Apartment Dwellers: Who are you neighbors?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We live in an apartment with six units, two on each floor. We are on the “garden” level (read: basement), on the west side. Mr. Jeannie and I have nicknames that we use to describe our neighbors, since we don’t actually know any of them by name (we tried making nice when we first moved in, but no one seems to want to be buddies around here). These are our neighbors:

Garden East: Black guy and the Bitch. Black guy is the only black person in the building (and in the immediate neighborhood, so far as I can tell), hence his nickname. He is by far and away the friendliest person in the place, which means that he says “Hello, how are you?” when you see him. This is far more than anyone else usually does. He lives with his girlfriend, the Bitch. She screams and yells at him constantly (and we don’t even have thin walls and we can hear her). I don’t think she ever calls her boyfriend by name. Her term of endearment for him is apparently “Motherf*cker.”

1st Floor West: The Stupid Family. Consists of Mom, Dad, Son, and Baby. Son plays the trumpet, which isn’t annoying since he’s actually pretty good at it. But Dad is constantly trying to fix or build things, and it sounds like a construction crew. They once accidentally flushed a ham bone down their toilet, it got clogged, the toilet leaked, they tried to fix it themselves, and water leaked into our bathroom through our ceiling. We called the building manager, who was not amused. Mom once broke the washing machine. She put a comforter in there along with a full load of laundry. She also uses the drier a lot, but hardly ever the washing machine. Hmmm…
Baby cries a lot, which we understand, but Baby’s room is right above ours and it’ll cry for 30 minutes before we hear anyone go in there to check on it.

1st Floor East: The Tattoo Brothers. Self explanatory. Two brothers, both covered head-to-toe in tattoos. Very nice people. Hardly ever see them around, but always smile and wave at us when we do see them. Brother #1 hangs out in the laundry room with his girlfriend, since she smokes, and Brother #2 doesn’t like people smoking in their place.

2nd Floor West: The Alleged Drug Dealers. Young kid (late teens, early twenties is my guess), his girlfriend, her sister (not sure if she lives there, but is there a lot), two little kids. Hardly ever see the guy, and he won’t even look at us when we see him (details here). Girlfriend is nice. Reason for the nickname: When the Tattoo Brothers moved in, one of them commented to Mr. Jeannie that the people in 2W had offered to hook them up with some pot.

2nd Floor East: The Loud Lady and her Dorky Son. This woman is the loudest person. Sometimes she comes down to the laundry room (right down the hall from us) to use her cell phone for private calls. We can hear every freaking word. Mr. Jeannie and I did an experiment to see how loud her normal speaking voice really was. I stood just outside our door, and he stood just inside the apartment. I said his name with increasing loudness until he indicated that he could hear me. I was practically screaming by the time he heard me (and I am NOT a soft-spoken person). Sometimes we can hear her if she’s on her floor in the hallway. Sheesh! Her son is this adorable little dorky kid with glasses. He once asked me if he could borrow a quarter for the washing machine. He asked as if he was afraid I’d scream at him. Then he kept swearing up and down that he’s pay me back later, until I finally was able to interrupt long enough to tell him not to worry about it. He once accidentally bumped into me in the hallway. He started sputtering, “Oh, man…I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, oh God, I’m so sorry.” I said, “Hey no big deal. See you later.” I imagine with a mom like that, everything she says sounds like she’s yelling, so “Time for dinner” may even sound like she’s angry.
So, who are the people in your neighborhood?

2

I moved out of my apartment in November, but I sure remember my neighbors.

The guy upstairs was mid-fourties and lived alone. He wasn’t home much. He drove a nice grand am. His kids come for their partial custody visit one weekend a month. THey spend the whole weekend running around over us. He had a townhouse, so the kids run down the stairs in his house and jump off the last landing onto the floor. All above our head, 9:00am Sat and Sun. morning. He comes out of his apartment monday morning when we headed out to work. He would apologize every week for his kids noise. I didn’t care, at least he gets to see his kids.

The guy across the hall is 30-40 yr. single fitness freak. He had two kids he sees ever 2-3 months. He spends all night long talking on his phone in his apartment. I feel bad for him. He has tons of pictures and obviously doens’t want to be where he is.
He runs for about 2-4 miles a day. At night. Never hear a peep out of him.

