Past or present. Stories, rumors, experiences, relationships… whatever you want to talk about.
Tell us about them.
Oooh - I got a doozy! My neighbor (“Crazy Lady”) routinely screams obscenities at our house. “Fuck you”, etc.
During the Iowa Blizzard in Dec 2009, she got stuck in her driveway, and rather than leave it, cause its already in the freaking driveway, she’s trying to get it out. I am inside my house, windows are closed, and I hear clear as a bell “I’m gonna fucking kill you fuckers!”. (I suppose technically its not a quote cause I can’t remember if she called us fuckers or bastards, but the rest of it is spot on.)
We ignore (again).
After the blizzard, several days later, no one has plowed her driveway. Husband (apparently trying to go for sainthood) calls her up and offers to plow her driveway. Emphasizing that he just wants us to have a nice neighborly relationship.
She turns it into a rant about how the kids up at the high school took the good tires off her truck and replaced them with lousy tires, and that’s why she got stuck. Doesn’t have anything to do with the snow drifting and her trying to drive through snow that’s higher than her axle.
Further ranting has indicated that she actually thinks neighbor from 3 houses down has been regularly going over to her house and “messing around” with her property/stuff. I know this guy and he’s really nice - we got along with him quite well.
We used to think she was just wacky. Now we are pretty sure that she actually has an undiagnosed mental illness. I sure wish she would move so someone else could enjoy her rants.
When we were trying to sell our house, we had lots of viewings but no offers. We knew there were a few things that needed work (replace wallpaper, etc.) but we had adjusted the price accordingly. And it was a cute little house. So we were confused.
Turns out, the next door neighbor was coming over and telling every viewer that we had massive amounts of flooding in the basement, we were about to go in foreclosure, and we had had gas leaks.
Evidently, he wanted to buy the place for himself and was trying to scare off the competition.
We had to send him a cease and desist letter and eventually sold the house. We actually contacted Judge Judy at one point and they were very eager to have us on - but then I decided that I really didn’t want THAT to be my 15 minutes of fame . . .
I think our current neighbour deserves a nomination in the category of “Worst”.
She runs an unlicensed kenneling operation out of her house. I have no clue how many of the dogs are hers vs. how many are boarding, but she usually has a dozen dogs on her property at any given time (which is way more than local by-laws allow… the city has a limit of two dogs per household in residential neighbourhoods). In the summer, our backyard barbecues are accompanied by the sweet, soothing sounds of barking dogs and shouted obscenities from our lovely neighbour. I won’t even get into the smell that occasionally wafts over the fence. Ugh.
Needless to say, animal control visits on a fairly regular basis. I have no idea why they haven’t shut her down yet… but it’s only a matter of time.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, she also has a habit of putting her garbage bins on our lawn for days on end, which she justifies by pointing out that the patch of grass she’s using is full of weeds and dead grass anyway (gee… I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that grass won’t grow when it’s covered with large opaque plastic bins?). Whenever I’ve politely asked her to keep her bins on her property, I get a blank eyed stare and nod… but within a week or two, the bins are back again.
I’d move the bins to her front porch to make a point, but I don’t want to start an all-out war with this woman… yet.
She even put out a rusty half-full propane tank with the rest of her garbage one week. I opted to return that one to her porch along with a note about proper disposal of household hazardous waste. I mean, it’s one thing to try to be nice, but I draw the line at the kind of idiocy that could result in significant damage to my home. I like my home, dammit.
The stupid cow actually said to me “But I turned the little knob all the way open, so the tank should have been empty!”. Apparently, the concept of valves is as far beyond her as the concepts of dog ownership, trash disposal and lawn maintenance. :rolleyes: The tank is still sitting on her front porch as of this morning… two years after the fact. It’s getting rustier by the day, so I fully expect to come home and find her porch blown to smithereens one of these days.
Thankfully, she’s not the one we share a common wall with. Those neighbours are actually quite lovely.
Our worst neighours were the single mom with an unknown number of kids next door - all the usual irritations - too many cars parked in front of our house, unmowed lawn, walk not shoveled, dogs barking constantly, the usual. The annoying thing about her unkept yard and sidewalk was that she had a teenaged son living there - we’re so old-fashioned that we think a healthy teenager can mow a yard once a week.
