What usually happens
The planning permission came through in the spring, the party wall notices were served, and the builder starts on a Monday in a street of terraces where the houses share walls and the cars share whatever kerb is left. The homeowner has told the two houses either side, in a conversation on the pavement six weeks ago, that the work will take about four months. That is the last piece of information the street gets for a while.
The skip arrives on the Tuesday morning and takes the two spaces outside number 12. Nobody knew it was coming, because nobody knew in advance either: the builder booked it on the Monday afternoon when he saw how much muck was coming out. On the Thursday the chasing starts, and the dust goes into the front bedroom of number 12, where somebody works from home three days a week and has now lost one of them.
We have run the friendly version of this street. On one of our jobs every neighbour was pleasant, every one of them had lived through a bad build before, and every one of them wanted to know when the crane was coming, when the skip was going and when the wait-and-load lorry would be sitting on the road. Ten minutes of traffic did not spoil anyone's day. Not being told did. On a busier job the same kind of street got the other version. A delivery driver clipped a planter outside the house opposite, a subcontractor left his rubbish on the pavement, and the neighbour who found both had nobody to tell, because we were off site that afternoon and the men who were there did not have the English to take a complaint. She did not want to ask the homeowner for our number and start hounding us. She wanted somewhere to put it so that it got fixed.
The neighbour at number 12 knocks on the door of the site on Thursday afternoon and speaks to whoever opens it. The homeowner is at work and hears none of this. On Friday evening the same neighbour catches the homeowner on the path and says that this is the third time, that nobody does anything, and that they are thinking of ringing the council. The homeowner asks the builder on Monday, and the builder says a lad was told about some dust and put a sheet up. Neither of them can say what was reported, when, or what happened next.
None of this is anybody behaving badly. The builder is running a site, not a communications desk. The homeowner is at work. The neighbour has raised the same thing three times, to three different people, none of whom wrote it down. Four months of that turns a street that was mildly curious about the extension into a street that is against it, and it does so entirely through information nobody bothered to share.
The homeowner
The homeowner is paying for the work and lives with the neighbours long after the scaffold comes down. What they cannot do, from an office on the other side of town, is see what is happening at the front of their own house. Asking the builder how it is going gets an answer about the work, not about the street.
A homeowner can set the page up themselves, print the QR sheet, put it on the front of the property and invite the builder to it. From then on, every problem a neighbour raises appears on the page with the time it came in, and so does the reply. If number 12 reports dust on a Thursday, the homeowner knows on Thursday, not on Friday evening on the path. Our page for homeowners covers setting one up and inviting the builder.
The record also settles the conversation that otherwise runs on memory. The page shows the average response and resolution times for the job, so "nobody ever does anything" can be answered with what actually happened and when. That is not about winning an argument with a neighbour. It is about having one version of events instead of three, four months into a job you have to live next to afterwards.
The builder
For the builder, the page takes the interruptions away from the gate. The public page carries the company name and the working hours and no phone number, so complaints arrive as a report the site team can read between tasks rather than as a person standing in the doorway while the mixer is running. Whoever replies is the person who can act on it.
The other thing it does is protect the builder when a complaint escalates. Councils have powers over construction noise under the Control of Pollution Act 1974, and the first thing an officer wants to know is what was reported and what the site did about it. A builder who can show that the dust report came in at half past two, was acknowledged the same afternoon and was answered with a photograph of the screening is in a completely different position from one who remembers sending a lad round. Our page for builders sets out the site team's side of this, and our guide to a neighbour complaining about your building work has the order to do things in.
Notices work the same way in the builder's favour. A skip booked on Monday afternoon can be posted as a notice on Monday afternoon, and everyone who has joined the page gets it by email that evening. The skip still takes the two spaces outside number 12, but it stops being a surprise, and a surprise is most of what people complain about.
The neighbours
Neighbours are not entitled to stop the work, and most of them do not want to. What they want is to know when the noisy days are, so they can move a call or take the baby out, and to have somewhere to report dust or a blocked pavement that is not a conversation with whoever happens to open the door.
On the site page a neighbour can see the company doing the work, the working hours, and the notices for the weeks ahead: noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as the scaffold going up or coming down, and any interruption to water or power. Reporting a problem means picking a category, describing it and adding a photo if it helps. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread, and the issue carries the time it was raised, the time it was acknowledged, the time it was resolved and whether the neighbour agreed that the fix worked. Our page for neighbours covers what you are entitled to know, and our guide to what hours builders can work covers the hours.
If there is no page for the work next door, the person best placed to set one up is the homeowner. This is a message you can put through the door or send in a text, and it asks for something that takes them a few minutes:
Hello [their name],
I live at [your address], next door to the work you have starting. I am not
asking you to change anything about the job, and I am not complaining.
Could you set up a page for the site so the street can see what is coming?
It is a web page with your builder's working hours and a calendar of notices
for noisy work, deliveries and skips, and there is a form on it for reporting
a problem, which goes to the site team rather than to you. Neighbours join
free and nothing needs installing at our end. It is called Noisy Neighbour.
The reason I am asking is [the concrete pour last Tuesday / the skip outside
number 12 / the dust in the front bedroom] — none of us knew it was coming,
and I would rather know in advance than knock on the door about it afterwards.
Thank you,
[your name], [your address]
One record for the street
Everyone in the scene above is arguing about something that happened last week with no record of it. The homeowner is hearing it second-hand on a Friday, the builder is remembering, and the neighbour is counting. One shared record of the notices, the reports and the replies, with the times on it, settles the argument for all three of them, because it is the same record for each of them and none of them can edit it afterwards. On Noisy Neighbour it costs £5 per site per week, and neighbours join free.
How Noisy Neighbour works on a domestic job
Whoever sets the page up, the homeowner or the builder, prints the QR sheet and puts it where the street will see it: on the hoarding, on the scaffold, or on the front of the property. Scanning it opens the job's public page, which shows who is doing the work, the working hours and the upcoming notices. There is no password and nothing to install. A neighbour who wants the notices by email joins the page with an email address, and any number of them can.
Notices are posted once by the site team and then do three things at once: they go out by email to every neighbour who has joined, they sit on a calendar that anyone with the link can see, and they stay there. The types match what a domestic job actually involves — noisy work, deliveries, skips and waste collections, milestones such as scaffold up, scaffold down and completion, and interruptions to water or power. A note taped to a lamp post does none of that and is gone by Wednesday.
A neighbour reports a problem by picking a category, describing it and adding a photo if useful. The site team is notified straight away and replies in the same thread, with a photo if that is the clearest answer. Every issue records who raised it, when it was raised, when it was acknowledged, when it was resolved and whether the neighbour confirmed the fix, and the page shows the average response and resolution times across the job. Whoever set the page up sees all of it, and the history stays for the life of the site. If the work involves a shared wall or a boundary, the surveyors appointed under the Party Wall etc. Act 1996 have their own process, and the record of what was raised on site sits alongside it rather than replacing it.