The others I never really saw. It was a nice apartment complex.

3

I live in a condominium, but each building contains eight units side by side, so I will only describe the neighbors on each immediate side. Neighbors to the north are an older couple, 55-60 years approximately. The first week we moved in, they called the cops on us because our kids were making too much noise. Since then, we have had no more trouble from them, but we don’t really speak to them and they don’t speak to us, and that is just fine with us. They have some cute grandkids who come over to visit pretty regularly though. The neighbors to the south are a young couple, probably no more than 25 years old. We don’t really see much of them. They both work full-time jobs and are both working towards their Master degrees, so they are rarely ever home except for in the late evening. They seem to be very nice though.

4

I’ve lived in my apartment for a year and 3 months, and so far I’ve had more neighbors than I can remember. After I first moved in, I was constantly harrased by tw different neighbors from downstairs who constantly needed to borrow money, use my phone, or try to bum a ride somewhere. I allowed one to use the phone once, and after that I guess they both had me pegged as a mark, but I’m generous…not an idiot, so I wouldn’t give in to any of their pathetic mooching from that point on.

One of these two leeches was a young black guy who lived with his girlfriend; she had a job and he didn’t…needless to say, I wasn’t sympathetic to his plight when I would come home from work to find him sitting at the base of the stairs, drinking a 40oz and asking me if I could give him a ride to the bank (which was in walking distance) so he could cash a check. After awhile they began to fight, and you could easily hear their shouting matches throughout the building, and one night I finally had enough of it and called the cops. They ended up moving out a short time later, and a nice lesbian couple moved in and they were there for six months before leaving. In there place, an older couple has moved in, and they’re quiet as mice.

The other mooch got evicted after passing out drunk in his bedroom, leaving the bathtub running and thereby ruining the floor of a good bit of his apartment. He refused to pay, saying that the tub sprung a leak and that it wasn’t his fault. :rolleyes: He was replaced by some whitetrash in his mid-twenties who would occasionally watch-over his child…and by watch-over I mean sleep on the couch with loud music blaring, the blinds to his apartment open so everyone could see his sorry ass neglecting his two year-old child as she pressed her pitifully sad face up against the window. His vehicle was a 80’s camaro that took about fifty cranks of the ingnition to start…and he would do this mostly late at night in the week when I would be trying to get some sleep. :mad: Luckily for me he moved out some time ago, and nobody has taken his place.

Now, on my floor, I’ve had two neighbors that have been there and have given me NO problems: One is an older gentleman who mostly keeps to himself, but is friendly enough if you bump into him; and the other is cop who’s pride and joy is his 300ZX which is washes and waxes often…making me feel kinda crappy about my car-care tendencies, but oh well. At first, I was kind of worried about the cop, 'cause I occaisonally enjoy smoking weed, and some of my good friends are stoners, but he’s a damn good guys, and I’m not worried about him sticking his nose into my business now that I’ve gotten to know him.

The apartment right across from mine, though, is an interesting case…the nice quiet couple that lived there when I initially moved in ended up disappearing for about two weeks or so, and then my landlord asked me if I knew where there were…apparently they were late with rent. Then all sorts of notices were left on their door…the power company was turning off their electricity, some legal stuff…and then late one Sunday night they came back, loaded up all their stuff, and left. A few months later a young guy named Chris moved in, and we ended up become rather chummy as we shared many similar interests. We were both movie and sci-fi fans, and we wer both avid DVD freaks…so we would trade movies and sometimes go out to the local bar and have a few drinks together. Now, Chris was pretty irresponsible with his money, but he was a banquent server at a local casino resort, so he made a good living for a young guy. He owned an old Fiero, and it got him back and forth to work with no problems, but then one day the engine died, and he decided he would rather just junk it and buy a used car. Well, he didn’t have any credit, and didn’t have much money saved up, but one day he comes home with a used Nissan Pathfinder he got gouged for by a car lot. He mentioned something about how he hoped he would have enough for the tag and insurance, but that he hadn’t yet checked on the prices. Now, they next night he comes over to my place and tells me that somebody “broke into” his apartment and stole just his DVD player, some of his movies, and some of his stereo. This was automatically suspicious to me, because why would any thief go through the trouble of picking out which movies he wanted to take, and then leave a TV and the surround sound system and speakers? It was pretty damn obvious that he pawned some of his stuff and was going through this act for whatever reasons. A week later, after telling me he was gonna be late on his rent because business was slow, he gets “broken into” again, and even calls the cops and files a report. Now, this time they took the TV, the rest of the DVDs, the rest of the stereo and the speakers…BUT they left and old crappy VCR I had loaned him a few days before (It was 10 years old and had been sitting in my closet, so I could really give a fuck what happened to it). I talked to the cop next door, and he concurred with my supsicion that Chris had pretty much pawned his shit, and was going throught his act to keep it from seeming like he was on hard times. Well, the next month he didn’t have rent, and Chris left to stay with his sister, and they ended up evicting him and dumping most of his furniture in the garbage (it was all mostly young bachelor press-wood stuff). He’s called me a few times, but I don’t want to associate with anyone who would go throught the trouble to create elaborate lies to a friend. I felt bad a first, but now I think I did the right thing.