Our best neighbours were the old couple next door at our last house - we saw the husband about once a week, usually mowing his lawn or shoveling the sidewalk. We never heard a peep out of them; the walks were shoveled before the snow stopped falling, the lawn was mowed and weeded religiously, the house was kept up, they had one car that they kept in their garage, they had no parties, they had very few visitors - they were the perfect neighbours. When the mutual fence between our yards fell over, we talked to them about putting it back up; since we’re younger by about 30 years, we offered to do all the work; they agreed readily, and gave us money for their half. Then they gave us more money, because they figured that wouldn’t be enough (we would have done it for free for neighbours like that, but you don’t insult old folks by not taking their money). I accidentally planted raspberries by the mutual fence, and now they have raspberries in their yard - I hope they can forgive me. 
Our all time best neighbor was Dave, from across the street. Dave kept a fishing boat on Lake Michigan, went out nearly every day, and pretty much always caught his limit. The problem was, he could only fit so much fish in his fridge, freezer, and smoker. So every couple of weeks or so he’d show up at our front door, holding a dripping plastic bag full of fresh salmon fillets, and ask us if we could “help him out.” 
We got really spoiled with the amount and freshness of the fish we ate.
Dave dropped dead a couple of years ago. We really miss him (and not just for the fish!)
Not really a worst neighbor, but the ones right behind us bug the ever lovin’ hell out of me. The back of our house (with windows for our bedrooms and bathroom) face their backdoor. The only thing that separates our house from theirs is a 3’ strip of grass and their single car width driveway.
They used to have a motion sensor light over their back door. No big whoop, it would go off in a bright yellow blaze for 3 minutes whenever they came home. Then something happened. It wouldn’t go off when they got out of their car or walked up to their door, but it would go on when TheKid walked around in her bedroom.
So they replaced it.
It is now one of those super white halogen lights that goes on at dusk, off at dawn.
I have blinds and room darkening curtains on my windows, but they don’t quite work. TheKid has taped up a heavy blanket over her neighbor facing window, but the light still seeps in.
I have asked if they would be so kind as to switch if off when they are in for the night and was told they have no idea how to turn it off. You don’t have an override switch? A what? sigh
On the plus side, I never have to turn on our bathroom light at night.
We’ve never had any GREAT! neighbors, which is sad. Our neighbors pretty much keep to themselves, unless they have little kids.
When I was growing up, there was the family next door. There were three kids; the youngest, Bobby, was a couple of years older than me. I knew him, of course, but we weren’t really friends; we never hung out or did stuff together, but we might talk if we both happened to be outside at the same time.
As the years went by, the two older kids moved out, and Bobby became quite a troublemaker. By the time he was 18 he was a full-blown loser. A few years after that, for reasons I never figured out, his parents moved out and left the house to him. They’d still come by on a regular basis, sometimes for weeks at a time, but they definitely didn’t live there.
Bobby never threw big parties or anything, he was just the type of white trash you see on Cops. He married this woman who didn’t know how to talk - her form of communication was to shriek. See the aforementioned Cops reference. Needless to say, they fought. A lot. At least a couple of times a week Bobby would storm out of the house and walk up the street, and The Fishwife (as my family called her, we didn’t know her name) would come out after, following him up the street, shrieking all the while. In an otherwise nice neighborhood. At 7:00 in the morning. When I and my brother, whose bedrooms faced the street, were trying to sleep. (Most likely after we’d been up drinking until the wee hours of the morning, but I digress.)
One morning my brother snapped. I was trying to fall back asleep after being awoken by the usual ruckus. The Fishwife was screaming at Bobby, telling him what a piece of shit loser he is, he’s calling her a fucking whore… then my brother’s voice boomed out his window: “WHY DON’T YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! OTHER PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO SLEEP, YOU FUCKIN’ ASSHOLES!!” Thereby establishing that we were so much better than them.
Meanwhile, our mother was in her home office, next to my brother’s room, on the phone with a client…
Good times.
Let me tell you about some awesome neighbors to balance out the not-so-great one I already mentioned.
My stepmum and dad moved in to this cute little dead end street in this Currier & Ives type New England Town.
Jack and Janice live next door. Jack is the self-appointed captain of the street. He’s a leathery older man who is semi-retired, working odd jobs like helping out his friend at the convenience store and driving handicapped kids to school. He doesn’t have to do these things, he just gets bored otherwise.
