Tuesday, August 31, 2004

When neighbours attack...

CJ's new neighbours have started to move in.

We discovered this very early on Saturday morning when the start to a days worth of drilling, sanding and echoey shouts was signalled by a very loud door bang at around 8am. Come back new cat, all is forgiven.

It wasnt a great problem to be honest, these things need to be done and its always best to be an understanding neighbour when this happens. Unlike CJ's other neighbour.

CJ's house needed quite a bit of work doing to it when CJ moved in, we'd finish work around 6 then rush round to the house to do a couple of hours renovating. A couple of hours only as on the first night, the neighbour came round to ask how long we were planning on making noise as he's a lorry driver and needs to go to bed early (we now know that I actually get up earlier than he does). We didnt want to make enemies straight away so we stopped. It appeared that we could only do work from 6-8 at night then.

So we decided to save all the heavy work till the weekends, the first Saturday we arrived at about 10 and started to do the noisy stuff around 11am. Within minutes the neighbour was round:

"Would you mind not making too much noise at the weekends as my wife works nights and spends the weekend days in bed. She gets up around 5 so you should be ok then".

So not only could we not do work after 8 in the week, we were also restricted at the weekends too. We toed the line for a few days, then ignored him.

Why cant some people just be a bit more understanding.

Anyway, it sounds like the new neighbours are building the house from scratch again, it can be the only explanation for all the noise emanating from it. It isnt a great problem to us really though as we'd planned to do a bit of decorating this weekend anyway.

By Sunday afternoon I had lost a bit of interest and energy, and as a consequence was taking ages to get drinks of water, wash paint trays, etc. I even started pegging some washing out.

As I was doing this, I was aware that I could hear the conversations of the new neighbours very clearly as all their windows were open. Amongst the singing and chit-chat someone was asked to get something from the shed at the bottom of the garden.

As expected, the back door opened and out of it stepped what, on first assumption appeared to be a daughter who then walked down the path towards the shed. She would be no more than 9 or 10 and as she walked down the path she looked over and gave me a cheery little wave, which I thought was nice.

"Hello, how are you?" I said.

"Ok thank you" She replied.

"Are you keeping out of trouble?" I asked. I noticed she was wearing a very fetching paint splattered bin bag over her normal clothes.

"I'm painting" She stated as she pointed at the bin bag.

" I can see that" I said.

"Mum works at a residential home and she's just bought this house and I'm helping her paint so I've put this on over my clothes to stop paint getting over them." She ventured, more info than we all needed.

"You'll have to bring some scruffy clothes next time then" I suggested.

"Yes I will" she said as she walked back into the house.

"Bye"

'What a pleasant little girl' I thought as I continued to hang the washing out.

As she returned back through the house I could still hear their conversations:

"Who were you talking to?" asked the Mother

"Some man hanging washing out" my new friend replied

"Did he ask you what you were wearing?"

"Yeah"

"Well dont tell strange men what you're wearing again"

I ran back into the house quickly, promising myself not to talk to small people again without a witness present.
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