…and the peasants did rejoice…
My neighbors have beautiful yards with well-maintained gardens, lucious lawns and lots of useful outdoor powertools.
It drives me crazy 
sorry, that’s all i got
Our lovely neighbor decided to leave his hose full of water all winter. The pipe broke sometime during winter, and when he started using it recently it flooded our dining room and his. However, we thought at the time that it was rain water getting in through the back sliding door. It was the rainiest week in recent memory, and that’s when he decided to start using his hose. Genius.
At least we’ll get all new carpeting out of it.
I find it VERY hard to believe that this didn’t violate some kind of ordnance.
Everyone makes some noise sometimes, and you just have to live with it. But no one is entitled to make unlimited noise. You can’t reasonably complain about a neighbor mowing his lawn at three in the afternoon. However, you CAN reasonably complain about a neighbor who mows his lawn at three in the morning.
Did you discuss this situation with an attorney?
A friend of my mom’s had her cat poisoned by a neighbor who objected to the cat crossing his lawn. Possibly she could have done something to him on a cruelty to animals charge, but there wasn’t enough evidence to stand up in court. And she got tired of the shit-eating grin he would get on his face whenever he talked about “whatever happened to your poor, poor kitty (snicker)?”
The neighbor went on vacation. My mom’s friend got a very large amount of salt, and in the middle of the night she sowed the salt on her neighbor’s lawn. When the neighbor got back from vacation, he found the word “cat” spelled out in very large letters on his front lawn. It took him forever to get rid of it.
Sierra Indigo, I have a similar situation. There’s a guy downstairs who, I suspect, is mentally ill and an alcoholic. He figures there’s no way to bother a deaf person living upstairs, so he plays music loud enough to shake my bed at midnight, time to time. I wouldn’t mind if he didn’t constantly compare me to bombs going off, when I don’t play any music, all my TVs are on mute, and hell, I even trained myself to get up without an alarm clock because of his complaints.
Whenever he’s in a bad mood, he takes a broom and he whacks where my feet are, no matter where I am (carpeted floor or bare floor). If he’s really in a foul mood, he throws things at the ceiling (sometimes quite violently, to the point where I wonder if he’s not destroying his ceiling). I have long adopted the Ninja Step to accomodate him, but he’s like the princess and the pea.
Others thought I was exaggerating, till they got the broom treatment for the great sin of getting up and going to the bathroom. Three different people at last count.
I gathered some witnesses, documentation, and presented my case to the management company. They weren’t inexperienced with him; he literally shouted our lawnscaper into quitting. They took the liberty of contacting the last owner and she colloborated my story. They laid the smack down on him, basically told him to suck it up because there was nothing in the noise ordinances I was violating, and that I might have to go to the police if he continued his behavior, and it’s been peace since.
We had a neighbor that we only spoke to once in a while, and she seemed like a lovely woman. We complimented her on her grandkids, made comments about the weather, whatever. Everything was copacetic. (Our one nitpick, which we never spoke to her about, was that her yard always looked like a garbage dump. There was old furniture, play equipment, flowerpots, etc. that were permanent fixtures on her property. Even when the hurricanes were imminent and everyone else in the neighborhood was out tying down any potential flying missiles, all her shit stayed right where it was, though she had grown sons that could have taken care of it.)
Anyway, as I said, it seemed like a fine neighborly relationship until the day she saw my mom out in the yard and started right in screaming at her about how our cats sat on her car and scratched it with their claws, and next time she saw one, she’d kill it. She had never mentioned any problem to us before, but in her mind, step one in solving it was: Scream and threaten. :rolleyes:
Fortunately, nothing ever came of it; we did our best to keep the cats away from her and moved soon afterward. She sounds like an angel in comparison to the other neighbors in this thread!
My mom’s neighbor is terrible. She lives about a mile south of her on a country road (that’s gravel for you city folks 
). This woman hasn’t worked anything other than the system for years. She drives to a town about 20 miles away at least once a day, driving around 20 mph. Her husband works off and on, but has mental problems and only comes back when his latest Internet girlfriend dumps him and he has nowhere else to live. They have three children, a girl who’s in about fourth grade, and twins who are in about second or third grade. When I was still living at home, I was driving past their place one day and noticed the twins, who were toddlers at the time, playing right by the road wearing nothing but diapers. A few days later, my boyfriend saw the same thing. Every once in a while, my mom gets a phone call from the woman in the middle of the night, when her husband comes home drunk and decides to tear up the house. One night he crashed his van, and managed to crawl into the house and nearly bleed to death in their kitchen. He ended up being airlifted out to the hospital. Their yard is always full of junk, with at least two junked out cars.
