What do neighbors do that annoys you?

I just got a few new neighbors (at an apartment building) that annoy me by:

Leaving used q-tips all over the floor of the laundry room

Piling their bags of trash and garbage next to the dumpster instead of actually putting them inside the dumpster

Parking a good foot over the center line in a pair of parking spaces (which are generous-sized)

Sweeping leaves and their own litter (candy and gum wrappers, empty coke cans, etc.) off their porch onto the porch below

Jamming stupidly large objects in the trash chute (like broken stools) and just leaving them there to trap garbage from floors above

Going to work before their alarm rings, so it drones on for hours before the super reports to work and can silence it

How about the obvious?

Hanging pictures up after 10 PM. (hammering nails into the wall)
Working on their cars outside and playing mega bass rap on the cars while they work on them. (Like I want to hear that! And now I can’t even get away).
Leaving their clothes in the laundry all day.

Things my neighbors do that annoy me:

  1. Not mow lawn for at least a month
  2. Let dogs run wild thru streets and yards
  3. Endlessly use their leaf blower to sweep leaves OFF THE STREET (not same neighbor as #1)
  4. Have friends pull up in front of house at all hours with thumping bass stereo
  5. Drive diesel trucks that shake the whole block when started
  6. Put old furniture on the curb 2 weeks before the scheduled date that city picks up these things

However, these are minor annoyances…I love my neighborhood as most of my neighbors are wonderful.

They put up one of those above ground pools right between our houses (on their side of the fence, of course). This is right outside my bedroom window. Their kids are ALWAYS in the pool SCREAMING bloody murder. I can’t leave my windows open because of this.

Grumble.

Oh, and the drug dealers down the street: they have butt-loads of people coming in and out of their house, which I don’t care about. The issue is that these people come flying down our little residential street at 50, 60, and 70 MPH. First: there are a lot of little kids that live here and it is only a matter of time before this ends badly. Secondly: I’ve almost had the back end of my car ripped off more times than I can count by your buddy who wants his friggin’ crack.

Double grumble.

Or the people across the street who have way more people in their house than should be legal. And all of their cars are HUGE Ford F-250s with trailers (why trailers? Don’t know). They can’t fit all their cars in their drive way, in front of their house, in front of their next door neighbor’s house, so they have to park in front of ours. Then they got mad after their beater was parked in front of our house for a month and we called the cops (we didn’t even know it was theirs).

Bah.

Grumble ^3

Never going anywhere. Aside from the guy next door who goes to work at 5:00 a.m., nobody has any visible means of support and they never seem to leave. It’s not that they are particularly noisy or anything, it’s just kind of creepy dropping by the apartment at lunchtime to find a bunch of late 20-somethings just hanging around. Where does the money come from?

(I don’t have any suspicions about nefarious activities. They seem to be pretty law-abiding, apart from a bit of pot.)
Other than that, I don’t have many complaints. We’ve lived here for 8 years and one consistent pattern is that any group of roommates that makes a lot of noise or is messier than the normal run of tenants is doomed to break up. Ditto with the girlfriend/boyfriend who moves in with the original roommate pair. Doomed.

Granted we don’t have some of the usual centers of contention. We don’t have parking spaces and there is no laundry room, so it’s hard for someone to find much mischief to get up to.

One thing I wonder about, though. Why do people go outside of their own houses to smoke, when everyone else in the apartment smokes, too?

Besides merely existing?

Leaving their lights on at night.

Riding their jetskis around and around in circles right by our house, despite the fact that the lake is 65 miles wide and 600 miles long. (Fortunately it will soon be too cold for said activity.)

Pulling up or walking on the dune vegetation on my property.

Go to work and leave the poor bassett hound outside all day. In the driving rain. Bassetts have a LOUD howl - bark and since my office is on the front of out house, I get to listen to this poor dog all day long. I guess they don’t hear him - they never seem to do anything about it when he barks when they are home. I feel sorry for him - I’m sure he has food and water (he’s a beautiful healthy looking dog) but why get a dog if you aren’t going to pay any attention to him?

My neighbor lady is extremely annoying because she won’t shut up. I always watch carefully out the window before I leave the house, because God help me if she catches me in the yard. She bolts out the door, and starts babbling before she even gets close enough for me to hear, which, really, doesn’t matter because she never says anything worth listening to, anyway.

You can tell her you’re late for work, or that you’re really in a hurry, and it doesn’t matter. She keeps on yapping. I could tell her my husband had fallen down the stairs and I was going for help and she’d keep on talking.

She knows no one wants to talk to her, and everyone tries to escape her company, so instead of changing her ways, she talks faster to try to get it all out before her audience escapes. What her kids are doing. What she’s planning to do in the yard. What her cat ate last night. How heavy her bags of trash were that she had to carry to the curb because her son has soccer practice, and soon he’s going to be playing against such-and-such and she knows someone who’s on that team who used to date her cousin . . . .Yap yap yap yap yap.

Hubby and I know her ex-husband. He says they divorced not because they couldn’t get along, or that she was a bad person but *because she wouldn’t shut up. *For thirteen years, he says, she never stopped talking. He couldn’t take it any more.

