New garden building: Dealing with difficult neighbours

VIDEO CHATTER

So you’re thinking about getting a beautiful Summerhouse for your garden, but there’s just one problem, and it’s your neighbours. Either you don’t get along with them, or you find them a constant busy-body.

Or maybe they find you quite difficult, or you just generally don’t agree on most things. Squabbling about colours for painting fences, where the fence should be, what the boundary is on the driveways, all that sort of stuff.

If there’s lots of bickering going on between you and your neighbour, you may be really quite nervous about the prospects of putting a summerhouse up and pissing them off even more.

What I would say to you is, there’s very little that they can do about you having that Summerhouse (or Shed, Garage, or whatever permitted development you fancy). If you adhere to all the permitted development that we have in the guidelines for planning, then there’s nothing really that they can do.

You can have a Summerhouse anywhere within your boundaries and you can have whatever sort of size and style that we have as standard in that garden space.

The only times that you would have a real issue is if you are encroaching on permitted development regulation. So, if you were trying to put the summerhouse really close to a boundary and the height exceeds 2.5 meters, then you will need to go for planning permission before having that built.

Now, in that case, can your neighbour object?

If you do need to go for planning, will your difficult neighbour object, can they object?

It is very, very difficult for an objection to be upheld. It has to have proper weighting. You have to be putting this building right in front of their kitchen window for there to be a severe complaint.

The other things are views and light. If you’re blocking any of these sorts of things within close proximity of your difficult neighbour’s house, then they might have room for complaint.

If they just want to object because they don’t like you and they don’t want you to have a beautiful Gillies and Mackay building, then it won’t be upheld.

Just take some comfort in knowing that the majority of summerhouses are permitted development. You really don’t have a thing to worry about anyway, but if you do encroach on permit development regulation, then there’s very little that your next door neighbour can do.

Either way, we can always do a site visit to put your mind at ease.