We have some great neighbors, but the ones who live behind us across the alley drive us nuts sometimes. The mother and daughter (around 10-11 years old) are constantly screaming at each other. If they’re going somewhere it never fails that one of them is sitting in the car waiting for 15 minutes, honking the car horn the entire time. The daughter is really weird. She has a couple of cats, and recently those cats have been in our yard and our next door neighbor’s yard a lot. One day the girl was trying to catch the cats by our neighbor’s garage. I saw the grey one on the side by our house, and asked the girl if she was looking for the grey one, because it was on this side. She looked at me as if I was an alien from another planet. Another time, I walked outside to see the girl standing behing my car, again trying to catch one of the cats. The minute I walked outside, she ducked down behind my car. I haven’t seen the cats for a week or so, so I think someone may have finally turned them in. They were always in anyone else’s yard but theirs.
There’s the fat-ass guy across the street who sits in his driveway revving his straight-pipe Harley for 10 minutes every morning at 6. His equally fat-ass wife goes to work later so she revs hers at 8. I hope they are both taken by Japanese whale poachers.
The guy who sits on his porch swing and masturbates his dog hasn’t been out for a while, but then again the weather has been bad.
My grandma owns and rents out the house next to her. Three years ago, she rented to a single mother with two small daughters.
In the entire time the woman lived there, she never once paid her own rent. She conned a local church into paying her deposit and first month’s rent, and then spent the rest of the time badgering her father, friends and boyfriends to give her the money. (She paid my grandma in spurts-- whenever she’d get the money, she’d give it to her, twenty or fifty at a time.)
She wasn’t poor, mind you. She was a stripper, and always had enough money to shop, but the rent was last on her priorities list. Her children were just a bit above that. They were always coming over to grandma’s house to be fed, and she watched them when the mother was out running around. She’d drop the kids off “for an hour” and dissapear for days.
The house is out in a rural area, and it’s near a favorite dumping ground for unwanted cats. The woman couldn’t remember to feed her own kids, but she always made sure huge dishes of food were put out for the stray cats. Grandma pleaded with her to stop this, because it was pulling in all sorts of wildlife. The woman agreed she’d stop, but instead started hiding the food bowls under her porch and in the crawlspace. Raccoons became a plague. Grandma actually had to have the foundation repaired because so many groundhogs had dug in to get the food.
She used the yard as her trashcan. Whenever she and her boyfriend would sit on the porch drinking beer, they’d just chuck the can into the yard. Grandma begged, cajoled and finally ordered her to clean them up, but the woman would send the kids out to do it, and then use that as an excuse if it wasn’t all picked up.
From what the kids said, they had seen their mother have sex with her boyfriends. One of them once asked grandma if she’d like to see a dance her mommy had taught her, and when grandma said sure, the child began writhing so seductively that my grandma (blushing) ordered her to stop.
The shared driveway was constantly clogged with cars. Now, it’s a huge driveway, and could easily accomodate at least five cars parked out there, but there were usually more than that, even when no one was home next door. She never did explain what those cars were doing there, and it was more than a week after she moved out before they started being moved by various people.
She never mowed the lawn. My grandma had to do it whenever she finally got fed up with the knee-high jungle. The woman always had a hundred excuses.
This all came with built-in entertainment, of course. Once, the wife of one of the woman’s boyfriends came to the house, beating on the door and screaming for her husband to come out of there. She railed at him, enumerating his many, many faults at the top of her lungs while the woman and the errant husband laughed at her from behind the windows. (All of this, of course, witnessed by the children.)
When she decided to move out (to marry one of her boyfriends once he managed to get a divorce) she offered to give one of the girls to my grandmother. Grandma, pitying the children, accepted, and took custody of the eldest. (The mother said she wanted to keep “one of them” so let my grandma pick.) She kept the child for almost two years until the girl went to visit her mother and the mother refused to let her come back.
