They Finally Got a Construction Start Date for Their Row House—Then Their Neighbors Decided the Timing Was Unacceptable
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Imagine living in a row house where you have walls attached to your neighbors’ houses on either side. If you were planning a home renovation project, would you take your neighbors’ schedules and lives into consideration before deciding when to start the project, or does that sound ridiculous?
In this story, one couple is in this situation, and they were being courteous by giving their neighbors a heads up before construction begins. Now, one of their neighbors is trying to convince them to push back the start date, but they really don’t want to do that.
Are they really being inconsiderate, or are the neighbors being unreasonable?
Let’s read the whole story to decide.
AITA for not delaying our rebuild for our pregnant neighbors?
We are planning on doing a major rebuild on our old row house and finalized everything around 2 weeks ago.
We are excited as it has taken us nearly 1.5 years to get here.
We texted our neighbors this weekend to let them know construction would start at the end of the month for approximately 3-4 months.
We are not extremely close with the neighbors but always pleasant.
One neighbor isn’t happy with the timing of the construction project.
One neighbor came by to talk to us after we sent the text and expressed disappointed in the timing because his girlfriend is pregnant and due next week.
We ourselves were never told of her pregnancy until December and that she was due sometime in February.
He also asked about our rebuild on his own and my partner mentioned it might happen sometime in April which was our original start date.
We told him how sorry we were for the timing but obviously it wasn’t intentional.
But the conversation didn’t end there.
10 minutes after he left we received a text asking if we were available to talk the next day about possible solutions and if we could delay the rebuild by 3-4 months.
We agreed to meet but told him delaying was not possible because we already have another place lined up for us to live in, contractor agreement, etc.
Needless to say the meeting was not ideal.
The pregnant girlfriend was really emotional.
The girlfriend cried the entire time while apologizing for crying and hormones. She said she has not cried as much as she has in the past 24 hours as she has in the past 2 years.
She’s worried how this will affect the baby because she’s stressed now.
She couldn’t believe that we just sent them a text message with only a month in advance and that we should have come talk to them in person as this was the first she was hearing about this. Did we even put ourselves in their shoes?
They have nowhere else to go. They are concerned with how this affects their own sleep because the baby will be up at night they need to sleep during the day and they won’t be able to with construction. If we did the rebuild 3 months later then it would at least be summer and they could go outside to escape the noise.
They are trying to be as considerate as possible.
They also kept repeating what if we just say “No this can’t happen”.
We obviously feel for them as new parents expecting a baby and we all live in old row houses so I get how noisy and distributive it will be.
We told them we would get them a build schedule so they could see what days would be noisiest and they want us to ask the contractor if their can be quiet hours from 12-3.
I don’t think that is realistic and don’t know what else we could do to amend the situation.
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The timing may not be ideal, but they can’t plan the renovations around the neighbors. I’d think it would be better to get the project started when the girlfriend is pregnant as opposed to after the baby is here. I’m not sure how long the project will take, but the sooner it’s over the better.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person has some advice.
Another person thinks it’s a good time to start.
This is pretty ridiculous.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a HOA who says that “no weekend renovations” means no repairing a storm-damaged shed, either.
Nobody thinks they should delay the construction.
Honestly, the longer they wait, the worse it will be. They need to get the construction started and finished as quickly as possible. If the contractors can stick to certain hours, that might be helpful, or at the very least, they can give the neighbors a heads up about the work schedule. It probably won’t be as noisy as they think it will be.
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