My only complaint relates to lawn mowing. My neighbor lady (an old friend) is retired but she mows a nearby golf course. I think she really loves mowing. She mows her lawn once a week whether it needs it or not. She does this on Saturday morning “so the lawn will look nice for the weekend”. WTF?
My husband thinks our lawns should be the same height so that means he mows whenever she mows. He knows the grass should be allowed to grow, especially in a drought, but he can’t resist.
Outside dog? Really? I wonder why he’s barking all day long.
Anyway, we are also the Klopeks of our neighborhood. No dead trees in the front yard, but it’s not mowed, and there are plenty of dead ones (some that have fallen) in the back yard. But it’s fenced in with a wooden privacy fence, which means don’t be looking in my back yard; it’s none of your business.
We’re actually not the worst; there’s a house right at the entrance to our subdivision where there is no grass in the front yard so I suppose that is more of an eyesore. There are two beagles who live next door who won’t shut up sometimes. So maybe we’re not the worst ones, but we’re close.
How do you know that that’s actually his washing machine, and not his stereo? He might have very interesting tastes in music. 
When I saw this thread title I immediately thought of the stereo loogie hawking. Our houses are really close together, and the neighbors on both sides apparently have phlegm issues, because I sure do hear a lot of hawwwwwwwking.
The people on one side keep chickens from time to time, which annoys my husband but I like the soft clucking. I worried when they first got them that they’d get our three beagles tuned up, but with the exception of Little, who sniffs around the fence sometimes, the dogs seem completely uninterested in the poultry.
All I can really say is that I have a file folder an inch thick that couldn’t even BEGIN to describe the living hell one neighbor (two doors down) has put us through including legal bills and more. At one point, the police were ready to arrest him for his insessent calls lying about my husband. It’s gotten really, really bad.
The one we knew and really liked lost her home and moved, and it’s been rented since so they’re quiet adn don’t bother us.
The other one thtat was right next to us killed himself (he was renting the place from his niece who had a stroke and had to leave) and there are new people in there now who have a small yapping dog that my husband has finally had to confront them about when they let it poop in our yard, and run wild without a leash. I have a 165 pound German Shepherd - and if your dog comes near him, he’s going to be dessert - so LEASH THE DAMN THING!
The guy across the street from us mows his entire lawn with a fucking weed whacker. He has a manual push mower, but when his SO is at work, he does it with the gas-powered whacker, which takes him some two hours to complete, instead of using the mower, which would take him 30 minutes, tops.
The new next-door neighbor likes to smoke, outside. Which means I smell it in my house because the windows are open.
Then there’s the idjit a few houses down who has a garage full of toys (wave runners & motorcycles) that he thinks it’s best to rev whenever he starts or before he stops them.
On the “positive” side, it’s because of him that I have pix of SWAT teams on the street. :eek: I even got the privliege to make entry with them & secure & extract the last ‘occupant’ - with a leash & a milk bone. It’s not every non-LEO that can claim to have done this.
SERIOUSLY??? Our neighbor from hell caused ME to have pictures of a SWAT team on our street using our house for the floorplan and our driveway to suit upt in!! Didn’t get to go in anywhere with 'em, but they did keep the neighborhood on lockdown for four hours or so! Set One and Set Two.
He’s just as bad it sounds like yours is - God I feel for you!
I actually miss my old apartment, where the neighbors were pleasant and quiet, and we had privacy. The only annoying thing was the 24/7 overpowering curry and other horrifically pungent cooking smells.
Now we live in a tiny old townhouse in a suburb, which is not private and quiet at all. We could hold hands with our next-door neighbors as we each stand on the front steps. And there they always are, chain smoking and either yelling at each other or having endless banal conversations, at all hours of the day and night. The smokiest one likes to hang around near our window and eavesdrop on us (and our banal conversations). Unable to plan errand trips ahead, they come and go every few minutes all day and night, too. Their trucks have beeping car alarms that go off every time they open the doors. They have several emotionally disturbed children, given to screaming fits. They’re nice people; they’re just annoying as such close neighbors.
Some of the other neighbors have many, many feral kids in addition to the feral daycare kids they take in and don’t watch. They hold the belief that it’s fine to pile mountains of loose trash and soiled mattresses in front of our house every day, because eventually it’ll be trash day.
Our house is an end unit, so we also enjoy herds of screaming kids cutting through under our windows, killing whatever I try to grow, no matter how often I ask them not to. Everyone has dogs, so I’ve also run out and asked people if they were planning to pick up after them. Then there’s the neighbor who is great except for his weekly 7AM Saturday festival of power tools.
I kind of hate my neighborhood, even though it’s not that bad.
Wow, a lot of the above posts make me think my neighbor issues are not really that bad. All I got is a backyard neighbor with a pool and outside stereo system. That stereo is ALWAYS on, and not softly. I can hear it in my home even with the doors and windows closed. He plays it until about 10 at night, so I guess I should not complain since it is not all night. Also, the real pain is that he plays music appropriate for his 9-year old daughter, so all we hear is teeny-bopper bubble-gum crap - not terribly offensive, but annoying nontheless. I have been thinking of just asking him to turn it down a few notches.
Why is it that people feel the need to pollute the air with their loud music?
