Building a new home is exciting — until the neighbors decide they have opinions about your blueprints.

When one couple started constructing a tall two-story house on a hillside lot, the neighbors tried to sabotage the project to protect their precious view.

But their attempt to enforce a building rule only ended up obstructing their view even more.

Keep reading for the full story.

Neighbour goes to developer to enforce a rule to protect their view. It backfires.

My girlfriend’s parents were going to build a house in a new development in a lot that was in front of their to-be neighbors. The lot is on a hill, so it is in front of the neighbors, but below them.

The neighbors decided they wanted to build a one-story rancher on the lower part of their lot instead of building something like a two-story on the higher side of the lot.

They assumed that whoever was going to build in front of them would only build a one-story themselves, which would keep their view unobstructed.

Having a great view was apparently very important to them and a big selling point on the lot.

So when a two-story started going up, the neighbors started to panic.

Her parents started to build their two-story house on their lot, with tall peaked gables.

When the neighbors realized their view would indeed be obstructed, they offered to buy the lot off of her parents.

Her parents gave them the price of the lot (which had increased in value since it was originally purchased) plus the cost of the materials already purchased for the build.

They waited for a response but didn’t get one, so they just continued on with their build.

By the time the neighbors finally responded, the price had changed once again.

A month or two later the neighbors responded to the offer saying they’ll accept it.

By this time, of course, more time and money had been put into the build, so her parents told them they could still buy the lot, but the price had increased.

The neighbors rejected the offer.

In this new development, all houses are required to have a two-foot overhang, but many of the homes haven’t actually been following the rule, and the developers haven’t been enforcing it. Her parents decided to also not follow the rule.

The neighbors soon used this to try and get the upper hand.

The neighbors then went to the developer to remind them that her parents needed to have two-foot overhangs, thinking that it would decrease the pitch of the roof, meaning the gables wouldn’t be so high.

The developers told her parents to make sure they had the two-foot overhangs.

Her parents went to the architect to find a way to keep the tall gables they wanted while also having the two-foot overhangs.

But the architect had a clever solution.

The architect told them to just raise the roof two feet to create the two-foot overhang so the angles on the roof wouldn’t be impacted at all.

Her parents kept building with these new specs. The developers approached her parents to inquire about the overhangs and if their roof was impacted at all.

The neighbors weren’t pleased at all.

The look on his face when her parents told him that they just raised the whole roof by two feet was priceless.

The neighbors avoided her family the entire five years they lived there.

These people definitely didn’t get off on the right foot.

What did Reddit think?

Many neighbors seem to think they have a lot more control than they actually do.

This commenter ran into a similar situation.

Oftentimes, protecting your view is an expensive ordeal.

This story gave “raising the roof” a whole new meaning.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.