Jack is constantly fixing things. When my stepmum & dad got married, they were living pretty frugally. Jack saw my 2 stepbrothers playing hoops in the driveway and wheeled over 2 10-speed bicycles he had repaired and repainted. “Give these to the kids.” he grumbled and walked back to his house, refusing money or thanks.
Jack once found this dead plant and as a joke, he stuck it on their back porch. My dad hid it back on Jack’s porch. It kept going back forth for weeks. Then Jack found a tacky iron colonial soldier plaque. They had fun hiding that back and forth in each other’s houses. Then it was a batman doll. Jack figured out a way to hang it in my parents’ shower. So they figured out a way to rig it to the lid of the toilet seat. Then he stuck it so that it hung outside my stepmum’s kitchen window. So they stuck it in his mailbox. Even if I was just visiting, we would devise new places to hang it.
The whole street is neighborly. Everyone knows who everyone is and watches out for each other. When my dad had his first heart attack, they all kept an eye on my stepmum and organized who would bring over dinners when, etc. When my dad passed away, they would take turns helping my stepmum mow her lawn or shovel her driveway.
In return, she’s the neighborhood babysitter and coffee queen.
Jack and Janice regularly invite my stepmum over for dinner and to their camp in New Hampshire. Whenever she’s having a bad day, Jack will usually joke and grumble it away. And he’s still fixing things and hiding things and just being Jack.
And we all love him.
Bad neighbor
Neighbors to the south cleared the lot and built the house about 5 years ago. We knew it would happen eventually, but hated to lose the families of foxes and the awesome bird species that the trees kept. The worst part of them moving in, though was that they had the property surveyed and discovered that our circle drive was onto their property by about 8 feet. Not at all what the previous owners had told us, and since they were the ones who built our house and sold off the south lot, I had no reason to doubt them. We discussed the driveway situation with the new owners and they agreed that the driveway being there wouldn’t bother them and it could stay. Then one day, during the construction of their home, I came home and there was a utility pole directly in the middle of the gravel of my circle driveway. We called the electric company and asked about it and the crew foreman told us that the couple didn’t want to spend an extra $250 to have a buried line. Then when he suggested they move the pole 10 ft. to the south so it wouldn’t be in the driveway, they insisted that they wanted it right there.
Good neighbor
On May 8, 2009. Same guy as above, and another neighbor, came to help clean up my yard after a massive storm blew through and took out 5 trees from my front yard. I had to work and couldn’t work on the yard until later in the evening but most of the job was already done well before then.
I have a good neighbor but I don’t know who it is. My driveway has been plowed whenever it snows but I’m never home when the plowing happens (either that or I’m asleep and don’t hear anything). I don’t know who’s doing it and can’t figure out how to find out other than knocking on everyone’s doors. The odd thing is that I’m fairly new to the neighborhood and don’t really know anyone. Maybe I should just put a sign in the yard thanking “To whom it may concern.”
There’s an old chap who lives across the road from us called Jack. He must be well into his seventies, a widower, and has lived on this street most of his adult life. He is a big believer in ‘that’s what neighbours are for’ and is an absolute gem. He takes in our packages when we are at work (and insists on carrying them over himself if they are heavy, which makes me feel a little guilty but he is an old time gent and wont hear of me carrying them). His hobby is working on a little allotment, and every now and then he brings me home grown flowers and veggies. All round lovely guy. I try to repay the favours by popping over every few weeks with a homemade pie or cake and talk to him about his daughter who lives in America. It’s the small things that make a community I suppose.
On the other hand, I am probably a bad neighbour… I am learning the violin.
We have a lovely neighbor, a trim white-haired retired lady more physically fit and active than I am, who still does some substitute teaching. She knows about all the kids in the development and looks after them, trades us occasional dog-walking favors in return for occasionally sitting with her cats when she’s traveling internationally, and she has sophisticated tastes and is a good conversationalist. We’ve invited her over a few times and she’s been very gracious.
Reminds me of when my wife and I were just married. There was a household across the street with innumerable cars - without a working muffler among them. We woke up around 4 a.m. one morning to hear what sounded like a break-up in progress. The guy was apparently locked out, and was bellowing out to his lover. The lines we remember were: “All you know how to do is suck cock, and you aren’t even any good at that!” and (repeatedly) “I want my new blue jeans!” Must not have been an overly complicated property settlement. 
The best neighbours are the ones we have now. On the left is a single old lady we never hear from. On the right are some reasonably nice folks who’ll sometimes use their snowblower to clear our driveway. Everything’s dandy.