The garden apartment has been rented to a horde (I have no better word for it) of Irish lads here on J1 student visas. They seem to be quite sweet boys, but they just don’t grok that this isn’t a college neighborhood. We don’t have loud parties past 4 am on weeknights. We don’t have sex on MY bench in the backyard and then LEAVE THE FULL CONDOM on the grass for my 7 year old daughter to find the next morning. We don’t use the grill belonging to my husband without asking. We don’t take my cooler and camp chairs out of the basement to use in the back yard without asking. We don’t lock the basement door going to the common laundry room and storage lockers so that we can throw down extra air mattresses because there are too many of us sleeping here to fit in the two bedroom apartment. We don’t leave the front door unlocked, because while we’re in a pretty good neighborhood, for fuck’s sake we still live in Chicago, and on a main street. And we don’t, we just fucking don’t carve “J1 2012” into the neighbor’s drying cement sidewalk.
All of this in less than a month. Little fuckers. If your accents weren’t so fucking adorable, I’d hate you all.
I get pretty aggravated at the horde of college students living next door, but after reading this thread, they aren’t so bad. They do party, loudly, a lot. There is also a pool which means a lot of shrieking. Lots of parties mean LOTS of cars on the street (I have an unreasonable hatred of people parking in front of my house, which I know is unreasonable). They also leave beer bottles/liquor bottles on the sidewalk. We had dinner guests on Sunday night and we got to hear their Bob Marley sound track when we ate on the patio. But, when they’re not partying, they are super sweet, wave to us when they see us, etc.
Sister Vigilante, our outside dog is a working police K9. He goes to work with Daddy 40-50 hours per week, they train another 4-8 hours per week. He goes for two long walks daily (20-45 minutes,) plus several short breaks for relieving himself. About twice a week, Tony stops at the big park on his way home, and throws the Kong for a half hour. When he’s outside, the dog’s home is an eight-foot square kennel set up under the carport, with a large crate, a fan, and a heat lamp in winter. He’s not a pet, but he’s pretty well taken care of.
And one of the indoor dogs is a retired narcotics dog. He is shamelessly spoiled. We couldn’t do that while he was still working.
Mostly not too annoying. The one neighbor has a son that runs a four wheeler around occasionally and it is a little annoying - but in general, they don’t see or hear from me and vice-versa.
Yikes, WhyNot! Do you think the building manager knew there were that many people going to stay there? Isn’t that not allowable under city code - to have more than two adults per bedroom? I was nervous moving into my building because there are some 3 and 4 bed units here that I knew were rented to students, but they seem to have been vetted very well by the Manager and so far they have all behaved themselves, even the parties are pretty low-key when they have them. I’ve started my third lease here and plan to stay a while. I feel like I got pretty lucky.
Huh. Well never mind. From the Metropolitan Tenant’s Organization:
That’s - nuts. And explains a lot around here, I guess! More researching seems to reveal the “rule” about number of people and bedrooms can be a landlords lease rule as long as it doesn’t violate HUD standards - which may allow more than two per bedroom depending on circumstances. I find this convoluted housing/real estate stuff so interesting. OK. I’ll stop being a geek now.
All our neighbours are nice (and I believe we share a property line with seven different yards). The people on the east boundary were always pleasant until their dog killed our cat, when they were surprisingly insensitive and deeply offended my partner. They remained friendly toward us after that, but we were a bit bitter.
Then suddenly they moved and our new neighbors are the most awesome of all! They give us fresh vegetables straight from their garden and in return we give them eggs from our chooks. Recently the wife knitted hats for our children for the winter. They’re so sweet!
Being in a condominium, my only real concern with neighbors is noise.
Frankly, as I value my sleep, if neighbors break rules about when to be quiet, I do not hesitate to send complaints to the property management firm.
Examples:
And then there were the shouting arguments with her son, who lived part of each year with her and part with his father.
They’ve been much quieter lately.
No problem with the ones where I live now but a few years back I did have a right miserable git living next door.
At the time I’d just fulfilled a long standing ambition to own a Harley. Neighbours on one side were great - “Wow, it’s a Harley Davidson, can we sit on it/can you take us for a ride”, that sort of thing. I should add that I live in the UK and Harleys back then were not common here.
When he first saw me park the bike on my drive, the guy on the other side just went “Oh it’s you making all that noise is it?” And he is American!
Only mildly annoying I know but he was one of these people who never had a good word for anyone and could find a reason to moan about anything. It just pissed me off a bit living next to such a miserable sod
My neighbors are the best, and I’d like to think I’m as good back. There’s only the one house visible from my house, and it is owned by a cop and his wife. They have two small boys and some goats and calves. If they go on vacation I feed their animals. If my car is in my drive when I’d normally be at work, they call to check on me. If they have a family party they always invite me. When his tractor died and he needed it pulled, I came over with mine to pull his out.
The nice thing is, their house is about 1/3 mile from mine, so we’re far enough not to get on each other’s nerves, but close enough to help when needed.
It takes being a good neighbor to have good neighbors.
StG
I’m crossing my fingers and knocking on wood here, because out of the 3 apartments I’ve lived in (shush, I’m young!), none of them have been bad.
Apartment #1: So quiet that I could hear the phone ring in the apartment beside my bedroom, but being a kindly old lady she didn’t make any other noise!
Apartment #2: Other than a couple incidents with Domestic Violence Couple, nice and quiet! Didn’t even hear a peep from the bar down the street. Oh, someone once knocked on my wall because I started to vacuum at 11pm. In my defense, I didn’t notice the time and stopped immediately!
Apartment #3: The landlord was renovating the suite next to mine on a long weekend which was annoying, but silent otherwise.