Sorry this was so long, but once I got started, I just had to get some of this out. I don’t live in a particularily “low-rent” nieghborhood, I guess I’ve just had a string of bad neighbors.

5

Their are 8 apartments in our building (two on each of four floors), and we’re in a group of four buildings. I’ve never met any of my neighbors! Couldn’t even tell you what they look like. My husband seems to have met them all. He tells me some things, and I have picked up a few tidbits on my own.

The lady who lives below us buys a lot of stuff from those home shopping tv channels. She never seems to be home, so the delivery men like to leave the packages with us. There’s an elderly lady on the ground floor who talks my husband’s ears off whenever they meet (he tells me about it afterwards). Apparently we have a flight attendent and a nurse somewhere in the building. One couple (?) on the second floor has their stereo and vacuum machine going almost every time I walk past.

I know the most about the people across the hall, a couple in their late fifties. They keep two dogs in their one bedroom flat. They come and go at all hours. I have not been able to establish a pattern. I know when they’re coming and going; apart from hearing the door slam, they have an old van which is in desperate need of a tune-up. It vibrates so loudly at such a low pitch it actually makes me feel ill (while I’m still in my apartment, four floors up). They have had blazing rows at 5am. And they have sex between 11pm and 1am. The woman’s a screamer; it actually wakes me up.

I feel like Harriet the Spy. But it’s a fun thread. :slight_smile:

6

I moved into this particualar apt last May. My apt number is 702, and there are 12 apts on 2 floors, the ones on the ends (both floors) are 2 bdrms.

The apt next to me has had people come and go. There used to be a Mexican family next door. It smelled good when the wife/mom would cook. The rather large husband/dad liked to walk around naked in their one bdrm place. I only know this because the stairs come up directly in front of their kitchen window. Not a nice view. They moved out and someone moved in, but I knew not who. Then Nina starts talking to my brother and I. She is dating/living with Gabe in that apt. I really didn’t care, but she was nice and I was drinking beer, so we talked for some time. I’ve not seen her in a long time, but every so often someone knocks on my door by mistake, and whenever that door opens, it usually smells of pot. Gabe is a pothead, but I have no idea if he still lives there.

Below me is a black family. She’s not unattractive, and he’s a truck driver. They have 2 kids, and the kids are nice. She is usually nice, but not talkative. He’s pretty straight forward, but I rarely see him here. I’ve actually seen them more at my work than here. They tried to buy a cell phone a couple of times. I told them that I lived above them. Like they cared.

In the apt below my next-door neighbor, I think a single mom moved in with her 2 kids, but I can’t be sure. I know that they have a small TV, maybe a 13" but that’s the biggest it could be. Sometimes people come out, but usually when I go downstairs I can see in their front window (blinds are down, but angled wrong) and usually she’s sitting on the couch with either her 2 kids or maybe 2 men. It’s hard to tell when I’m leaving. I don’t want to really ‘look’ but I can ‘glimpse’ in.

The people directly across from us moved, I think. It was a mom and her extremely horny daughter. She slept with several men in the complex, and appearantly Gabe also.

Below them there was a white guy with a mexican woman with two kids. They moved. He smoked out on the steps at night. I liked them, even though I never talked to them.

Next to those people is appearantly a woman and a kid. The kid watches cartoons all the time. I can see their TV most of the time when I leave at night. Always on cartoons. I made a comment about it on SuperBowl Sunday to my friends with my door open. She said to me, ‘Are you talking about here?’ Yep, I was busted. “It’s my boy, he watches cartoons.”

