My wife and I just closed the sale on our townhouse, and will be moving out of our condo complex in July (or sooner, depending on possession dates). While we actually kind of liked our complex and we’re not bursting at the seams, our moving schedule has been sped up by our neighbour. While my time here at the SDMB has shown me that she is not, in fact, the world’s shittiest neighbour, she at least belongs at the annual banquet honouring the Worst Neighbour of the Year, perhaps to present an award in the category of Most Annoying or to the guy who runs a combination meth lab/weasel farm.
While she (a 40-something single Polish woman) can be nice enough to talk to, she has never seemed to have grasped the concept of condominium living and sharing space with other people. The problems started early, when she decided to put up a bamboo privacy fence in between our two units (to give you a clear picture of the complex, it’s a series of row townhouses grouped in units of four. We are on the end of one of the rows, and her unit is to our north). Her stated reason - to block the view of traffic. This is an unusual reason to my eyes, as there is a large greenspace with 50 foot tall spruce trees in a row, with about 200 feet to the road which is perpendicular to our units. Our unit is closer to the road than hers, so one would really have to try to notice the traffic.
Still, as I said, not a big deal, except that her “fence” is a bamboo thing (with scorchmarks, which should have been a hint of things to come) that was unsecured and continued to fall over - almost invariably towards us. Eventually she got the bright idea to anchor it down into the ground, stretching a line to an eyehook screw, with the line passing directly in front of our door.
(A brief aside on our communal property - none of the green space is owned by individual owners, but we’re free to put lawn furniture out temporarily in the spaces directly in line with our units, and aren’t allowed to put gardens in on this space, etc.)
So, while this isn’t technically our lawn that she’s claiming, it’s not hers either, and she’s blocking our walkway and presenting an actual tripping hazard. We confront her about this, and she says “I was waiting for you to say something about that.” Really?! If you knew it was a dumb idea, why did you put it there in the first place? Did you think we were just going to ignore that our doorway was blocked?
So - one crisis averted. However, barbeque season has then arisen. Another note about our regulations - BBQing on the common areas is explicitly forbidden, and each unit has a concrete patio where we’re supposed to BBQ. She either is unaware or ignores this and uses her Weber grill out on the common lawn. Badly. She decides that the best fuel for making hamburgers is newspaper, which, if anyone has tried this, results in a column of grey smoke and a shower of glowing embers that bathes the rest of the complex. Luckily she avoids setting her, our or anyone else’s units on fire. The property manager is notified, and we hope the problem is solved and the message gets through.
The problem is not solved and the message has not gotten through. We return from vacation later that summer to find that she has decided to start a fire pit in the lawn, apparently uncontained. Fueled by painted lawn furniture. There’s literally the remains of a chair in the ashes. I do well to just contact the property manager again and not yell in her face at her attempts to burn down the complex. This is a woman who should not be allowed to have fire beyond the level of a birthday candle. Since then, we’ve never felt that we were close to having to call the fire department, but every so often in the summer we end up bathed in smoke from her grill. If you can’t make some burgers without making your neighbourhood smell like a fireplace, you’re doing it wrong.
To avoid turning this into a novel, I’ll go to bullet points to further elaborate on her offenses, which range from the baffling to the infuriating:
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made furniture out of spruce bows, tree stumps and cedar shanks that she placed on the burned out spot in the lawn that she made (and blamed the HOA association for not fixing fast enough), topping it off with a glass table top. The thing looked like she was hosting a Hobbit’s tea party.
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adopted her daughter’s cats, cut a hole in her house for them to come and go (not installing a proper cat door, oh no), with the inevitable result of them running away. She then went away to Europe for the winter, during which time one of them came back but had since developed feline pneumonia, resulting in the humane society coming out to collect and put it down. Thankfully, my cats are 100% indoors animals and never came in contact.
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Constantly smokes pot (not such a big deal by itself) and sunbathes topless in the common areas (a bigger deal). Occasionally you will spot some of the kids in the complex doing laps around the parking lot with a particular eye on her unit.
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Has a variety of gentlemen callers arriving at odd hours, and occasionally hosting a dinner on the patio, where I’ve personally spotted her riding one. She then gets indignant about this invasion of her privacy (!), resulting in her putting up a sheet that she ties to her awning and her car. This sheet eventually catches fire from a candle.
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Plugs in the block heater on her vehicle at the barest hint of cold weather, well beyond any potential benefit of helping her car start. I’ve seen her vehicle plugged on a day as warm as +15 deg C. She may be under the impression she has an electric car.
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Painted her concrete patio (expressly forbidden by the HOA) with grey indoor paint and no primer. This, predictably, has begun to peel in a matter of months and already looks awful. Further on that front, she noticed my wife spray painting some lanterns for decoration. She picks up on that idea, but not the detail of laying them on a plastic sheet so as to collect the paint. Her idea - spray paint some decorative items, and some eating utensils (!) gold, on the asphalt. There will be a long, golden reminder of that decision in this complex.
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Dug up an area in front of the concrete patio and the parking lot to put in a garden box, made of what seems to be the cheapest particle board possible. This space actually serves a purpose, that of giving our vehicles a place to overhang so we don’t run into the patios. This box, inevitably, gets run into and looks even shittier as a result.
I’m probably even forgetting a few things (there’ve been the other typical annoying things, like loud music, etc.). What finally made us decide to move is finding out that she had removed a wall to turn her unit into a sort of loft, which pretty much makes it unsellable in our eyes. She’s never going to leave, so we need to. Maybe I should thank her, since we’re going to be getting our house sooner than we expected. But in just a few months, we’re going to be free, free I tells ya!