Worst I ever had were the folks in front of us at the townhouse complex we lived in before this house; their back “yard” was directly in front of our front entrance. The couple was OK - the husband was superintendent, in fact - but their ne’er-do-well son was a goddamned scumbag. Every Saturday there was a drunken party, and every seocnd drunken party he’d get into a gigantic screaming match with whatever slutty girl he was doing at the time. So all the families got to hear fuck you this and fuck you that at 2 AM.
Every now and then I’d go out and tell him if he didn’t shut his yap I was going to close it for him with a goddamn golf club. That usually worked for a month, but he would keep getting drunk and high and would forget. Things got better when he went to jail. Then we moved out.
When I was growing up we had a neighbor a couple of houses down who was a Vietnam vet and was on medication. Apparantly he didn’t like taking the medication and I can remember about five times where the police came out and took him away because he was off his meds and being a nuisance to the neighborhood.
One time he came over to our place on a weekend, because we were all home doing something or other inside, and decided it would be fun to start pouring paint all over my mom’s car. My dad called the cops and made us go hide in the back of the house while he hid out in the living room peeking out of the window. Eventually the cops showed up and took the guy away.
Another bad neighbor was a couple of years ago in the apartment complex I currently live in. I live on the second floor and the staircase to my place goes to one other unit. She moved in next door into that unit and was an old hippie that was still doing drugs. A month after her and her boyfriend moved in he climbed up on the roof and was threatening to kill himself if she didn’t take him back. He was taken away never to be seen from again.
A month or two later she clogged her toilet and decided the best way to unclog it was to keep flushing the toilet. She did it so much that it flooded her place and the water seeped into the unit below her. The complex had to replace all of the downstairs neighbors carpets and some of the drywall.
A month or two later it was later in the evening, about 9 PM, in the summer and I had my front door open to cool the place off and she comes up to the open door and just stands there for a few seconds just staring off into space so I asked if I could help her and she mumbled, “something something bathroom” and then turned around and dropped the sweats she was wearing and squatted down. I immediately yelled, “NO! You get out of here!” she mumbled something pulled up her pants and wondered off down the stairs and disappeared into the parking lot. I called the manager and told her what happened. She said she would take care of it and the next week the old hippie lady moved out.
My current neighbors are awesome. They’ve been there for about three months now and they are drama free.
I couldn’t remember anyone that bad until I realized I’d apparently repressed the memory of the last apartment we lived in. :smack:
6 units in each section, two per floor, separated by a hallway running down the middle of each section. Three sections per building, sections separated by concrete block walls.
Upstairs: Nice youngish couple, two kids, mom and dad worked all the time trying to get themselves into a better situation. They had a friend do a lot of babysitting, and she let them run rampant. They let their cat out on the (wood slat, big gaps) balcony to go to the bathroom, and it’d piss and shit through the cracks onto our balcony. The kids also ate up there and food debris would come through. The kids ran around upstairs, stomping loudly, and would climb up on the kitchen cabinets and jump down, which shook our kitchen cabinets loudly. At one point, one cabinet of ours came out of the wall after a particularly loud boom from upstairs.
Across the hall: Mom, sometimes some kind of male father-type-figure (I don’t think it was the same one each time, but we didn’t so much see him as hear him), two daughters, approx. age 12 and 8. Mom and daughters could not go a day without screaming their heads off at each other at full volume; if a guy was there, he’d yell too. No, not even a break for Christmas. 12-year-old dressed very inappropriately for her age (“slutty” clothes) and would yell down at the teen boys passing by.
Dishonorable mention (possibly) goes to the next-door neighbor across the concrete wall divider, who had a fire break out in a bedroom (judging by the floor plan) and thus was quite possibly a smoking materials fire or something equally preventable (bad space heater usage, etc.). Our apartment was fine due to the concrete, but you know the one across the hall had to have some smoke damage, and downstairs probably had water damage.
Living in apartments most of my adult life, a lot of times, I didn’t even know who my neighbors were. But the of the ones that I did know, some were quite memorable.
Bad neighbors: The man in the apartment across the hall about twenty years ago. He had recently divorced and had never lived in an apartment before. He thought that the walls were soundproof. Even with complaints, there were times that the volume from his stereo and tv would rattle the pictures on the wall. He owned an old panel van, an old Toyota, a new Toyota and a bass boat. Although there was limited parking in front of our building, several of his vehicles occupied spaces front and center. His boat wasn’t backed into a spot and unhitched, nooooo…it remained hitched to the van and parked across five spots. Complaints to the management finally resulted in assigned parking and stickers (with a limit of 2). That’s when he (thankfully) moved.
