A mum has been criticised for allowing her teenage children to blast loud music in the garden from 11am until 11pm every day.
The mum's neighbour works from home and is "really struggling" with completing her work and partaking in meetings while the teens play "incessant music" and "screech incessantly". The neighbour has broached the subject with the teens' mum but she just "rolled her eyes and said to just ignore it".
Taking to Mumsnet's popular Am I Being Unreasonable (AIBU) thread, the neighbour sought advice on how to handle the situation. She penned: "My neighbour has two teenage children. One sitting A-level and one GCSE's which means they're on study leave apart from exams.
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"They have a kind of teenage snug at the end of their garden - glorified shed really with lights and speakers etc. This means that from 11am every day they are blasting (bad) dance music till 11pm at night. The night time I can cope with, but I work from home, and the only place I can work is the dining room - which is their side of the house. I am really struggling with working and having meetings with incessant music and screeching of teens. I mentioned it to neighbour who rolled her eyes and said to just ignore it.
"I've got 3 months of this ahead of me! I don't have an office I can work from to escape it. And soon I will want the window open too. How can I explain that this is an issue and that EVERY SINGLE DAY and constant music isn't really acceptable?"
The neighbour's post was met with more than 100 responses from fellow Mumsnet users keen to share their thoughts. One said: "Work out what you can cope with - e.g. music after 5.30 and go back and talk to neighbour. If nothing changes then say you will have to contact the council."
Another Mumsnet user commented: "You have to tell your neighbour straight that it stops right now. There is nothing worse than loud music and you have to work!"
A third said: "I feel for you. When I was this age if the neighbour had come round to my parents and said I was disturbing them all day, every day I'd have absolutely been told to wind it in and stop being antisocial. But that was a billion years ago and now it's all MY LIFE MY RULES and the Mumsnet favourite 'if you don't like noise go live in the middle of nowhere on you own'. Rampant individualism reigns on here. All you can do is keep asking them to tone it down. You're not being unreasonable. Good luck."
One Mumsnet user replied: "Agree with this. I've got teenagers a similar age and wouldn't let them do this. I've brought them up to be considerate. It does them no favours in the long run to bring them up to be antisocial". Another said: "That level of noise is not reasonable everyday whether you are WFH [work from home] or not."
In a follow up comment, the neighbour added: "She likes to make herself out to be the "fun mum" for all her kids friends, so they tend to have half a garden full most days. And I do understand that it's nice for them to have this summer times at their age. Neighbour did suggest I use one of those we-work offices where you can rent a desk for the day, but they're quite expensive compared to what I actually earn so it's just not an affordable solution.
"We do things she doesn't approve of which we're not willing to stop (current bug bear of hers is we did no-mow-may - so didn't mow our lawn during May (it will be done tomorrow!) and won't cut our hedge during bird nesting season. They have fake grass/astroturf), and she sees these things as equal. But I'm slowly being driven mad by the constant music and screeching and can't escape it!"
At the time of writing, 82% of Mumsnet users voted the neighbour was not being unreasonable to complain about the teenagers playing loud music.
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