Let's have a law to stop home improvement junkies driving their neighbours mad

As we live cheek-by-jowl with our neighbours, I’m not a big fan of home improvements. The occasional lick of paint and a new kitchen, fine: kitchen conversions, loft conversions, new garden lay-outs, new fences, floor-sanding, new windows, new roofs – after a while, not fine.

Two years ago, relatively newish near-neighbours had a kitchen conversion done. They moved and sold to another couple – who, after eighteen months, decided to have the kitchen conversion done again from scratch. What puzzles me is why the new owners didn’t look for a house that had a kitchen they liked – and then we wouldn’t have had to go through yet another three months of hammering, banging, thunking, clunking, blaring radios, dust clouds and builders walking up and down the road bellowing into their mobile phones.

Once that got done, in January, the people behind us decided to convert their attic (still going on). Then their neighbours decided to do their kitchen, at the same time as the people in the corner house decided to do something apparently requiring large slabs of marble to be cut with a saw in the road outside our house. A large beepity-beepity van parked in the road yesterday as builders carried flat-packs into another house a few doors down – the same house that the same company spent nine months doing up last year, filling in the gaps by working on the house next to that. The neighbour next to the corner house just had their conservatory converted to a proper structural kitchen extension. There’s a mass of scaffolding clinging to a house in the next street, and there’s someone hammering something on the roof as I speak. We went through all this not two years ago – same house, same scaffolding, same hammering.

I'm just waiting for the day when the first sign announcing that someone's having a basement built goes up in our street - there have been several of them in the road parallel to us, and that takes nine months, and the noise and dirt are indescribable.

Now, you’re probably thinking I need to get out more, and you’re probably right. And you’re probably also thinking that people doing up their houses is a good thing. Couldn’t agree more- it adds to the value of all our properties. But there comes a point, surely, when home improvements carried out on houses that are in perfectly good nick signals that the improver is in the grip of obsession.

In the old Barry Bucknell days, this was a country of DIYers – those working and lower middle-class chaps without a hobby or an interest in sport or boozing would fill up their leisure hours by mucking about with lathes and saws and Black & Decker power tools – a few dodgy shelves and wonky patio decking were about all that resulted. When they outgrew their homes, people would move to a new one. Now, of course, thanks to Big Government rapaciousness, moving house is so eye-wateringly expensive (or we’d have done it a long time ago), that it's easier and cheaper to improve and expand what you’ve got.

But there comes a point – usually when the fourth or fifth vanful of workmen and scaffolding poles turns up at a house that has already had two or three lengthy bits of work done on it in the past eighteen months when the urge to ask the house-owners why, if their home is so horribly unsatisfactory, they didn’t bloody well buy one that suited their needs in the first place.

Because, as far as I’m concerned, a bit of piece and quiet is a lot more important than living in a home resembling an Ideal Home exhibit.

I can’t help hankering after a fusspot Swiss-type law limiting the amount of disruption, annoyance, noise and dirt any householder is allowed to inflict on their neighbours in any five-year period: I reckon three months-worth is more than enough, with an extra couple of weeks tacked on for emergencies. (Exemptions would apply to houses that are genuinely delapidated - there's one nearby with a tree growing out of the kitchen roof). Come to think of it, the law should probably apply to individual properties rather than owners, to allow for "eager new owner" syndrome.