Who is in the wrong? Newspaper article?

Shelldean

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/homeowners-shock-after-neighbours-extension-24023255

So one guy has built up to the boundary and is now complaining his neighbour has done the same and he can't maintain the side of his house.

Now the second blokes extension does look dodgy, but why is ok for the first bloke to build to the boundary then complain when another person does it?

AdrianC

Did he extend to the boundary? Looks like his place was built to it originally, from what little we can see in the pics.

But, either way, the neighbours are the ones who've done the work now... I presume he objected to the planning app back in 2018?

Very big house next door - 81,000sqft plus an additional 76,000sqft, so 157,000sqft, 14,600m2.
Wonder how big Buck House is?

GDB2222

It's a very poor design. It's usual to make the walls touch, with an overlapping roof, so as to avoid the maintenance issues.

wannabe_a_saver

Shelldean said:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/homeowners-shock-after-neighbours-extension-24023255

So one guy has built up to the boundary and is now complaining his neighbour has done the same and he can't maintain the side of his house.

Now the second blokes extension does look dodgy, but why is ok for the first bloke to build to the boundary then complain when another person does it?

Article says this guy only moved in in 2017 so I don't think it was him who built up to the boundary. 

There are a couple of houses like this near me, they look like they're playing tetris, with gaps of mere inches.  I always wonder how it was allowed and how on earth they get maintained. 

Its a bit of a shooting yourself in the foot situation for whoever builds second, yeah you get the extra space inside but you've just caused yourself decades of potential problems, not to mention made it harder to sell if you want to move on.

lincroft1710

I think it could be 81 sq metres plus 76 sq metres

[Deleted User]

Presumably in the past he was only able to maintain his side of the house by going over his boundary on to his neighbours property? 

AdrianC

lincroft1710 said:

I think it could be 81 sq metres plus 76 sq metres

You mean a square metre isn't the same as a thousand square feet...? Who knew!

Perhaps if the redtop tabloids got with the latter half of the 20th century, instead of pandering to their geriatric readership by clinging to measuring in dibnahs.

GDB2222

Deleted_User said:

Presumably in the past he was only able to maintain his side of the house by going over his boundary on to his neighbours property? 

Probably. You have a legal right to do that, actually. I can't remember the Act, but I was surprised to find that there is a statute specifically about that.

Looking at the pictures, it looks like the gutters on the left hand house oversail the boundary. Or, at least, one of them has overstepped the boundary. Hopefully, they won't spend any money on lawyers to sort this out.

ProDave

So which one is in the wrong place?  The new extended house wall?  Or the front garden fence?

One of them is wrong.  Either the house on the right, the extension is trespassing over the boundary,  or the house on the left is occupying a strip of the right house's garden.

Either way it makes me glat to have 10 metres between my house wall and boundary wall, so will never face this trouble.

GDB2222

ProDave said:

So which one is in the wrong place?  The new extended house wall?  Or the front garden fence?

One of them is wrong.  Either the house on the right, the extension is trespassing over the boundary,  or the house on the left is occupying a strip of the right house's garden.

Either way it makes me glat to have 10 metres between my house wall and boundary wall, so will never face this trouble.

I agree. It's a terrible muddle. The only thing that could make it worse is if they spend £100k on lawyers.

Jimmithecat

I thought you had to legally leave 1 metre either side of your boundary which would prevent this problem.
only when neighbours built a conservatory 6 inches from our boundary did I realise this was no longer the case and planning is a bit of a free for all now with no consideration for maintenance or what their neighbours the other side of the fence think is reasonable 😡