Issue with shared front garden

arciere

Mickygg wrote: »

I agree that the spiders story is piffle.

You both own the garden so you will need to speak to them to see what they are going to do with the garden.

The amount of issues in this site with shared anything I can't believe people buy places that have anything shared other than the house or flat itself!

IMO if you see shared garden, shared driveway, shared pizza run forest run!

It's not a shared garden as such, we both have our own private back gardens, it's a really small garden at the front of the house.
Quite sure that the spiders are the reason. Or, in other words, the lady downstairs is terrified by them, thinks that cutting trees and plants helps, and husband executes.

G_M

You have 4 options:


* just live with it. Avoid the stress of confrontation and focus on keeping your own rear garden nice.
* negotiate. Invite them to tea and bake a nice cake. Come to some arrangement whereby you agree how to re-plant/maintain the front. Maybe a lawn? or spider-eating plants.......?
* go down the legal route to force them to re-instate the garden as it was before they ripped anything out. This will be slow, costly, stressful, uncertain and make life a misery for months and years to come (or until you sell whereupon you'll have to declare a dispute to all potential buyers)
* collect spiders and regulaly put through their letterbox (is there a dedicated leterbox for their flat?). Maybe they'll give up and move.......

arciere

G_M wrote: »

You have 4 options:


* just live with it. Avoid the stress of confrontation and focus on keeping your own rear garden nice.
* negotiate. Invite them to tea and bake a nice cake. Come to some arrangement whereby you agree how to re-plant/maintain the front. Maybe a lawn? or spider-eating plants.......?
* go down the legal route to force them to re-instate the garden as it was before they ripped anything out. This will be slow, costly, stressful, uncertain and make life a misery for months and years to come (or until you sell whereupon you'll have to declare a dispute to all potential buyers)
* collect spiders and regulaly put through their letterbox (is there a dedicated leterbox for their flat?). Maybe they'll give up and move.......

1) Happy to a point. Neighbours' gardens are all well(-ish) maintained, not a nice view when you see ours at its current state. Also thinking about potential buyers should we decide to sell in future;
2) My preferred option. I wrote to him today saying that we moved here more than a year ago (both of us), we've had plenty of time to discuss the issue (which I didn't know we had) over a coffee, I couldn't understand the urgency today. I also pointed out that his wife seems to be avoiding us (never spoke to her, she disappears as soon as she sees us). Reply was, quite literally, 'I am filtering this requests from my wife, otherwise what she wants to say will offend you.
3) Yeah, it does sound like the worst option, and I really don't think we'll ever go that way, but you'll never know. I can't just ignore the fact that they are doing pretty much whatever they want on something that is not (exclusively) theirs.
4) Yes, we have separate letterboxes. But I would never do such a thing. Never.

Mickygg

arciere wrote: »

It's not a shared garden as such, we both have our own private back gardens, it's a really small garden at the front of the house.
Quite sure that the spiders are the reason. Or, in other words, the lady downstairs is terrified by them, thinks that cutting trees and plants helps, and husband executes.

I do feel for you as there can be no assurance this is the case and so they chop away regardless. I get a lot of spiders, walk around my kitchen at 3 in the morning and they are in most corners. Other than false widows I catch them or use a handheld hoover and let them outside.

Surely they should be looking at gaps and sealing them so they can’t get in? I have gaps everywhere but can’t be bothered to try and seal them all especially behind units.

Now that said in my old house we had ivy growing all up our steps and brickwork. That held huge amounts of spiders so maybe then. Trouble is if they think it’s the garden they will more than likely not want to replant anything!

They should count themselves lucky. I have silverfish and can’t get rid of them despite trying for the past year. Anyone that knows them, they are horrible things to be having crawling round your home.

People can be strange creatures sometimes.

Just seen GMs option number 4, I vote for that!

Sirrah67

She would hate our garden, it's literally crawling with spiders! They live in the grass, and you can see them scuttling off as you walk.

Sorry, I realise that doesn't help. Maybe suggest she gets help with her phobia, because she will never eradicate spiders from her home?

MortgageDonkey

4 for me.

Once go back to mine and a shared garden had a fence up clearly marking neighbours owned land. No discussion, just errected.

Albala

I'm always a bit suspicious of people, male or female, who say that their partner 'says' 'insists' 'wants' 'says I have to' when you never hear directly from the partner. IME it often means 'I want this'.

zagubov

I'm always asked to scoop up any spiders in a glass and liberate them out the back/front door.

Been very reluctant to do that now when I read that
- the spiders we see are the non-biting males who're looking for the females (who sit in webs behind the skirting boards).
- they kill flies I don't like.
- they need the warmth inside the house so much it would be more humane to kill them immediately instead of "releasing" them as they die of cold quickly when they're outside.

arciere

Albala wrote: »

I'm always a bit suspicious of people, male or female, who say that their partner 'says' 'insists' 'wants' 'says I have to' when you never hear directly from the partner. IME it often means 'I want this'.

Yeah, but he should have said so when he spoke to my wife. She left and they were both happy, this goes, this stays.

She (his wife) sent me a message today to say that basically, when they asked us what we wanted to keep, they implied 'what we wanted to move to our private garden'. Yeah, sure, so if that's what was implied, why did you ask me about that plant again a couple of hours later and then got upset when I didn't reply within 30 minutes?

arciere

zagubov wrote: »

- they need the warmth inside the house so much it would be more humane to kill them immediately instead of "releasing" them as they die of cold quickly when they're outside.

Is that so? We see many more spiders in spring/summer than in winter though.