When I lived in a enclosed apartment bldg for a while, and smelled good cooking in the hallway, I always wanted to go knocking on doors until I found the source, and then invite myself in.
Other than that, I generally ABHOR living in apartments, which I have done for much of my adult life. Once upon a time, I SWORE that I would go live in a freeway underpass or a hollow tree before I would ever live in an apartment again. And I did very nearly that for a while. I quit my job, moved to a semi-rural area, and lived in a guest house on a 50-acre horse ranch for 10 years. After that, I lived in a place that seemed like the Garden of Eden to me for three years. I can’t resist showing some pictures!
(These are all just pics of the same place from several different views.)
Now I’m back in an apartment in a city again, with some mildly noisy neighbors and some moderately low-life neighbors and some mildly jerkish apartment management, and I WISH I COULD GO BACK AND LIVE THERE AGAIN. And maybe sometime Real Soon Now I’ll find a place like that again!
The worst is a white trash family who make Howard Stern’s Wack Pack look like the Osmonds. None of them, from the grandmother (before she passed away) to the youngest child (as soon as he could talk) can talk below a shout, and their favorite word to shout is “fuck” and variations thereof. When I hear them get really going it’s fun to listen and count how many fucks they can string together without another word getting in the way.
There’s something about a tiny, piping child’s voice shrieking “Fuck you, you fucking fuckheaded motherfucker!!” that makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.
On the other hand they make the usual feral children, barking dogs, and the guy on the other side of the block who likes to look in people’s windows with binoculars much easier to take.
There is one family across the street that is always screaming at each other in some kind of theater of dysfunction. A couple of weeks ago, the mother locked the kids (teens to young adults) out of the house and they screamed at her to let them in all night long. Everyone was high or drunk and it went on all night. The cops came by a couple of times, but they’d quiet down for a bit and then just start up.
I keep hoping that the DC housing boom will convince them to finally cash out and use the profits to go on a drinking binge with the proceeds in some other neighborhood, but not yet.
The dogs are the worst. WHY would you buy a dog if all you’re going to do is leave it in the yard all day long so it can bark its fool head off? I’m very grateful we don’t actually live next to these dog owners so we can shut our door, but when we open it we hear it. I wonder what the people next door to them do. I’ve never seen them play with the dog or interact with it in any way other than putting food out for it.
And then there’s the guy who lets his dog shit on other people’s yards and doesn’t clean it up. Him I want to straight-up murder. Everyone else does clean up their dog poo; what an asshole to think the rules don’t apply to his HUGE mutts.
A coworker at my last job had the same problem. One day she hid on the porch where he couldn’t see her, and after the dog did its business she popped up and yelled, “I hope you’re going to clean that up!”
The guy was so shocked he picked up the dog poop with his bare hand! :eek:
I live on a pretty nice, quiet block–the main annoyance is Motorcycle Guy, who revs it endlessly and rides it up and down and up and down and up and down the street. Everyone in the neighborhood *hates *him–if he were rifle-shot off his bike the suspect list would be in the hundreds.
I can deal with him–I have had *way *worse neighbors–but my landlord wants to go over and confront him. The landlady and I are both trying to talk him out of this, as my landlord has a temper, and I’m sure Motorcycle Guy does, too, so that would Not End Well.
My neighbours are mostly good here - there are a handful of low-level annoyances, but no one who stands out as, “Don’t get in front of my car while I’m driving, because I’m not sure if I’d hit the brake or the gas.”
The young couple in the rental across the street have a young boy who seems to scream every time he’s outside. The house down the block a ways have some kind of all terrain vehicle that they occasionally race up and down the alley late at night.
Then there’s my neighbour across the alley to the back, who likes to sit on her porch and look down at my yard (she’s up a hill from us) and talk to me as I work in my yard. I always think of “Office Space” when she does that - “Can you at least pretend that you aren’t staring right into my back yard and watching everything we do out here?” She also has a dog that they bought recently who likes to bark when he’s outside. And since he’s up the hill, too, he sort of broadcasts his loud barking to the whole neighbourhood.
I think I have an orangutan living above me. Honestly, I cannot figure out what in the world he could be doing to make that much noise. Everything is a CRASH and BANG. I swear he’s going to break the toilet slamming the lid down. The walls literally shake.
