Anyone else hate living in the middle of a housing estate??

After a week of blissful peace, quiet and countryside i've returned to the hell of a housing estate and realised how much I hate it.

Tonight we had a friend come round to help with some garden work. He parked on the street/public road opposite our house in a space normally occupied by one of the two cars owned by the house opposite.

Now we are normally very respectful of people's "street" spaces even though we know they have no legal right to them. We have two cars, one goes in our off-street allocated space and the other in whatever space we find on the street.

Rich and his mate have just gone out to collect some food after the neighbours opposite have conducted a vigil of leaning on their fence awaiting our guests car to move out of a space on the public road.

Literally about 30 seconds after the boys moved the car, she comes running out in her dressing gown to move her car about 4ft and then the next house moved theirs about 3ft.

Now i know that tomorrow morning she will whinge at me about it before i go to work and i'm at the point where i'm gonna tell it like it is as we are the most respectful people on the street when it comes to parking and i'm fed up of being whinged at for something that happens very rarely and that people really have no right to.

Is it just me or does this happen to other people? I understand that people like to park infront of their house but its when they don't understand that they don't legally own that section of the street that bugs me.

I'm off to look at Rightmove and find a nice village cottage or something.

Hi - we had this before we moved to a house with plenty of off street parking.

Our house before was terraced and the people next door had two cars, one they parked outside their house and the other they parked outside ours. We had one car and more often than not we ended up having to park right down the end of the road - not amusing when you have bags and bags of shopping to get indoors. We had very young kids at the time as well.

As you say, i know we didn't have a legal right to park outside our house but i think the neighbours could have been a bit more considerate, especially as they already had one of their cars parked outside of their house. I did try to speak to my neighbours about it diplomatically but it was a waste of time, the answer i got was "its got tax on it so i'll park where i like" - so much for being neighbourly ! they were not very nice people anyway so i expected this sort of "I'm alright jack" attitude. But it got ridiculous in the end - on the rare occasion we did get to park outside, they would wait until we had gone out and lo and behold when we came back they had parked their car there again. Pathetic! thats one reason why we moved and made sure we had off street parking. Some people are so selfish and don't care about anyone else except themselves.

I'd be having a polite word with your neighbours, telling them they don't own the public highway !

We have similar problems with parking here, sadly when the estate was built people only had one car if they were lucky, but now its two and three car families, but no extra parking spaces.
My son when he lived here worked nights and it was a scramble every night to see which neighbour could get in the car first and park thier second car in the vacant spot. It was very amusing at times, we started taking bets. We would see them trying to hid behind thier curtains, keeping an eye on the parking space. one lady used to run out in her dressing gown with curlers in.

We've told them that already and it makes no difference, we just get accused of being knobheads because we're the newest to move in even though we've been here a year.

Now to make matters more interesting our direct neighbours are playing blaring music at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. Grrr

in a way im glad we dont have a car anymore. no more parking wars. but i remember them well.
when we lived in a tiny hamlet. (middle of no-where) 1 neighbour parked in the wrong spot. and the opposite neighbour pushed the offending car out the way with his landrover. that was quite lively when it all kicked off.

Esmed - sounds like you'd be wasting your breath anyway - they are the knobheads ! inconsiderate, ignorant etc etc.

Our neighbours were complete ar*seholes and this was a major factor in deciding to move tbh. If you are not happy there then have a look around see whats about. I know some may say why should you have to move but tbh i wouldn't want to lower myself to the same level as these people, and thats what happens - you become as petty as they are in the end because you are constantly having to keep up with the next thing going on.

If you really wanted to play dirty you could get an old wreck, tax it and just leave it in that space - you wouldn't be breaking the law as its taxed. That would really p*ss them off ! (i thought about doing this )

We used to live on quite a nice little estate - all the cul-de-sacs connected through parks etc...

Sadly, as nice as the place was, the people were very annoying.

We'd been thinking about moving for a bit, when one day Max came back into the house wet through and covered in slimy stuff (He was about 8 months old).

The kids next door had climbed onto their garage roof and were throwing water bombs and oranges at him!!!

Our garden was covered in little bits of plastic/burst balloons, and chunks of orange etc.

When I went round to tell their mum, she dismissed it as 'only having a bit of fun'.... we moved shortly after that!

Its the sun it does it every time. In the winter we hoard up and watch TV in the Summer out we come like butterflies and in the Summer I am slowly coming to believe the human race could do live a 1mile exclusion fence around their familes from the rest of the race.....................

Its hard to say let it go but you have to or become a person with "neighbour rage"

I've been there and the next property you buy, I'm sure you'll get off-street parking! Mind you, even having off-street (we have double garages and parking in front on our drive we sometimes still get parking probs, as somebody (not neighbours, a visitor or someone) will park across our drive! (Have even had someone park ON our drive once).

Personally, I wouldn't stand any nonsence from these people. I'd just tell them how it is and if they take offence, too bad. They aren't the sort of people I'd worry about upsetting. Having said that, if you are one of these people that like to be friendly with neighbours, you'd best play along and move asap!

Good luck

I think I'm just more wound up about it because we'd been away for a week in a cottage in the middle of nowhere and returning to the estate after a week of peace was an eye opener!!

We don't normally get much bother but maybe it is the weather that gets people more irate about things. I'm hoping for the opportunity to introduce myself to the new neighbours this week so I can put them straight on whatever the gossip queen has told them.

It's quite sad but I think a lot of people think Rich and I think we're above them or something because they can see the money we spend on the house and I often think they scoff at us because we both work. Maybe I am a bit snobby in that case but there's nowt wrong with being proud of paying for housing works out of hard earned cash instead of taxpayers money! I sometimes think they could rename our road Benefits road and the gossip queen across the street is the most paranoid about benefit officers! Wonder why!