Police Visit on the Job

Wheeler Painting and Restoration Services recognizes that our clients are not the only ones impacted by our work. Many times a neighboring property is also impacted. Sometimes on a residential project, we will ask permission to place a ladder in the neighbor’s yard in order to access the side elevation of the home we are working on. When working in commercial spaces, often times there are other tenants above or below the area of work and our team of professional carpenters and painters work very hard to be a “good neighbor” on all of our projects.

Before starting work, we will request that our client to communicate to the neighbors that we will be performing work and a general idea of the work. Before our team starts a job, the foreman will meet with the neighboring properties, introduce themself and hand off their business card in the event there is an issue that needs to be addressed. Clear lines of communication are established so that as our team is working the neighbors are informed and kept up to date when our work will impact them. However, no matter how much work and communication is done ahead of time, you can always count on the unexpected to happen.

Our crews were on a residential job site in Seattle, working on an end-unit townhome for the private owner. Before work began, our client and job foreman both contacted the unit owner as well as the tenant to inform them of our work and what we would be doing. At no point would we be in the neighbor’s yard, but the tenant would be able to see what our crew was doing from her living room window. At the beginning of each day, our job foreman would check in with the tenant in the neighboring unit to see if she had any concerns with the work our team was performing on the exterior of the townhome right next to hers. Every day, the tenant would state that it looked like things were going well and she appreciated our teams efforts to minimize noise and to keep her informed. You can image how surprised our crew was when 4 or 5 days after they started working on the exterior of this townhome the police showed up!

The police indicated that “a neighbor” called to file a complaint of someone working on the exterior of her home without her permission. With only one neighbor on this project as our client was the end unit, our job foreman went back over to the neighboring unit to ask the tenant if everything was ok. The tenant indicated that everything was going well and that she was enjoying watching the progress on her neighbors unit. All in all it appeared that there were no issues. The job foreman asked the tenant if she had called the police regarding our workers. The tenant answered, “No”. Strange. The team continued to perform the rot repairs on the exterior of the townhome for which we were hired.

A second time the police showed up and could see that our team was clearly working in the yard and on the house of our client. We assumed the police spoke with the neighboring tenant to ensure there wasn’t an issue and to let her know that she should not be calling the police unless there is an emergency. This was certainly a strange occurrence for our team of professionals as there was not an issue to resolve on our end.

Needless to say, after the second visit the police no longer showed up to the job site and our foreman kept in daily communication with the neighboring tenant to ensure all was well. Now we know the police will no longer show up in Seattle for complaints of tradesmen lawfully performing work on the neighbor’s (our client’s) property.

All of us here at Wheeler Painting and Restoration Services do whatever we can to take the headache out of your construction project, however we can’t control the neighbor’s need to call the police. Until the next crazy story in the Adventures at Wheeler Painting and Restoration Services, be well and do good.