm gap, presumably to avoid party wall discussions when they built their extension. Our structural engineer has suggested we need to demolish our garage, dig new foundations (no deeper than their foundations) and build a new cavity wall to the boundary line. It should be very simple. All permissions (planning and building regs) have gone through fine (even with their objections, that they didn’t tell us about). Just about every house on the street has done this work.
We’ve tried to keep them in the loop with everything we’re doing from the outset. We’ve sent them e-mails with all the designs, we’ve sent build schedules, we even give them advance notice by text of any noisy work. Face-to-face they’re absolutely fine and have no issues, but they then lodge objections to everything behind our backs.
The plan was to build up to the boundary and ‘seal’ the gap to avoid debris etc. building up between the two properties. We’d also need to install some flashing around roof level for the same reason. Our architect said this was normal and best practice.
We gave them the plans months ago and asked if they had any questions. They were fine. The only relevant Party Wall matter seems to be the Line of Junction notice since we're building entirely on our own land up to the boundary. Needless to say they immediately raised a dissent against this without speaking to us first. We’re happy to go down the Party Wall Award route but given their history I think they’ll continue to be difficult even after this. We’re now reluctantly thinking of building shy of the boundary and leaving the small gap between the properties, so we build entirely on our side with no junctions. Obviously this means their existing wall (covered in very shoddy render) will be inaccessible for maintenance.
Can anyone anticipate any issues with this? If we go down this route is there anything they could do if they still wanted to be awkward? (which they inevitably will) Or do you think we should continue with our plans to build up to the boundary and go down the PWA route?
Thanks in advance!
Judith