This is a funny thread. I’m not sure what portion of these posts come from neighborhoods that are more/less affluent than others, but I guess it doesn’t make a difference where you go. I live in a pretty wealthy neighborhood, so consequently we have a bunch of kids raised on a silver spoon whose behavior goes unsupervised and undisciplined. In my neighborhood, it’s mostly violation of the peace, so maybe I have nothing to complain about.
I’m not an old man (almost 26), and I know kids will be kids, but I never hit footballs with a baseball bat in my front yard when I was a kid, but this was indeed something I witnessed from the kid who lives directly across the street. As you may have guessed, footballs have a rather unpredictable trajectory when hit with a baseball bat … so imagine how thrilled I was about that since my car is parked directly across the street. I walked outside when one of the footballs careened into our yard and just stared at him as he came to get it. He stopped doing it immediately. But then, he’s also been known to crack baseballs up and down the street as well, with cars and houses as the backdrop of his makeshift practice stadium. And then there’s the kid next door has no qualms about shooting hoops with his dad’s brand new BMW in the driveway, and I’ve seen the basketball bonk the roof and doors of the new car enough times to realize he probably has no reservations about it bonking mine, which sits less than twenty feet away. I’ve told these kids to knock their shit off or go to the damned park (which is a block away) because their parents obviously see nothing wrong with making our neighborhood into their own private gymnasium. I do, in fact, have two small dents in places on my car which are most certainly not the result of door dings or minor bumper scrapes … and I cannot do anything about it despite the fact that I’m 99% certain I know what caused them.
I’m no hypocrite. I was a little punk ass kid when I was that young too. In fact, I was probably worse. But you see, I went to the park to goof off and make noise or take a few swings at a [insert ball of choice here]. I didn’t do it in the damn street right in front of my neighbors. Maybe there has been a shift in disciplining kids and teaching them to be courteous enough respect other people’s peace and property, and maybe there hasn’t, but I guess I can’t expect parents to do anything about it either way because kids these days just need to be free to “express themselves”.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Those same neighbors with the BMW also have a cute little Schnauzer that suffers from the bark-nonstop-at-everything-and-nothing problem, which they did little to prevent. We contacted the police in our town about that, and it turns out we got them on a technicality because while they aren’t so hard on dog barking, they do come down pretty hard on folks with unlicensed pets, which this dog turned out to be. Seems like the dog quieted down significantly after we learned about that. There’s also some kid who lives on a nearby street who enjoys revving the engine of what looks like a 70’s-era Buick Riviera, which has some variety of enormous GM big-block that can nearly rupture the fabric of space-time. Don’t get me wrong, I love classic cars and the sound they make, but there’s a time and place for it, and a quiet neighborhood isn’t among them. Our police can’t do anything about that one either, go figure …
I used to live in an apartment right above the Loud family. The complex was a bunch of two-story buildings with little front porches and four apartments on each story. I was working from home during the Loud’s time there, and so got to hear them round the clock.
Mr. Loud left for work every morning around 5. He usually had a screaming fight with Mrs. Loud before he left, and would slam the door as punctuation. Mrs. Loud, who stayed home, would start in on him when he came home, which was often late at night (11-ish).
The Loud children, of whom there seemed to be about five (in a one-bedroom 550 sq ft apartment, which I’m pretty sure was a violation of the lease), and at least three of whom were too young for school, spent all day running in and out of the house, slamming the door (thus shaking my entire apt) and screaming. And I don’t mean the joyful voices of children at play. I mean they had screaming contests for fun. For hours. Every day. Mrs. Loud had seemingly forbidden them from going out of her sight, so the kids were never out of earshot from me, either.
The Loud television went on around 4:00 a.m. (presumably to get Mr. Loud off to work) and didn’t go off until after midnight every day. Except of course for Sundays, when the Loud stereo would go on around 8 a.m. and stay on the whole day. These were invariably turned up so high that I could actually follow their television programs or make out the lyrics of the music THROUGH MY FLOOR.
I went downstairs to speak to Mrs. Loud. I politely informed her of the problem, but only got back a vague smile and “No hablo” (they’re a Mexican family). So gamely, in my broken Spanish, I explained again. Vague smile and no improvement in the situation.
