Roller Coaster

Saturday:

Life is a roller coaster, isn't it?

I was so happy this morning. The pool is finished, and full of water, we still have to do the 'hand-over' but it looks great.

And we're getting a skip bin put out the front this morning so we can get rid of all the piles of rubbish and get started on the garden.

But then Tim was taking Aiden to his tennis lesson, and was trapped by an angry neighbour outside. Craig is the one who put in the complaint about the heat pump for the pool, which has still never been turned on. We understand his concerns but haven't done anything about it yet, the pool company is supposedly following it up, we weren't too worried yet as we were not even going to turn it on for months, we're not using the pool in winter. We've got time to put up barriers and/or lots of plants or at least find out what needs to be done, like moving it further away from the fence (difficult and expensive). So a silent heat pump can hardly be disturbing him, can it?

Well it can. Tim was subjected to a 15 minute rant about everything from legal action about the 'non-compliant' heat pump (apparently he has access to information we don't?? He said he'd talked to our certifier which is very annoying as they haven't spoken to us) to concrete dust from the construction on his clothes on the line to us doing everything vindictively because we don't like him. Apparently we never speak to him, we never consult him about anything (I thought we did! About the fence, anyway, which I had thought was the only thing that would affect him.) Very confused, we fed his dog when he was away and I though we were fine if not good friends with them.

Right at the moment I don't like him at all! I'm utterly miserable. Have we been bad neighbours? Is he an unreasonable person? A bit of both? I feel guilty, sad, worried, frustrated, depressed. I've never had to live next to an enemy before. Seems like he hates us. Will we be banned from using our very expensive pool heat pump, and can we get our money back on the grounds they didn't tell us it wasn't compliant? Will Craig complain when we run our water feature waterfall - will that be too loud too? Or if we have happy children squealing as they play in the pool in summer?

Tim was surprised when one day I described them as our 'old' neighbours, he says they're not much older than us. Obviously I was getting the curmudgeon vibe from the start. Although they had a huge noisy NYE party soon after we moved here.

Or is he justified?

I just don't know, I'm too upset. We can't get on to the pool people or the certifiers today because it's the weekend, so we don't know what is going on. Does the pool company have information they haven't passed on? I've never had any kind of dispute with a neighbour before, I feel like I'm getting a stomach ulcer. I'm scared to go outside in case I see him and he yells at me. I would just start crying if he did.

In our last house we had a big tree that dropped a branch on a neighbours roof and broke some tiles. We were on very good terms with him, we had the rest of the tree branches trimmed so it wouldn't happen again and offered to pay for repairs (he had spare roof tiles which he put on himself so we didn't need to). It was all amicable and stress-free. I certainly didn't feel under attack by him pointing out the damage and asking us to have the tree trimmed, it was just something that needed to be done. It doesn't need to be like this. First we heard of it was a letter from the certifier saying he'd complained.