Post your neighbour stories here

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ll start.

The Missus and I are hanging out on the deck, when a guy comes around the side of the house to introduce himself. He said he was the drummer for Creed. After he left, I did some googling. His narrative checked out, but he looked older than 44, I’m not sure he sounded like the videos I watched (Mrs. L.A. thought he did – also, the vids were from 2009-2011), and Mrs. L.A. said his tattoos didn’t match (I didn’t think to memorise them). So we either have Creed’s drummer living near us, or we don’t.

2

Here’s one told to us by this same new neighbour.

There was this old Canadian guy (John) who lived a couple of doors up the street. Nice guy when we’d see each other (the Canadians tend to have holiday homes here), but his speech patterns reminded me of Floyd the Barber. Well, he died a year or two ago. I heard from the (Canadian, Summer) neighbour between us that he’d had millions of dollars. (I should have gotten to know him better!) So Creed Guy says John had buried half a million dollars on his property, and left cryptic clues on his death bed. We were told half of the cash had been found, but there’s another 250 kilobucks buried somewhere.

No, we’re not going to look for it.

ETA: Creed Guy told us the relationship he had with John’s family, but he was talking so fast I don’t remember it.

.

3

One of our neighbors mows his 30 X 30 patch of lawn for hours at a time. In the dark, only after sunset. I’m afraid of him.

4

If I were the drummer, or anyone, from Creed, the last thing I would do is visit all my neighbors and tell them. But that’s just me. :smiley:

ETA: And I definitely wouldn’t lie to my neighbors about being in Creed, either. That’s just… sad.
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5

Yep, my neighbours spend an inordinate amount of time mowing their lawns. And frequently, too. With Summer, there’s the growl of lawnmowers basically every day.

6

IMO, Tom Waits has the best neighbor story (YouTube link).

7

My new neighbor drives his little tractor around and around, leveling and scraping, from the time he gets home from work around 4 to well into the dark. Every fucking day.

He sets up his fancy canopy gazebo with picnic table and chairs and stuff.

Then, on cue, a wind storm comes up. Pretty constant around here. I say to my wife, “How long do you think that shit will last? Might not make it through the day, actually”.

Wind hits, picks up all the loose pulverized dust from the constant dragging, kicks up an absolute Haboob, tears down the gazebo and sends the rest of his shit into the next county. All within 5 minutes of me opening my big mouth.

So, yeah. I’m just jealous of the tractor. :wink:

8

Same house, previous owner (it’s a revolving door of horror):

Old guy, basically a hermit. Never left the house and smoked about 4 packs a day.

He had a broken pipe in his back yard that bled out about 65,000 gallons before I finally noticed something wasn’t quite right here, and had to go tell him.

A few years back, I see an ambulance at his place on Christmas Eve Morning. He’s getting stretchered out.

And that was it for him!

9

Ask him for Scott Stapp stories. Stapp was the singer, was raised in a fundamentalist household, which informed Creed’s sappier than thou song lyrics. But I think he is also bipolar (??) and had substance abuse issues, so his ups and downs have been very extreme. I am sure the drummer would have stories.

I don’t have great stories. I was living in an apartment on Nob Hill in SF. Doing laundry in the basement, one of my fellow tenants and I were talking. I mentioned I had just moved in, and he goes “in the murdered girl’s place?” After clarifying which unit he was referring to, the answer was No, but still. Great intro.

10

TLDR, dude from next door’s stealing my gas. Or is he?

Last place I lived was wonderful, with the exception of the dad of the family next door. The kids and mom were great folks but he rode a moped every day because his NCDL had been revoked numerous times. Guess how he lost his license the last time… that’s right, racing some other dude down the metropolitan interstate while drunk. Thank god he never killed anyone. Anyway, I digress.

I started to notice that the gas volume in my dodge van was often less than I remembered when I last parked it. I only drive it once a week or so, and I’d get in there and think, “I thought I had more gas. Hmmm.” After doing this a few times I got a locking gas cap and the prob was solved. Of course I thought that dad next door was doing it but I had no proof and I’m not about to confront a crazy drunk. Especially one I live next to.

So one day the next door kids and theirs and my dogs are playing in my front yard. Their dog likes chasing balls and my dog likes chasing dogs… worked out well. One time the ball rolled over toward my van and stopped against the rear tire. The little boy ran over to grab and re-throw it saying, “My daddy plays hide-and-seek over here.” I didn’t process that phrase immediately but as my gaze rose from the ball on the ground I noticed the gas cap on the van.

11

My neighborhood, more my end of the island since it is so spread out, has quite a few vacation homes that sit unoccupied much of the year. A few of those are well known celebrities who really just want their quiet time away.

So on the rare occasion I notice one of the homes occupied I’ll glance to see who it might be. And I’ve managed to see, as they came and went from their respective homes, my namesake as well as a prominent owner of a major sports team who both have homes here. And there is one singer who has been seen around but I’m not sure if she owns a place or just rented a vacation home.