Good neighbors: In my last apartment in a dodgy part of Nashville, the four guys in the (1 BR) apartment next to mine for two years were gems. They were immigrants from El Salvador, mostly working two jobs and sending money home to their families. Anytime I brought groceries or laundry home, one of them was right there offering to unload it from the truck for me. They were always available for moving furniture and other heavy jobs. One of them was a fabulous cook and they brought meals over to share with me on occasion. In return, I would assist them with reading bills, etc (they spoke English but didn’t read it) and sharing baked goodies.
My current apartment is primarily folks forty and up and pretty long term, as apartments go. We watch each other’s homes when we travel, sometimes take each other to doctor’s appointments and pick up things like produce at the farmer’s market in season. My downstairs neighbor, Miss Sarah, is a retired lady. She’s the designated parcel drop off for most of us. I would like to move closer to work, but having good neighbors has made me reluctant to leave.
Several years ago, I owned a farmhouse on 20 acres. My house was setback from the highway about 1/4 of a mile. The property directly behind me was a 40 acre tract of farming land that was used for wheat, milo, and maize production. The property owner behind me had an easement to use my gravel driveway to access their property. To cross over to their property you had to cross a creek that was on the back side of my land. The creek most of the time was about 6 inches deep at the crossing spot, but during heavy rains could get up to a few feet. Since they were normally using tractors or harvesting vehicles, this was not a problem. Under the easement, I had no requirement to maintain the easement other than my gates had to be at least 14 foot wide to allow for the agriculture equipment to get through, and the neighbor had the right (at their expense) to come and trim tree branches to allow for their equipment to get through.
At some point the neighbor sold his 40 acres to a doctor. I was also in the process of selling my house and land and moving. One evening during dinner, I got a knock on my door, and it was the new neighbor (the doctor) and his daughter and son-in-law. The doctor said he had a proposition for me: he wanted me to give him a 14 ft. wide strip of land on the Eastern border of my property, that equated to a total of about 4 acres. This was so they could have their own driveway to their property behind mine. I told him that I would certainly consider exchanging that 4 acre strip for 4 acres of his land that abutted against the back of my property. He said, no he just wanted me to give him the land. When I asked why I would do that, he responded that he would terminate the easement. I politely told him that I didn’t consider that a fair exchange, and wasn’t interested in his proposal. He proceeded to tell me that his daughter and son-in-law were going to be building a house and that the traffic up and down our driveway was going to increase with the construction crews. I told him that didn’t bother me at all. He then said that if I didn’t give them the land, they were going to require me to build a bridge over the creek. I told him that he might want to get a lawyer ro review the easement before he began making demands, as I had no intention of building any sort of bridge over the creek and that his daughter and son-in-law could drive through the creek like the last neighbors did.
I did have my lawyer review the easement again and he advised that I had no obligation to maintain the easement other than my gate width. That all other improvements were the obligation of the neighbor.
A few months pass, and I get a contract on the sale of my property. I find out from my realtor that the neighbor has been contacting my buyers and trying to scare them into some sort of side arrangement about the easement. I have been very open to my sellers about the easement and their rights and obligations. But the fact that the neighbor is contacting them and might scare them off royally pisses me off. I had my realtor and lawyer send them a letter politely advising them that any action they may be taking that may scare my buyers away may be considered tortious interference and I would be looking to reclaim any damages I might incur. They finally shut-up and I was able to sell my property.
I spoke to my buyers a few years after the sale, and the neighbor never built a house on the back property and they rarely ever see them.
Worst neighbor - the choir director at a local college who came over on the day we moved in to tell me that he’d be coming over the fence into our back yard on a regular basis, because there was a flower bed that was really on his property. His wife repeatedly came into our yard to do things like “tidy up” nearly invisible wisps of trash, which happened to be right below our bedroom window. They required considerable education in normalcy.
Best neighbors - this may sound stereotyped, but when we lived in South Dakota, Native Americans were the best. This includes the medical residents with the incredibly well-behaved children, as well as the rather strange family who left deer parts on the lawn and occasionally carried comatose people into and out of the house. Very quiet neighbors though.