When I moved into this house last year the adjoining house next door was being renovated and thus not being lived in. While the constant drilling was a bit of a pain when I was working late shifts (or just sleeping all day) it was nice to think that there was no-one there we could piss off with our noise, not that we made any. In fact I often thought we should be playing music and watching movies louder purely because we could but then home is a refuge, and a shared refuge at that, so calm and serenity is the way forward.
A couple of months back next door was finally sold and my heart sunk as the potential awfulness of our new neighbours dawned on me. So far they’ve been okay but they do seem to be DIY nuts and the irony of this is not lost on me. The previous owners spent a good year completely re-doing the entire house and garden and now these new folk are tearing it all out. Obviously I can’t judge what they’re doing to the inside but just before Christmas they started on the garden, scorched earth style.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of the before, but for a Kingstanding garden it was pretty nice. The small lawn (still there) was followed by a small clump of tall-ish trees leading to a slightly overgrown but interesting end third with a corrugated iron shed and a potential vegetable growing area. It was an effective, interesting and quite peaceful use of these standard but quite substantial suburban plots.
And now it’s all gone. They even had a mini-digger out there. And this huge fence has gone up on all sides. Not only that, but their neighbours on the other side have gotten into the act (possibly pooling the costs) cutting down all their again quite established trees and continuing the fortress-fencing theme.
This could of course go one of two ways. It could result in a nice inoffensive garden or it could go all Chav. I’ll be keeping tabs and posting and development up on Flickr.
As you know I rarely watch TV but very occasionally I have been known to watch one of those “how to sell your unsaleable house” shows. The bottom line always seems to be how to fix up the image without putting any substance into the investment. If this is what happened to your neighbor’s house then I can understand them tearing the recent remodeling apart!
One show had the sellers applying marker pen over the grout between the kitchen tiles, having painted the entire tiled wall with gloss paint. Actually this all seems to reflect the times we live in, as directed from Whitehall.
But they spent a whole year doing up the house. Either it was completely delipidated or they did some serious work. Whatever, I never saw the inside so I can’t comment, but I certainly heard it.