Above the cartoon boy there used to be a bunch of teens in and out. Usually with drugs, or so I thought. They’re gone, and I know not who is there now.

A couple doors down on the first floor of that building is a lady that has several dogs. She’s nice. I’ve talked to her a few times. She cleans up after her dogs. I like that, especially in the hot summer months. The slut never cleaned up after her dog.

To the left of me is the building that makes the roof of the pi. I only really know of the guy with the dog that never cleans up. He dented my brother’s car unknowingly. My bro got $1300 out of that one. I think he’s a chef or something, because he sometimes come home in a white coat and odd pants. I think he goes to Baylor. I’ve driven next to him before. He doesn’t like to drive slowly, either.

Above him is a guy that drives a new Silverado. He has horns in his window, and I saw his girlfriend naked. When we were moving in, she was naked, shutting the blinds. My fiancée saw it too. Too bad I don’t see more good looking chicks naked here. Less fat Mexicans has been nice. Didn’t like that. He had an argument with her I think, because I heard him yelling that he wanted to be with her goddammit.

That’s pretty much it for here. In the first apt my bro and I lived in, we knew all our neighbors. But it was a one bdrm and there were 2 of us. It sucked after time.

7

How on earth?? That is very wierd.

My neighbors are very nice and we all pretty much look after each other. The two women above me are really nice and quiet as well, which is a good change from the previous tenants, the Bickersons. One night before the Bickersons moved, they had a screaming row that spilled out into the street. On the way out, Mr Bickerson slammed open the communal front door that their apartment and mine shared. The door hit the wall, creating a good-size hole in it. Unfortunately, at the time he swung the door open, my head was leaning against that wall that formed part of my bedroom (no, I didn’t have my ear against a glass - you could hear them in the next complex). My head bounced off the wall and I ended up with a spliting headache.

Quiet is good.

8

I’m also in the basement. Across the hallway is the indeterminate number of people who are ALWAYS fighting. Also they keep like seven pairs of shoes outside their door. Bear in mind that it’s a two bedroom apartment. (We’re three in here and that’s pushing it.)

Above us are two very large black gentlemen. I’ve made the acquaintance of one of them, a mover by trade who bought the washer and dryer of the women who lived here before, and who sold us his old ones. He’s very friendly and sold me some pot very inexpensively for my birthday. He has very loud sex with a lady friend whom I’ve never seen, at peculiar hours of the morning and afternoon. At one point their washer accidentally overflowed and eroded a hole in our bathroom ceiling.

I don’t know any of the other people in the building.

9

We live in the basement of an old Victorian home. So we only have the upstairs neighbors. An 80+ year old man, Mr. Henry, who owns or owned several restaurants in town. The restaurants are still in his family, I’m just not sure whether he still owns them. About a year ago, he fell outside and broke his hip. For a long time, every time you saw him or talked to him, he told you about it over and over and over…

His two spinister neices live with him. One works at the restaurant nearest us. They both seem nice and aren’t a bother.

But, being an old house coverted into 2 apts., we have the same electrical system. Luckily ours is newer, but they are always blowing the fuses and he calls downstairs to get us to reset them. This happens at least once a month and at 8 a.m. on the weekend. He did give us a bottle of wine once for always resetting the fuse and being home when the landlord called the electrician because Mr. Henry’s dryer wouldn’t work. (It really did work, the heating element went out so then they had to call a dryer repairman.)

Oh yeah, the one neice has one of those little rat dogs that yaps all the time from early morning. But at least he is quiet at night when we are trying to sleep.

Wonder how all of our neighbors would describe us?!?