So I go to management. They had a girl on staff who speaks Spanish and I asked her to explain the problem. Later that day I can hear her and Mrs. Loud on the porch below me chatting in Spanish and laughing and having a gay ol’ time. Great! Problem solved, right?
Nope. Nothing. I go back to management and this time I hear “there’s nothing we can do.” Turns out the Louds are friends of management and nothing’s going to be done. I’m at the peak of my frustration when, one evening when coming in from my car to my apartment, I see Mrs. Loud standing at her front door with the Avon lady. Talking animatedly. Conducting business. In fluent English.
Very calmly I went upstairs and called the police about a noise violation. I asked them to bring a Spanish-speaking officer to avoid the “no hablo” problem. Police came and chatted with Mrs. Loud for a long time. A loooong time.
As soon as the cops left, Mr. Loud RAN out to his car, jumped in and drove off like the devil hisself was chasing him. Turns out the Louds had (inadvertently, I’m sure) neglected to follow proper immigration procedure upon arriving in this country and Mr. Loud was desperate to correct this oversight with the appropriate authorities.
Either that, or he was off looking for a louder home for his family, since they were gone by the end of the week. Good riddance, I say. A nice quiet college girl who collected glass figurines moved in after them and I was thrilled.
I live in the Historic District, which is relatively affluent, but like many historic districts, it is right next to a poorer area.
The little bastard who lives next door gave us grief when we first moved in. My dog is terrified of anything that sounds like a gunshot, and the little son-of-a-bitch thought it was hysterical to throw firecrackers over our fence to watch her shake and moan in terror.
I didn’t know what to do about it, because I never caught him doing it. By the time I got outside, he had run back into his house. (Likely to watch snickering through the curtains.) I had fears that if I talked to his mother, he and his little friends would retaliate in even nastier ways.
That situation resloved itself. Hubby works with a guy who knows the kid’s dad. (The parents are divorced.) We never told him about the problems we were having. The co-worker has a weird sense of humor, and thought it would be fun to mess with the kid’s head. “I hear you’ve been messing with your new neighbors,” he said. “If I hear any more about it, I’m going to have a talk with your dad.”
He said he thought the kid’s reaction was odd when he said that-- the kid went a little pale and looked as guilty as hell. The dad is a very strict disciplinarian, though the mom is a flake. The co-worker asked us about it, why the kid had looked so scared, and had a good laugh when we told him what the little bastard had been doing.
Never had another problem with him.
That’s not the word I would have spelled.
I had some pretty bad neighbors at our townhouse. Two weeks after we moved in, they left a nastygram on our door complaining about our weird hair and clothes. They then reported us to the HOA for letting our dog run around the neighborhood (he never had). Then they called the towing company our HOA uses, claimed to be from the management company, and had our van towed out of OUR ASSIGNED SPOT. We had to pay $70 and drive a half an hour to get it back. We talked to the management company about it and they decided at the next HOA meeting to change towing companies, and that the new towing company would have a password that they needed to get before they would come tow somebody. That night the neighbors did it again (obviously trying to get it in one last time before the change was made!) and we woke up to find our van gone. We called the management company and told them, and they paid to have the van towed back to our house. The nieghbors eventually got divorced and moved out, to our great delight.
The neighbors on the other side were almost as bad. When we first moved in, our landscaping was in violation of the HOA covenants–the bushy tree things to either side of the front door were really overgrown and largely blocked the steps leading to our front door. The previous owner, a single mom, had developed multiple sclerosis (I think) and was in a great pain and couldn’t keep up with the landscaping. As the new owners, we weren’t fined for it or anything, but we did have to get it into compliance. The tree-bush things were two stories high and we didn’t have any way of trimming them ourselves, so we shopped around for estimates, and the best price we found was something like $700! They were ugly to begin with, plus they were so overgrown that if they were pruned back to the right size, you’d pretty much be cutting off all the greenery and be left with brown. We decided we’d rather remove them and replace them with smaller, nicer bushes. The problem is that you have to submit any landscaping changes to the management company in writing, and wait for approval. This takes at least 30 days. During that time, our neighbors continually complained to us about the trees. One day, I came out and found the neighbor hacking away at the one on the side closest to his townhouse. The branches overhung onto his property line (though not blocking a door or anything) so he felt justified in trimming them back. He basically hacked out a huge chunk of the tree, which looked horrible and would probably have killed the tree, had we left it. I didn’t make a huge deal out of it, since we were going to cut them down anyway, but had we kept them it would have seriously messed it up.