And he does his laundry at 4 or 5AM. Wham BAM Slam then off balance spin cycle wooo!
OTOH, I never hear any loud music or yelling from him.
The residents of my complex are generally a good bunch. Two-thirds of them are Sisters of Notre Dame, which makes for a pretty quiet and respectful community overall.
The neighbors I have a problem with are the residents of the apartment building next door. The demographics of the two complexes couldn’t be more different. Their kids have a habit of throwing fruit over the fence into our driveway and some of the tenants like to play mariachi music turned up to 11 all day long on the weekends (there were 2 police visits on Memorial Day weekend because of the noise). Also, their de facto “overflow” parking is in the cul-de-sac situated beneath my bedroom window…loud comings-and-goings with loud voices and booming stereos are pretty common in the wee hours. Oh, and did I mention the overly-sensitive car alarms? Thank god for good earplugs.
You must live on my old street! When the yard was bare dirt it never saw a single turd. After I spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars landscaping it, i got 8 or 10 piles a day. One morning I was up early to mow and caught TWO of my neighbors standing in the middle of my yard while their dogs did their business. “Don! Manny! Good morning! So good to see you! It looks like you BOTH forgot to bring bags! No worry, I’ll run inside and get a few!” They were both gone when I got back. I almost felt bad when I repatriated their dog shit to their doorsteps.
My boyfriend has yelled once or twice at the lady about her dogs, but she just apologizes profusely and then does nothing about it. It’s frustrating because when you yell at her she keeps bowing her head and then you feel like an asshole. She does this with any neighbor that complains.
There is one guy two houses down that has two huge dogs that he lets out into the front, off lead, so they can do their business in other people’s yards. If he notices one of the neighbors outside, he immediately starts calling the dogs, “MOLLY, SKIPPER! GET BACK HERE” as if he didn’t let them run around the neighborhood to shit.
We all have nice big back yards, including this guy, and I can see that he has a dog run in his yard. Apparently he’s just too lazy to pick up his dog crap from his own yard. Asshole. Every time we find a big pile on the lawn I want to take it and put it on his doorstep, but so far my husband hasn’t let me. :mad:
We may be the annoying neighbors. We are in the country, can’t see any of the neighbors’ houses, which are some distance away. We have a volunteer rooster, who showed up one day years ago, and eventually he managed to lure some hens over. We love having a constant supply of fresh eggs, so the flock is now the rooster and 5 hens, all free range with no coop at all. Thing is, the rooster crows every morning (and through the day) starting at about 4 am. The neighbor behind us has poultry (we think the volunteer rooster wandered up from his property) and so he’s no problem, and we are so used to the sounds we don’t even hear them any more. Other neighbors probably can hear the rooster if their windows are open. I figure they are either used to it and don’t hear it, actually like the sound of a distant crowing rooster, or hate it but are just too meek and mild (er…kind) to say anything about it. Occasionally there’s quite a racket from this flock at the edge of our yard, putting them closer to their yard (which is several acres away). If they don’t quit their yapping (the hens) within a couple of minutes, I go out to quiet them down, but that’s only if I am here. (They only have to put up with this for a couple more years; we are moving then and the poultry is going to a new home…) Not sure where a rooster fits in with the kids and barking dogs you guys deal with.
These stories remind me of living in military housing for all those years. We had one religious nut neighbor who bought a Dungeons & Dragons board game, then put it in a trash can, sprayed it with lighter fluid, and burned it in front of his children to demonstrate what happens to “satan’s works”. They also weren’t allowed to go out on Hallowe’en.
One neighbor across the fence on the civilian side of things was a cop, who was married to the biggest bitch on the planet. She was constantly screaming at her son (the long-suffering Patrick) about every little crappy thing, while she cooed at her daughter. One day she was screaming about somebody ate the last egg and she wanted to know just who would do such a thing, blahblahblah. After five minutes of this, I opened the window and shouted “Jesus Christ, I ate the damn thing; give the kid a break!” They had a sign on our side of the fence that said “Military people: do NOT throw trash in this area. Private property!” I used to throw rocks at the fence and, when she would come charging out to raise hell about it, pretend it was the lawnmower that did it.
Another neighbor (different place) had two big dogs that shit all over their very small back yard, which was right outside our kitchen, which made having the window open impossible. I finally told the guy to clean it up or I’d report him to base housing. “Oh, they’ve been sick,” says he. “No shit?” says me.