10

from reading about the living situations i have become extreamly jealous of everyone that lives in an apartment… I live in military barracks, so aside from living in a small private room and having 12 people in total in my immediate ear shot… So here is the low down… I share a bathroom with this guy named Hector who has prompted me to make the thread about alcohol use. He is always using Dialpad.com or one of those telephone call websites to call his family in Alabama, he drinks heavily, lies about his masculinity, physical prowess, and personal hygine practices. I hate having contact with he because he is very irresponcible with his money and I dont want to have him come ask me for money. Directly across the hall there are 2 women. I dont actually know either of their names but everyone i know calles #1 Space Kadet and #2 Tank Ass… Space Kadet is always wearing this black shirt that says “dead kennedys” on the back, wearing some kind of motley looking haircut style that consists of 10 gallons of black hair dye. She is always hanging out with this guy i used to work with who was ultra weird… he was into that witches and warlocks religion thing, but he was completly serious about it… He would talk about it for hours unprompted… Well most times he is in Space Kadet’s room doing random things I bet. One time Space Kadet’s friend showed up at her door with this 4 foot long sword! I figured i would just stay away till he was gone with it… Tank Ass is this girl from L.A. and she is getting married to this guy from Toms River, NJ… Well this girl Tank Ass has the biggest ass I have ever seen in the entire world… Its especially weird because her torso is completly normal then her booty just goes WHAM and then gets huge… Traveling down to her knees it starts to get back to normal… She is nice, but gets a bum deal because of the size of her ass… OK, moving to the right there is this guy who name I only know as “Plummer” This guy is country… I am talking about the worst country accent you have ever heard and this guy is 100 times worse… Well he has this mr. dance club pimp thing going on. If disco was popular he would be doing very very good… Across the hall from him there is this girl who’s name I have never known except in stories my buddies tell me about how she is in bed… Apparently the odds are if you go out drinking in the same bar as her you will end up getting some action from her. I stay away just because of the health risks, and my dislike for drunkards… OK enough babble…

-Mikey

11

I share a house with my landlady and her two kids. Strictly speaking it’s one house split down the middle by a wall thus creating two absurdly skinny apartments (three stories, but only nine feet wide in the horizontal --that’s affordable housing in San Francisco. My friends refer to it as the “Ant Farm”).

Shes a nurse and has hepatitis, something which leaves her fatigued so often I find myself a defacto babysitter for entire nights. My girlfriend is convinced that this is good fatherhood training, whereas in reality it’s doing nothing but turning me off the idea of having children entirely.

I also find myself dealing with every disaster that befalls the house. It has made me a very good amateur plumber (dammit women of the world, those tampon applicator thingies just don’t flush!!).

Immediately to my left live a SFPD detective and his wife. Which made the meth lab in the house immediately to my right seem all the more surprising. But there it was. And 3:00 a.m. one tuesday morning –BAM!!! The FBI, the DEA, the ATF, and a few other letters of the alphabet descended on my neighbors, breaking down the door and rousting the whole skinny goosebumped family out naked and bound with plastic twist-ties. Then came forensics guys. Then the guys in the bio-hazard spacesuits. Then government guys who wanted to declare my whole block a super fund site. And finally the real estate agents.

12

I gave up on apartments because of the friggin’ neighbors. Now I live in a house with lots of empty land between me and my neighbors. Great place.

In one apartment I lived, two hot chicks moved in next door – no problem – but they promptly drew the attention of two brain dead, over muscled construction guys from across the street. So, they came over, drunk, stoned, loud, obnoxious, beat up a couple of other neighbors who complained to their faces about their actions and between screwing the chicks, wandered the courtyard making a racket. They finally got arrested for stealing and the chicks moved out.

I’ve had neighbors who argued loudly with each other, neighbors who insisted on playing their music loud enough for everyone to enjoy – even when asked not to, neighbors with big, savage dogs that barked when a frog farted, neighbors with screaming, obnoxious, noisy, destructive little kids whom I would have cheerfully beaten into comas with a bat if I could have gotten away with it, neighbors who insisted on waking me up in the day – when I worked nights – to borrow my phone, neighbors who smoked so much pot that I almost got high just living with an adjoining wall, and neighbors who were never sober and figured that no one else should be either.

I’ve had neighbors watching me and reporting every dump to my land lord, neighbors stealing light bulbs from my outside light, neighbors always trying to bum money, needing rides, trying to sell me pot or busily selling everyone else pot. I’ve had neighbors parking in my drive way or parking spot, trying to seduce my girlfriend when I wasn’t home, letting their dirty diapered little rats scuttle around and get into everything outside or scream for hours inside. (Some people need to be forcibly sterilized.)

So, I keep a good distance between myself and neighbors. If I could afford it, I’d build a 10 foot tall, two foot thick cement wall around my place and line the top with broken glass.