Those neighbors also came to the door once with a bill for $1500 for replacing the drywall in their bedroom. They claimed that our gutters were clogged (they weren’t–they’d been cleaned) and that this had caused runoff into their house and damaged their walls. The problem was that our gutters weren’t clogged, and their roof was higher than ours, so ours couldn’t possibly runoff into theirs. Also, no water had come into OUR house. Plus, the damage happened during the winter, when snow melt was the only water on the roof, and which wouldn’t be affected by gutters anyway. I refused to pay it and he said I’d hear from his lawyer. I said okie dokie, I’ll be waiting. Never heard from their lawyer. I assume he realized he had no claim.
Ah, I’ve been meaning to post about the Hell House across the street. My block is all duplexes, and was built in the 1920s, so everything is miniscule. This being Silicon Valley, the rents are outrageous and people try to cram 4 - 5 people into these tiny 1 - 2 bedroom duplexes. Overall, though, many of the units have the owners living onsite and they rent out the other unit. We have a quaint little neighborhood with tiny yards and well-maintained houses and an active neighborhood association. And then, there’s the Hell House.
My duplex was planned by a moron. It’s on the corner, and my bedroom is on the street. The window is exactly 1 foot from the sidewalk. Directly across the street from my bedroom window are the entrances to Hell House. There have been many, many inhabitants and owners of Hell House over the past 7 years. All of them started out seemingly normal. And then, the possession takes hold. It starts out with leaving the front door open. And turning the TV up. And then the stereo. That’s ok, it’s not that loud, I can live with it. And then they start coming home later and later, with much car door slamming and yelling, but they go in the house. Slowly, over time, they start hanging out in the yard more and more, drinking beer out of bottles, which they take great pleasure in shattering in middle of the street. Their friends come over to party with them. Then the fights start. At first, it’s yelling in the afternoon, then the evening and finally escalating to screaming arguments outside my bedroom window at 2 in the morning. Punches are thrown, weapons are brandished and occasionally used. The cars that were decent when they moved in get trashed, the people go from regular bathing and wearing clean clothes to looking like they’ve homeless for a while. The cops show up on a regular basis, demanding to know what’s wrong now. Arrests are made and finally, they are either evicted or lose their mortgage. This has happened over and over and over again in the past 7 years. Oh, and once, one of America’s Most Wanted was living there. Woo hoo! What excitement! It’s the house. It must be the house. The rest of the neighborhood is normal. WTF is up with that house, though? And why does it have to be right across the street from my bedroom window! :mad:
This thread is like watching Cops. Very depressing what people have to put up with. I weep for humanity.
This sort of thing is exactly why I plan to get 5-10 acres with my next house. Right now I’ve got a small lot and 2 close neighbours that are just fine, but eventually one will move I’m sure.
Love the Google ads too. Soundproof Walls Ceilings. Privacy Trees. Sound Blocking Materials.
And yet…even though your tales are scary indeed, I now want to go hang out at your house. I didn’t know people like this existed in real life! :eek:
When I was dating my husband, he rented a little house with a friend in a little complex of small houses owned by a guy pretty much known as a local slumlord. One of his neighbors was a crazy old cat lady. On more than one occassion the police came and took her away to the hospital until she started taking her medication again. Anyway, she used to leave bags of food and clothing on my husband’s porch, with notes saying they were “for Erik in the pool”. Erik (I think that’s his name… it was a long time ago, but the name doesn’t matter) was a guy who lived in the house before. The woman was convinced that he had not moved out, but rather was being held prisoner in an empty swimming pool…located in the basement. Mind you, these houses didn’t have basements, nor do most houses in Tucson, especially not really old ones like these. She even sent the cops over once or twice about it.
Pardon me for the hijack, but there’s no way I’ll start a GQ on this, so… this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of someone masturbating his/her dog. Is there a particular reason why people do this (that doesn’t involve getting weird sexual jollies out of it)?
I’m just guessing but maybe the dog has a humping problem. Personally I’d rather let my dog hump everything in sight than give him a handjob.