Bob the Builder has moved in next door

This is the view from my front door! My whole house is vibrating as I write this.

Alex is very excited as there are great big yellow diggers and dumper trucks living next door and he gets to watch them from his perch on the back of the sofa looking out of the living room window. Me on the other hand, I'm not so happy about it.

When we moved here 4 years ago from London we were after a quiet country life. Unfortunately due to budget restrictions we could only afford a small modern terraced house in a cul-de-sac and not the detached country cottage of our dreams. However its big saving grace was that it was at the end of the row and over looked fields at the back. We had neighbours on one side but on the other was a lovely rambling old garden filled with apple trees and an impressive vegetable plot. It made our tiny garden feel much bigger and gave us the privacy we were looking for.

However last year the two old gentlemen who live there sold off their garden to our local garden grabbing developers. I don't blame them as they are in their late seventies,they need something to cushion them through old age and they were offered 6 figure sums for the land which would be hard to refuse for anyone. But I am gutted.

Now they are building not one but two houses on a relatively small patch of land right next to mine. They are going to have patios rather than gardens so their houses will be about 10 feet away from mine. I will be overlooked completely in both the garden (from one house) and inside the house(from the other at the front). I can live with the building noise and disturbance, the loss of the lovely garden but what I cannot live with is the loss of privacy and the lack of space. I feeled hemmed in and they haven't even finished digging the foundations yet.

I have seen the house designs and they are lovely, white weatherboard and terracotta tiled roofs and a lovely traditional design. They will be very attractive to look at. What I am not keen on is the fact that they will be able to see me in my PJs in my own home and vice versa! We tried complaining about how close it was to ours at the planning stage but because we live in the modern high density part of the village we didn't have a leg to stand on. Plus we are the only ones affected by it so we had no support. We bought this house purely because it wasn't overlooked so the building work is very detrimental to our enjoyment of the house and garden but we just don't rate as important enough to stop the development.

So I guess we are going to have to move. We will have to leave the area as there is nothing affordable here and move further east where it is out of commuter belt. I will miss this lovely village and my friends here but I know I can't live hemmed in on all sides. When to move will be the question - if the building work gets completed sometime in the spring we will sell up then. However if all goes according to plan we will be having a baby at the end of May - Slap bang in the middle of things. We have to decide whether to try moving before so putting the house on the market in Feb 08 (when it looks at its worst) or after and not moving till Autumn 08 (and trying the keep a house with a toddler and a newborn tidy for viewings). Hmmm. This could be interesting.

Oh yes and the 4 bed house they built up the road with no garden just sold for £600K - what madness! Who wants a family house without a garden?? Not me that's for sure.