Car Windows Scratched by Neighbour

sunny2110

Hi Guys.

I'm hoping someone can help advise me on what I can do.

My car was parked on my drive a couple of days ago, at some point during the day my neighbour paid a workman to clean his gutter. As my drive is next to my neighbours house, during the process of cleaning the workman threw some of the unwanted mess from the gutter onto my car. As he was blasting it out with water he also threw a lot of water onto my car. The temperature outside was sub zero and due to this the water and mess froze on my car.

I had no idea this had happened and needed to use my car at night to go somewhere, I was surprised how thick the ice was as it took me around 20 mins to scrape it off. The next day when my car wasn't in a frozen state, I noticed the mess on my car and also that all my car windows had faint scratches. I've now washed my car and the scratches are still there. I believe they've derived from the dirt/mud on my car scratching the glass whilst I was scraping the thick layer of ice from my car windows.

My question is, can I lawfully action anything whereby my neighbour or the builder have to pay for the damage? I don't think its fair that I should have to pay for something when I've done nothing wrong apart from try to take ice off my car. Also how likely/easy is it that I will actually get some sort of repayment?

Any advice is well appreciated, thanks in advance.

Sunny

Sgt_Pepper_2

sunny2110 wrote: »

Hi Guys.

I'm hoping someone can help advise me on what I can do.

My car was parked on my drive a couple of days ago, at some point during the day my neighbour paid a workman to clean his gutter. As my drive is next to my neighbours house, during the process of cleaning the workman threw some of the unwanted mess from the gutter onto my car. As he was blasting it out with water he also threw a lot of water onto my car. The temperature outside was sub zero and due to this the water and mess froze on my car.

I had no idea this had happened and needed to use my car at night to go somewhere, I was surprised how thick the ice was as it took me around 20 mins to scrape it off. The next day when my car wasn't in a frozen state, I noticed the mess on my car and also that all my car windows had faint scratches. I've now washed my car and the scratches are still there. I believe they've derived from the dirt/mud on my car scratching the glass whilst I was scraping the thick layer of ice from my car windows.

My question is, can I lawfully action anything whereby my neighbour or the builder have to pay for the damage? I don't think its fair that I should have to pay for something when I've done nothing wrong apart from try to take ice off my car. Also how likely/easy is it that I will actually get some sort of repayment?

Any advice is well appreciated, thanks in advance.

Sunny

Can you prove who damaged your car?

Sounds like you did it yourself.

sunny2110

Sgt_Pepper wrote: »

Can you prove who damaged your car?

Sounds like you did it yourself.

Thanks for the response.

I believe it was done by myself from scraping ice off my car... but!... I'm pretty certain this wouldn't have occurred if there was no dirt/excess water on my car.

My car had some ice on one of the windows this morning but I didn't scrape it off as when I tried I could hear the dirt particles scratching my windscreen.

When I scrapped ice of my car the night this happened I didn't know there was dirt on the windows as 1) it was dark 2) it was covered by ice.

Hackman_2

So you heard it scratching and did what stop or carry on?

cb1979

I always use a de-icer spray, even yesterdays road grit etc. will scratch the glass if its frozen on

sunny2110

Hackman wrote: »

So you heard it scratching and did what stop or carry on?

During the night I didn't hear any scratching and everything seemed normal apart from that the layer of ice was thicker than usual and thicker than the other cars on my road (I'm assuming this was due to the water that was sprayed on my car).

I only heard the scratching this morning and could see how much dirt was on the car windows/body as it was daylight and the car wasn't frozen.

eschaton

You should have cleared your windows with warm water and you would have done it in under a minute without scratches, instead of 20 minutes with scratches.

STOCKWIRE

sunny2110 wrote: »

During the night I didn't hear any scratching and everything seemed normal apart from that the layer of ice was thicker than usual and thicker than the other cars on my road (I'm assuming this was due to the water that was sprayed on my car).

I only heard the scratching this morning and could see how much dirt was on the car windows/body as it was daylight and the car wasn't frozen.

This morning, if the car wasn't frozen, why were you scraping the windows ?

eschaton

STOCKWIRE wrote: »

This morning, if the car wasn't frozen, why were you scraping the windows ?

Don't be silly, he was scraping the dirt off the windows

sunny2110

STOCKWIRE wrote: »

This morning, if the car wasn't frozen, why were you scraping the windows ?

One of the windows had a little bit of ice on there

sunny2110

eschaton wrote: »

You should have cleared your windows with warm water and you would have done it in under a minute without scratches, instead of 20 minutes with scratches.

I've heard warm water can crack the windows.