12

My neighbors seem to have either an illegal day-care center or they just act as repository for the kids of all their relatives, no matter how distant.

Every year they go to Costco or Walmart and buy a kiddie pool and set it up in the backyard. Every year kids play in it for a day or two, and then it’s allowed to turn green and slimy and become an ideal mosquito habitat. And has West Nile Virus been detected in the area? Why, yes, it has.

One year an ex-husband of one of the family members went all out and bought a more elaborate three-foot-high bigger pool for his kids that still lived there, even though it barely fit in the tiny backyard. Yup, it was swum in for a couple of days, then abandoned, and then it became a green cesspool. We had just started to plan on calling the HOA about it when it burst and flooded their backyard with algae and slime.

13

The cat lady who would shave her cats in the summer so they wouldn’t be too hot.

And put home-made capes on them in the winter so they wouldn’t be cold.

14

Yonks ago, I was living in an apartment with a couple of friends of mine. On the floor below, there lived someone with the same name as a regionally-sometimes-nationally semi-famous football (what you call soccer) player. Wait, was that confusing? Sports person. OK.

Or, rather, it might actually have been this sports person. We didn’t know for sure. We never saw this person, to confirm it or disprove it either way. We just noticed the name, on the doorbell and the mailbox. And the sports person wasn’t living-in-a-mansion level rich or famous, or anything like that. It’s not entirely impossible that he could have been living in an apartment in our building. He was a striker in the Norwegian top soccer division, which sometimes is the sort of person you might run into at the 7-11. I ran into one at the video store once.

(ETA: Come to think of it, I actually, confirmed, lived in the same building as another one for a little while, in my tiny original home town. I would run into him when he was walking the dog. So, yeah, totally possible. I’d forgotten about that. Anyway.)

We also didn’t actually want to find out, for reasons that will become clear. So we went out of our way *not *to find out.

Anyway. Most likely, it was a totally different dude. But every week, we checked the sports results, to see if it this striker had scored any goals that weekend. If he had, one of my housemates (who, BTW, was a tad eccentric) would purchase some apples, corresponding to the number of goals scored by this dude. Soccer isn’t a high-scoring game. The number was usually zero, sometimes one or two. Then, he would place these apples in a bag, which he would proceed to hang on the door knob of this downstairs neighbor’s door.

So, for a while there, some guy was finding apples on his door. And that’s the story.

15

I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but when I was living in Japan before I got remarried, I lived in an apartment building with paper-thin walls. One night sometime after midnight, the neighbor started vacuuming right next to where I was sleeping. After it didn’t stop I got pissed and pounded on the wall, to no effect. It took going out into the hall and pounding on his door.

It seems that he had his girlfriend coming over and we needed to vacuum his bed.:rolleyes:

Look if you have other women over and don’t want to your girlfriend to find hair which doesn’t belong to her, just change the damn sheets.

16

There was also the guy with the incredibly posh name. He lived right next door to me, in the next apartment over. (Not the soccer player building, not my current building, totally different building.) Double-barrelled, super fancy name. Extremely nice guy. I noticed that he had numerous girls over. I didn’t think much of it. Good for him.

Anyway, I didn’t live next to him for that long. A few months, and then he moved. At which point, for whatever reason, I decided to google his name. It was an interesting-sounding name. I don’t know why I hadn’t done it before, but I just hadn’t thought of it.

Turns out he was better known under a different name. A pseudonym. He was a well-known pornographer.

17

The house next door didn’t have trees in it’s front yard. I purchased my home and enjoyed several leaf free winters.

House sells. New neighbor moves in and plants two Tulip Poplars in his treeless front yard. They are fast growing trees. They were 14 ft tall within a decade. They’re twenty foot monsters now.

Starting in October, my driveway and yard get covered in leaves. My house gutters were getting clogged and I had special ones installed with leaf guard shields.

The neighbors passed away and I’m out there raking up their legacy several times a month.

18

I have a different time table for lawn care (specifically leaf gathering), he’s on it everyday (retiree) while I tend to just work on it on weekend. We have my yard, then about 2 feet of his property then his driveway.

One year he put up a black snow fence thingy so my leaves wouldn’t be blown into his yard.

Bite me you old busybody.

19

I would assume that determining if he is actually the drummer from Creed would be easily provable by anybody with access to the internet.

Maybe he’s the drummer from Agreed.

I have no neighbour stories. Aside from the occasional suspected screams from drug-induced domestic aggression that I do not involve myself in, my neighbours are unremarkable.

20

My idiot neighbour is a right one. We have taken him to court for putting up structures against our property without first getting the necessary planning permission and he’s argued on more than one occasion that said structure (one was a carport and one was a double garage which had originally been a storage shed) had been there when we moved into the property. Hmm…like he thought we wouldn’t notice?

Aside from that, his general level of idiocy is laughable. Yesterday it was heaving down, the kind of rain that causes flash floods and comes down hard enough to bounce several inches of the ground. He is outside at 6am with a pressure washer. Washing his cars.