Neighbours lean to destroying garden wall

missile

Davesnave wrote: »

"All the above assumes that the neighbour refuses the best way of resolving this, which is reasoned discussion"

.......... something we can agree on :beer:
Like most posts we only have one side of the story. There could be a reason why the neighbour is refusing to talk to OP?

Steph1078 wrote: »

Haha she was busy barking at next door ��
There’s not really anywhere for the water to go my side and I’ve already suggested to my fella about putting a gutter on but he’s insisting he’s not allowing them to put gutter on our side of the wall... no compromise with him unfortunately! The space above the wall our side belongs to us and they’re not over hanging it...
He just wants to feud with the neighbours I think - if we fix this it’ll be them parking in “our” space outside our house which doesn’t belong to us at all but thats a whole different story!!

Furts

missile wrote: »

.......... something we can agree on :beer:
Like most posts we only have one side of the story. There could be a reason why the neighbour is refusing to talk to OP?

Plus the elephant in the room. OP's #21 says the neighbour has a convenanted responsibility to maintain the wall. Which in turn suggests the wall belongs to the neighbour. The neighbour may feel entitled to pitch a lean too roof off their wall? I know the piers are on OP's side but here reality kicks in. When sub contract bricklayers are bashing up work on housing estates the last thing on their mind is who will have legal ownership of the wall they are building. Which side the piers get built is frequently an irrelevance, or an unknown, or both.


It follows that the repairs are not OP's responsibility, but I expect the neighbours would welcome OP repairing the piers. But I doubt there would be any reimbursement.

As I said earlier, the wall is not pretty, but neither is the state of the shingle, the slabs and the levels - these items cannot be blamed on the neighbour. Perhaps both parties form an ideal match?

Steph1078

Okay to respond to some of the comments here. The statement I made about “he just wants to feud with the neighbours I think” was tongue in cheek and we definitely don’t actually want to fall out with them over this - I was just trying to explain the situation we are in and my partners attitude toward it in that he doesn’t want to compromise since they’re chucking loads of rainwater over the wall & ignoring us when we try to resolve the issue - which is destroying what seems like their wall correct but I also have the fixtures / fittings / info pack where the previous owners have stated it’s our responsibility to maintain so it’s not quite as clear cut as that.
Regardless of who owns the wall they should not be discharging the rainwater over the top of the wall and damaging it whether they own it or not.

I approached the neighbours, my partner hasn’t spoken to them. I like to think I’m a pleasant enough person and I certainly wasn’t aggressive I simply asked if they knew who owned the wall as it was starting to erode and did they want to pop round to see what we could do with it. WE - not them. As I say she offered to split it 50/50 which suggests I wasn’t nasty to her over it - it was her suggestion & one I was happy to talk about since neither of us knew who owned the wall and it needs fixing ! But since that conversation they have refused to talk about it - probably because they realised they didn’t want to remove the lean to (or come up with an alternative solution to the rain water issue)

I resent the fact that you’re commenting on the shingles / paving etc around the wall and comparing us to neighbours who don’t want to engage to resolve this as it’s not something that we’ve done. And the whole point of resolving the wall is to change that part of the garden, including the wall as repairs of our property - there are of course lots of things we’ve found since moving in which aren’t done the way we would have and again like in our last house there are botch jobs completed by the previous owners which nobody would know until you try to do repairs or actually spend a lot of time in a house. Funny enough the patio out the back of the House slopes towards the House - DOH! Not something we’ve done but we have to deal with - without problems with neighbours making it more difficult.

I will not be working to get the paving / etc sorted when they’re chucking buckets of water over the wall and it’s landing in our property which may cause issues with new block paving we were discussing putting in.

Although I appreciate your constructive assessment of the situation with the wall telling me our side of the wall needs work isn’t actually helpful.

Furts

It is a situation which has existed for years, the previous owners could not care less about it, they allowed the situation to exist, they may even have authorised it, and their standards of detail were low. I doubt anyone is disputing this.

Moving on, engaging a solicitor could be an expensive mistake. My intuition is the neighbours could play a game with you and you will also be milked financially by the solicitor.

There is a lateral thinking, and low cost way forward. You patch repair the piers on a diy basis, the wall is decorated/screened/fenced/ made a feature, a gutter and downpipe can be disguised in this - think alligning with a pier detail, and the new block paving detail is porous paving and perfectly suited to receiving the run off you are concerned about.

If it were me, I would be doing the latter approach. Indeed I did something similar with a rear garden where a neighbours bright brick garage was built protruding into it. It looked awful!

I clad it with fencing (never asked the owners permission, but they never knew because they could not see these walls) and decorated all the fencing. The result was everything blended in and looked super - it transformed the garden.

The result was no solicitors bills, and no neighbour fall outs!