I was thinking this morning about how important it is to consider what your neighbours are like and recommend finding out who they are before you buy.

I don't want to be sexist, so feel free to swap the genders around.

When we got our first home, I was traveling for work on average 3 days a week, sometimes whole weeks, leaving my wife with first one toddler and then two and we were on a very tight budget with a high mortgage. That meant that she couldn't travel much to see friends and if we had been smarter we would have done what we did with our most recent home and found out who our neighbours were.

In the first home where it really mattered, we had Asians on one side who didn't speak English and on the other side a very large gang related family with 11 kids of which a few were in jail at any given time. During those times, which was pretty much always, they would have grandchildren staying with them, playing loud music into the early hours of the morning, tossing glue bags over the fence (which their grandparents didn't know about) and I found it very intimidating when I had to go and confront them for the sake of my kids health.

We bought that first house in a low income neighbourhood because that was all we could afford and eventually we made some good friends within walking distance through the kindergarten.

The learning is though that our home is our castle and we need to feel safe in it but more importantly we want neighbours that we can relate to and hopefully be able to make new friends, especially when the caregiver, the person not working is at home.

I don't think this is something that many people think about at the time .

Is this something you did when you bought your current home?