Most of our neighbors are wonderful, but we do have one house behind us in the alley that we secretly pray will be hit by a meteor or something. Occupants are a mother, father, and teenage daughter, who is 17 but acts like she is 9. That may, in fact, be insulting to 9-year-olds. The dad is a very nice man and we like him. His wife and daughter, however, are extremely obnoxious and stupid. This family has two dogs (used to be three; don’t know what happened to the third). Their regular routine is to let the dogs out without a leash, then scream at them for half an hour or so when they run away and shit in everyone’s yards. The situation with the dogs is neglectful and abusive—once a dog was left chained outside all day in -30 degree weather—and we have reported them on many occasions, but still they are allowed to have the dogs. I don’t know why. They are also often outside screaming at night (the people, not the dogs, although the dogs do bark much of the day). 9:30 seems to be when they check their clock and decide it’s time to go outside and scream. They also like to honk their car horn at 6 a.m. I could probably go on all day, but you get the general idea.
On one side is a two family house, both rentals. The families renting have known each other for a long time, and we’ve become friends with both of them. The other side is a semi-absentee owner, his aunt left him the house, and his daughter now lives in it. We pretty much don’t ever see her, but he comes up one weekend a month or so, and we get along just fine.
Along the back we don’t know them well, but they don’t make a lot of noise (outside of an occasionally barking beagle) and don’t constantly give us dirty looks. My wife is convinced that one woman back there hates her, but they’ve never actually spoken.
If anything, we’re the lousy neighbors because our son has entered a tantrum phase, and you could hear his whiny ass in the next county.
In the first home I owned, we thought we had good neighbors all around, and the houses were no more than a dozen feet apart on their sides. Then one day, our neighbor to our right decided to take up hunting …with dogs. My first two children (both girls) were probably 2 and 4 at the time, and I had their swing set placed about 6 feet from the chain-link fence that separated our yard from the “hunter’s” yard. Over one weekend, he poured a concrete slab up against the chain-link fence directly next to my daughter’s swing set (where I have very fond memories of rocking them to sleep on many occasions), enclosed it with more chain-link fencing, added a dog house, then 5 dogs… yes, FIVE medium-to-large-sized hound dogs. Thereafter, we could not enter our own back yard without being continuously (and I DO MEAN CONTINUOUSLY) barked at by the dogs. Using the swing set was completely out of the question, so I had to disassemble it and move it to the other side of the yard. They still barked, but not directly into our faces. Of course, then came the stench. I soon discovered that my neighbor’s idea of a sanitary environment for his animals was to have his teen-aged son spray the concrete slab with a garden hose until all the poop was moved off of it. That’s it.
After politely speaking to him about it, he bought one section of a 6-foot wooden fence, and leaned it between the dog house and the fence. That’s it.
I’m convinced it would have turned into a very ugly situation if I hadn’t at the same time gotten a excellent job offer out of state which required us to move immediately.
Shockingly, a good friend bought the house from us, and has no problem whatsoever with the dogs. Still scratching my head over that…
Right now we’re the hated neighbors but it’s not anything we did. Really I swear.
I live in a neighborhood of old small bungalows with large oddly shaped lots and most of the neighborhood has lived here for time measured in decades. When we moved in 5 years ago the house that touches the back of our lot and only has a tiny frontage on our street was in disrepair and had been purchased by a father and son who were going to fix it up. They failed and then last year the neighbor whose lot is completely surrounded by that lot and mine passed away. A developer bought both the failed reno and the dead neighbors house and proceeded to put together plans for townhouses. They slipped a card in our door and since we had already decided we’d gone too small in our downsizing and we had zero desire to spend 2 years living next to a construction site we came to an arrangement with them and sold our house.
A couple weeks ago they had an information setting for the neighborhood to show what they were planning and talk about their timelines. The rest of the neighborhood was more interested in the what, since we’re renting back the house until they break ground (or our new house closes) we were more interested in the when. It was the most uncomfortable hour I’ve sat through in a long time. Only one person in the entire room would speak to us. I understand that they’re unhappy about the development but it was happening even if we didn’t sell. Why the hell blame us for it? I suspect it’s going to be a long 2 years.