We’ve made polite excuses. We’ve bluntly said we needed to go. Once, I even turned and just walked away from her as she was gabbling. She just walked behind me, increasing the speed of her words to the point where she was barely understandable, trying to get it all out before I shut the door in her face. She wasn’t offended. She must be so used to it that she assumes that’s how everyone behaves.

Have their redneck friends over with ten cars to block the driveway

Play loud music, of which I can only hear the SUPER THMPING BASS through the wall. At 2 AM.

Smoke so much pot I practically get a contact high…it comes out their window and into mine. Even if I have a fan blowing OUT, i can still smell it.

Luckily, between the guy who lives below them and me, our landlord had decided not to renew their lease when the current one expires in October.

These are a few different neighbors:
Never mow their lawn.

Leave their garbage cans in the street for several days after pickup. (Not on the curb - literally in the street.)

Don’t bother to secure their garbage cans in a neighborhood that already has an excessive raccoon/possum population.

Park their 6 vans in rows directly across the narrow street from each other right at the end of the block, so that cars can’t turn onto the block if anyone is already there.

Leave religious tracts stuck in my mail slot or door frame when I’m not home.

Often forgets to close the fence behind them, allowing their dog to roam the neighborhood.

Bought a rooster.

Slam the door. ** We live in an apartment build, you f*ers, every time you slam the door the whole building shakes. STOP IT. Learn how to close the door gently…you’re not children.

Most of my neighbors are awesome. We have neighborhood barbecues and they have really gone out on a limb to help us several times when we really needed it. We all have several acres of land so that really helps. However, we do have a set of trashy neighbors that no one has ever seemed to have spoken to even though they are outside all the time. They are basically northern rednecks. All they do is work on their hotrods and get drunk. The problem is when they combine the two and decide to hold drag racing contests down our quiet street at 3 am. Sometimes they have two or three drag races in a row. I guess they do have some sense though because they always quit in just a few minutes so it is not worth calling the cops.

Leave beer cans and bottles on our lawn and driveway. We’re on a corner, and the folks across the street to the side of our house are always having people over, and those people frequently park on our curb, so odds are those friends are the culprits. The implication, which is that they just finished the beer and tossed the can before climbing into the car and driving away, is appalling.

This is my first house, and I’ve worked hard to have a beautiful lawn. I hate hate HATE it when people just toss cans on it.

Taking up two parking spaces. It’s a city street, folks – if you can’t parallel park, move to the effin’ 'burbs.

Running the mower right over the piles of dogshit instead of scooping it up first. On a hot summer day, the stench was unbelievable.

-Toss things on the sidewalk and on the street

-Blast music at odd hours

-Have their disgusting, snot-nosed, bratty, hellions play in the space between their house and ours

-Smoke so much weed that the country of Columbia can’t keep up with the demand

-Beat drums (?!)

-Scream at each other (domestic disputes)

-Beating their own children (We’ve had to call CPS once)

…And so forth.

Ooooo…grr.

The previous tenants downstairs were orthodox Hindu, and painted our (common) porch step with religious symbols every day. I didn’t really mind this, but they’d use a wet paper towel (to correct mistakes? dunno) and then throw it in the fucking bushes.
Asswipes. This is not your personal garbage can!

Leaving the car alarm on in the driveway alongside my house, and using the remote entry key to open and close the doors, about fifteen times a day. Four chirps to open the door, two to close it. All day. We live in a nice neighborhood, this is un-fucking-necessary. :mad:

  1. Running up the stairs, stomping your feet as hard as possible, the later the harder I swear, and then slamming the door. Yes, our door takes a yank to close, but it doesn’t require a slam, and neither does yours, dammit!!!

  2. A couple of days of the week, if you leave your trash bags near the steps at the front of the building before about 8:30AM, they will come pick it up for you. This is nice. However, this does not mean that you leave a trash bag for three days sitting right between our doors, which are about six inches apart. I just love walking by YOUR STINKING GARBAGE, yep, it’s so much fun. Take it down the stairs, morons! If you can’t handle a flight of stairs, why the hell do you have a second-floor apartment? Of course you are never home so I can ask you to move it…

Neighbours opposite who I have to look at from the kitchen while washing up: Have the messiest front yard full of weeds, have never painted the outside ever, since the house was built. And have random besuited people come knocking on their door, which they never answer so the suits come to me, asking if they live there and if I think they work. (??? Debt collections??? I always say I have no idea.)

Neighbours across our unfenced garden - also have a crappy unmaintained house, they have a nest of sparrows in every (broken) airvent cover to their house. Must be bloody noisy in the house with all the twittering… If you go within about 15 feet of the house, their three enormous dogs (malamute, labrador and shiba) start baying for your blood. The shiba is chained outside and they have made sure the chain doesn’t reach onto our land. By about 3mm. A bit hard gardening when there is a slavering hound four inches from your ear…

But I think we are bad neighbours - this is a very quiet street with no other kids. We come and go all day, I yell at the kids to hurry up, my kids are constantly squalling and scrapping, their friends come and go, and we have loud and long conversations in our garden.