Okay…but here’s our logic (if we ever had to employ logic, which we don’t because we don’t have neighbors). It’s up to you to protect your yard from floating dandelion fuzz. After all, it could have come over from “those people” a couple blocks away.
I’m sure my logic would go over like a fart in church.
The problem there is that uncut lawns tend to attract pests.
Like Mike, for instance. 
My landlord has yet to have our yard mowed this spring. The bunny rabbits are getting large and bold under the deck. I don’t mind, because I like bunny rabbits, but I feel a little guilty when I look across the street at the elderly retired gent who mows his yard every day and has his walks edged and flowers laid out with geometric precision, and here we are living over a good facsimile of a Tasmanian jungle. Our tiny little postage stamp of a yard is supposed to be the landlord’s lookout, but I’m on the verge of telling him that if he’ll spring for an el cheapo push reel or something, I’ll take care of the damned thing, since he can’t be arsed to pick up the phone and get his maintenance guy over here.
I like dandelions though. I’ve never understood the hatred for dandelions. Why is that? Did a dandelion slap your (collective “your”, not anyone in particular) momma?
If you’re referring to mosquitos, yes…in the hot summer, it is somewhat more mosquito-y if I don’t keep up with the mowing (which I do). Our property is but a clearing in the forest, so pests are a regular thing. Half our property IS forest. Raccoons, deer, rabbits, mice, possum and the like all live here with us. It’s part of life in a heavily wooded area.
I’m with you for the most part. The worst part about them is the stink eye they generate from the neighbors.
Ahh, tales of suburban life indeed.
I have recently moved from the centre of a smallish UK city, to the outskirts, swapping a crappy flat for a nice semi detached house. The neighbours adjoining are totally deaf and the other neighbours seemed very nice when we went over to introduce ourselves. So, we arranged a house warming party and invited both sets of neighbours.
Deaf neighbours show up early and we get to “chatting” via improvised sign language. Many of our friends at the party were cops. Female cops. Female lesbian cops to be precise (2/3 of the ladies). Deaf neighbour man (dfm) starts making lude gestures. DFM gets increasingly drunk. DFM goes and:
a) sticks his tongue in a ladies ear
b) thrusts repeatedly at another young lady
c) grabs the tits on another lady…
d) asks one lady upstairs (she points out that she doesn’t go for men and laughs it off)
Now, I wasn’t aware of any of this until someone mentioned c). I asked his wife to take him home which she did immediately (she was pretty disgusted with him).
He came round rather sheepish the next morning with a thank you card and a present (book of “useless information”, which is cool). At least the other party goers weren’t offended and in fact took it all rather well. Our house appears to be the place for unusual entertainment all of a sudden…
Incidentally, the other neighbours turned out to be really nice. 
Anybody besides me wish they could get invited to a party at BadBadger’s house?
Several years ago a few neighbors tried to start a Homeowner’s Association, but, being the rebels most of us in the hood are, we pretty much thumbed our noses at 'em. I just do not care what my neighbors do or don’t do) in their own yards. I can’t see whatever it is or isn’t anyways because I spend most of my outside time on my back porch or at the pool, both of which are surrounded with a privacy fence.
Oh wait, there is the one neighborhood grouch who got upset about the kids in the house behind him (which is the house next door to me) hitting balls into his yard. He asked me if I had the same problem. I told him that for me it’s not a problem because I possess the ability to pick up the ball and toss it back into their yard. Yeah, I wouldn’t like it if they broke a window or something but to be real, they’d pretty much have to be aiming for a window on my house to do that. A ball being hit or thrown into my backyard is not a problem.
The kids’ parents have even come over and apologized for it. I told 'em not to worry about it. It’d be great if the biggest problem I had was the neighbor’s kids hitting or throwing a ball into my yard.
Kalhoun one of the things I like best about mom’s and my sister’s houses (they live next door to each other) is all the wildlife from the woods behind. I’d love that. Course they did have to racoon and 'possum proof their trash cans.
Yes, we had to do the same thing. But it has slowed down considerably since we no longer have a dog who eats outside. Dog food is very popular amongst the critters in the forest.
And yes, it is great living in the woods. If only our house was set further back. The traffic can be really loud when you’re trying to sleep in. That’s probably why I’m up at 0:dark-thirty every day.
On the garden forum I frequent, most people who have had to deal with Homeowner’s Associations have nothing good to say about them. I’ve read horror stories of people being totally dictated to when it comes to their front yards. They can’t have certain trees or shrubs. They must have certain trees or shrubs. They can only have a certain kind of fence. They can’t have a fence at all. They must devote x amount of space to lawn. They can’t have vegetable gardens in front. They can’t have the garden ornaments of their choosing. It’s like they don’t even own their own property.
When Mr. Cee bought this home 10 years ago (I didn’t know him then) he made sure that there wasn’t a HA beforehand. There is a city ordinance about lawn height, but it is not too stringent. We’re happy.
This is not about shitty lawnkeepers, this is about our shitty lawn.
Once the snow melted i noticed a substantial amount of dog poop by our hedge near the sidewalk. I had a sneaky suspicion that it was the new neighbor three houses down and her little pug dog.
I was home during lunch one day and saw the dog owner arrive home. She went into her house, immediately came outside with her dog on a leash and raced down the street towards our house. When she got here she stopped so he could do assorted business on our lawn (three times) then . . . SHE GAVE HIM A TREAT!
I was speechless. Now I stand outside or by the window when i know she’s walking her dog. I talked to the neighbors and they were already aware of the problem. If it happns again the dog poop will be in her yard.
Sounds like it’s “Flaming Bag of Dog Poop” time!
