When you want to take on a large home improvement project that involves adding to the structure of your house, it is a good idea to check with the neighbors if it will impact them.

What would you do if your neighbors said that they didn’t have any problems with your plans, but then, when you submitted them to the city, the neighbors objected to almost everything you wanted to do?

That is what happened to the couple in this story, so after a lot of back and forth, they were able to push through some changes that would have a big, and very negative, impact on the neighbor’s property.

Keep reading for all the details.

Neighbors shoot themselves in the foot with lies

We decided to extend our property as we need more space for an office due to working from home more.

We approached neighbors to make sure they were fine with it as we are a semi detached.

We bring up every potential issue and they say it’s fine the have no objections.

So the neighbors really did have some problems with the project. Why didn’t they speak up earlier?

Pay for plans and submit for council permission and the neighbors object on everything they can think of and a few stupid one.

We altered the plans and made the build more expensive and got approval.

My petty revenge is more passive but there are a few of them

Let’s see how they got their revenge.

The building work he wanted to stop is going to make him mad. One of their bedroom windows will have close to a 3m brick wall right next to it, blocking light until around midday and every time he looks out of the window it will remind him.

The final petty revenge is my personal favourite, due to the changes we had to make, he cannot extend this bedroom out to get the light back as it would create a small inaccessible for maintenance gap between the extensions and this would not get planning permission.

This means this bedroom will have the big brick wall blocking light forever unless they essentially alter our house to the original design.

This is why communication is so important. Sadly, most people don’t do it very well.

I am going to enjoy dropping this in the next conversation I have with them and see how they react.

Worst part is if they told us of objections we would have not got the work done and moved to a bigger house.

He tried to clear everything with his neighbor before even starting the project, but they wouldn’t give him any feedback. Now both he and the neighbor are going to be unhappy with the results.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an apartment tenant who is being called petty for blocking her parking space with trash cans.

Oh well, let’s see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about what happened.

If this could happen, the guy might have to rip down his entire addition.

This could be a big concern.

Better to apologize later than ask permission now.

This commenter thinks they should just cut off communication with the neighbor completely.

Some open communication up front could have avoided all of this. I don’t know why the neighbor didn’t just express any concerns they had when they were originally asked. Oh well, now they will pay the price for it.