When I moved into the townhouse I’m currently renting, I had two run-ins with the guy whose mother lives 2 doors down (note that the guy doesn’t even live there all of the time):
I moved in while there was still snow on the ground, and when spring finally arrived we started having trash trouble: someone was leaving small white kitchen trash bags at the curb (which aren’t allowed, per HOA rules), they were getting torn apart by squirrels and raccoons, and bits of trash were being strewn all over the place. This guy decided that I was the culprit. Never mind the fact that I only put my trash out in big black bags until I was able to get a trash can, and never mind the fact that most of the days when there were problems I hadn’t put any trash out. No, I was the last to move in (2 months after the other people) so I was obviously the cause of the problem. He knocked on my door and was quite rude about it, even after I explained that I hadn’t put any trash out recently. So he was pretty much a dick right from the start.
Then it came time for lawn mowing. I didn’t (and still don’t) mow my little postage-stamp-size lawn every single week, but I keep on top of it and usually have shorter grass than everyone else in my row. There was one period where I’d been out of town for a weekend, and was planning to mow during the week but came home on a Monday to find my lawn had been mowed! I just thought someone had been nice while they were out mowing their lawn, and wished I knew who to thank. But then it happened again a few weeks later, and that time it was a little annoying: I take pride in the appearance of my house, and I might not get to the lawn every week but it never goes unmowed for more than 2 weeks. Mowing my lawn once without telling me is a favor, twice is an insult. Wouldn’t you know, a few days later the same dick knocks on my door, and tells me that he took it upon himself to arrange a side deal with the guys who do the HOA mowing and that they’ll keep mowing my lawn, his, and another neighbor’s for $25/month (each).
That pissed me off. But I calmly declined his offer, and stated that he had no right to arrange for anything having to do with my property without talking to me about it first. I told him there was no way I was going to pay $25/month for something it only takes me 20 minutes to do with a push-mower, and he had the gall to tell me that I hadn’t been mowing my lawn enough – even though my lawn was always mowed before his! I think he could tell that he went too far with that statement, because he quickly backed down and started saying that he was just trying to be nice. And then he asked me to mow my lawn every Tuesday, because that’s when the HOA mowers come and he likes it when all of the lawns are mowed on the same day. :rolleyes: Never mind the fact that no one had made arrangements for the lawns in front of either end unit, so the row wouldn’t ever look “neat” anyway. I told him what he could do with his lawn mowing, and that he needed to stay away from my property.
Luckily, that was the last time I had to deal with him. The few times I’ve seen him since he’s been almost condescendingly nice – I think he realized what a dick he was and feels bad about it. His mother is a piece of work, too: seems like a nice old lady until you start talking to her, and you find out she’s a prejudiced busy-body. I am not going to be sad to move in August.
Every once in a while, I think that as I get older, one day I might want to sell my house and move to a condo. Then I read about stuff like Misnomer posted and I think… :eek: no way!
I don’t understand mowing your own grass when you live in a Condo. I thought homeowners Association Fees covered that automatically. What EVAH.
I agree. It’s stories like Misnomer’s that make me glad I don’t have to answer to the neighbors with regard to how I keep my yard. We tried keeping up with the dandelions once, but when you are on the edge of the forest, all kinds of crap blows into our yard anyway, so we have an even balance between weeds and grass. And we’re not going to invest the money to change that.
When the grass is cut (usually weekly) it looks fine as long as you’re not actually standing in it. Our hedges haven’t ever been trimmed, which I’m sure would horrify anyone who prefers trimmed hedges, but its a natural barrier between us and the road, so wild and unruly they’ll stay.
This might be a terminology thing, but around here condos don’t come with any outside maintenance requirements: a condo is pretty much an apartment that you own, and the condo fees cover the grounds maintenance.
I live in a townhouse, which in the city would be called a rowhouse. There are 5 houses in my row. Townhouses have the same square footage as a small-to-medium single-family home (SFH), with a small front and back yard (end units also have a side yard), and you share walls with your neighbors. It’s much better than living in an apartment, but not quite as good as having an SFH. I’m lucky in that there is no grass in my back yard: it’s mostly patio, and the rest is covered by the giant pine needles from the giant tree out back. So I only have to maintain the tiny lawn out front, the bush in front of the kitchen window, and the small cherry tree on the lawn.
That’s pretty much how it is here. But if the building is owned by someone else, generally they are the ones doing the maintenance. I’m sure there are exceptions.
At any rate, your neighbor has a helluva nerve.
We believe our neighbors are in the Witness Protection Program.
They mow once a year, whether it needs it or not. They have several fruit trees in the yard. The fruit falls to the ground and rots. Another neighbor happened to see the husband coming home late one night and asked if they could have some of the fruit. Absolutely not!
They have two school aged boys who we’ve seen a total of 5 times in the 7 years we’ve lived here.
They have locks on all the gates, and for a while, had a padlock on the front door, locking wife and baby inside during the day.
I guess the baby is in school now too. The wife now drives the kids to school ( I talked to her once) They go the a private school 45 miles away. No one is home from about 5 am until 8pm, when wife and kids come home.
Dear? Is that you?
I think there are reasonable limits to the kind of maintenance one can expect a homeowner to provide: it would be ridiculous for me to expect the homeowner to come over every week to mow the lawn and trim the hedges, or to pay for a contract for work it takes me 30 minutes to do myself. Likewise, it would be silly for me to expect someone else to shovel the ~6-foot sidewalk every time it snows.
With apartments and condos, the grass and sidewalks are considered common to the building and therefore it makes sense for the building management to provide those services; with townhouses and SFHs, those things are most definitely within specific property boundaries and only the homeowner can be held responsible. I’m sure that grounds maintenance varies lease-by-lease, but mowing the lawn of the house that I rent makes perfect sense to me.
Agreed.
picunurse: Wow! :eek: