Anyone else have shitty neighbors?

[bif]

We have wonderful neighbors on one side and a total asshole on the other. I've dubbed him "Shithead" because, well, that's what he is. He's so self centered he only cares about himself. He cuts his minuscule front lawn a couple times a week and spends a couple hours edging, and using the leaf blower. The other day, I was sitting on our patio and he decided to use his leaf blower on the driveway so we had to go inside to talk. Last winter we had a power outage. He put his industrial-sized generator right next to our house. When I asked him if he could move it behind his garage he said no and walked away. He moved in a couple years ago after spending three years rebuilding the house. It was like living next to a construction site. We have a monthly potluck dinner which he never attends. Huge ego.

How are your neighbors?

[CurtEastPoint]

1. I am so lucky. My neighborhod is very mixed: seniors, gen x/z whatever, black/white, straight, gay, trans

Immediate neighbors: black straight couple on one side, white straight couple next to them, lesbian couple, trans man, gay couple next to me, family across street w/trans teen, gay couple across the street. it's like Mayberry. Kinda!

We are sandwiched between ATL city limits and ATL airport. Have been here 34 years. Whatever you need, post it on FB and people respond right away: sugar, bay leaves, rosemary, jump start, ride to ATL, you name it.

We are Jefferson Park in East Point, GA

[KT2000]

2. It can be hell

with a bad neighbor.
I had a good neighbor on one side and bad neighbors on the other side - sold 3 times to jerks. When the house was on the market again, and vacant, my other neighbor and I saged the whole property. The most wonderful people moved in and we now have a great neighborhood.

My neighbor's friend had a horrible trumper neighbor who was aggressively mean to her. While he was away for the Winter, we saged her property to protect her from his negativity. He came back in the Spring and for some reason, no longer bothered her.

My neighbor's neighbor is a man with severe mental illness and substance abuse issues. He used to stand at the property line and yell all the abusive words you can use against a woman. We saged her property to protect her from his abuse. Not long after the police took him away where he was hospitalized. He is back and for the moment, calmer.

Another neighbor witnessed these successes and has asked us to sage for her neighbor's house that is going on the market.

I know this sounds weird but the effort is to use positive words of protection for the nice person but not anger and bad wishes for the bad neighbor.

Amazon sells sage sticks, about $10. Just light one for each person and walk the perimeter of your lot and while it is smoking, say what you want to protect you, your family and home from this neighbor. Ask for peace. Do this while he is not home.

What do you have to lose?

[Wifes husband]

11. Well, you can lose $10 to start with.

[KT2000]

13. Yes, I expected

such responses.

[Marthe48]

3. You got me started

When we moved here in '89, one of the long-time neighbors we met said we were the young kids on the block. We were around 40. Fast forward to now, and I am the old kid on the block. All of the quiet neighbors have been replaced with people who have loud mufflers, mow, blow and rev constantly and take great pleasure in cutting down all of the mature trees on the property they buy. I used to enjoy going out to drink a cup of coffee in the morning, but not any more. If the pot-bellied yard patrol isn't mowing their golf course on their John Deere, they are running their power tools, badly, or cutting something down. Yes, I'm old. I grew up in an era when having a loud vehicle was a reason to feel shame, when planting a tree was something to be proud of, when people had push mowers instead of yard tractors the size of harvest reapers.

My concept of Heaven doesn't include any lawns to mow.

You have my sympathy.

[mwmisses4289]

4. Quiet. polite. Occasional noisy party on Sat or Sunday afternoon.

We say hi, talk occasionally. Saturdays and Sundays early we all do yard stuff before it gets to hot; because If you wait until 10a.m., someone's gonna have to call 911 on you due to the heat.
Really lucky, thankfully.

[Ocelot II]

6. Not any more, but my former next-door neighbor was awful.

Some years ago I replaced my turf lawn with shrubs and native plants and he hated it. He got all pissy and demanded to know why, saying, "I like grass!" and I replied that I didn't like grass, and I was tired of mowing the slope down to the sidewalk, and it was my lawn anyhow. For years there were repeated little incursions. He complained that my shrubs made it impossible for him to put up a ladder to change his second-floor storm windows, although there really was plenty of room, so he put his ladder on my shrubs and squashed them. He threw his yard waste in the Dumpster I'd hired when I was doing some remodeling, which was plainly labeled NO YARD WASTE, so I had to climb into it and haul out the tree branches.

One day he and his shrewish wife came to my door and demanded that I cut down the trees in my back yard because they were overhanging his yard and would interfere with their electrical lines from the utility pole. I told him I was not going to cut down my trees but that he was legally allowed to trim overhanging branches. He told me I would have to pay for that work, which I refused. Nothing happened after that for many months, until one day I came home to find that he'd had someone saw large branches off my trees well into my side of the property line, and they'd thrown the branches onto my yard. After that I had a 6' fence put up between my yard and theirs.

The following summer they were doing some more tree trimming, and, obscured by my fence, I heard the shrew tell the workers to just throw the branches over the fence, but the workers told her they couldn't do that. The last straw was when I discovered that all the plants and shrubs on a 18" strip along the property line on my side had been poisoned, apparently with something like Round-Up, and everything on the strip was dead or dying. At this point I got a lawyer involved, and now they were claiming that the property line wasn't where it had obviously been for decades, and they'd never claimed otherwise before even though their own landscaping extended only to the existing property line. And I pointed out where the 100-year-old survey markers were and told them they could get the property surveyed themselves if they wanted, so that was the end of that. I never did get any relief on the plant-poisoning, though I did notify the police so I could make an insurance claim for vandalism. I didn't have proof they did it, though nobody else had either the motive or the opportunity, and it wasn't worth the effort to go to small claims court over it.

They moved away three years ago, probably to a development where there is a fascist homeowners' association of which he or she is now probably the chair, and they amuse themselves by pestering residents about the color of their mailboxes and maybe someone is growing tomatoes in their front yard where the hydrangeas should be. So that's my shitty neighbor story.

[peacebuzzard]

8. good fences make good neighbors until it doesn't. n/t

[SWBTATTReg]

10. God, what a horrible neighbor! Why is it that some people just can't get along w/ literally anyone? We've been so

lucky where we are at, neighbors are all good, and when we had an issue in that I couldn't mow the yard due to some health issues, one of the neighbors popped over and mowed the yard twice!! And he wouldn't accept any money from me after I found out what he did for us.

Fortunately, the number of 'good neighbors' easily outshines the number of bad neighbors that we have, and any issues that we have had over the years, are usually easily resolved quickly.

One of the neighbors actually made a nice steak / meat mixture, gave it to us, and it was wonderful.

Neighbors like this (and most of them are like this) are diamonds in the rough and we wouldn't give them up for anything.

[peacebuzzard]

7. My one good neighbor is mad at me, coincidentally, today.

Other neighbors are a*holes.
But she doesn't like the fact that after years of dumping debris down the hill where I live and letting it pile up on my fence and breaking the fence (mainly yard debris, but still......
Today I found some willing and able young landscapers to climb the hill and clean out the debris, plus cut down "her" branches that are extending into my yard.
They are making a pile of the debris to come to pick up in a couple of days with their trailer.
It is on her treeline where she has been throwing (and her yard people) the debris for decades.
I told her that my landscapers need to bring their trailer in a couple of days to pick up the debris which has rolled down the hill all these years.

But she is mad because her mower who comes e.v.e.r.y. week to trim the yard to 1/4 inch of grass is coming today, and she doesn't want this pile of "her" debris, which my landscapers picked up today (after all these years of her throwing in down on my fenceline,) to be in her mower's path. Go figure.

I hope my one nice neighbor gets over this. (today, for the first time, she is not so nice)

on edit: Oh and also she suggested I throw the debris which she threw down to my fence into my woods downhill. I told her the woods are already full of debis that has piled up from decades prior to me getting a fence.
(We are out in the county where there was no garbage pickup and most people burned their garbage and threw it anywhere.)

We now have garbage pickup but she still throws stuff in her woods which can and does roll down to my property....

[Kali]

9. Hmmm

In clockwise order starting North: assholes, good, meh, mixed - she is a bad word, he is ok, don't know how he puts up with her, next is kind of an ass, but I actually get along with him. Then a rural conservation 30 to 40 acre development that is meh, then a wildcat development that contains thieves. Next is my best neighbor. Then another asshole family, finally a good neighbor who I have known since we were kids.

[chouchou]

12. I get along with my neighbors fine. But, one of my husband's friends could tame down your asshole neightbor.

..ah...if the price is right..

[RockRaven]

14. I've got one who is more weirdo than shitty, the guy behind us.

The neighbors on either side are gone more often than they are here, both travel extensively for business. When they are around they are quiet and keep to themselves.

But the guy behind us is a piece of work. A while back he complained to us that our "lights are shining right into" his house. We said "oh, sorry about that" even though we could not recall leaving any of our outdoor flood lights on, or even using them recently. A couple weeks later he said the same, we apologized again and vowed to be hypervigilant (and were). A third complaint and we started asking clarifying questions.

The answers beggared belief. The lights "shining right into" his house? The indoor recessed can ceiling lights in our family room, which has a large window facing our backyard -- which he can see (a small portion of, above a 7 foot fence and through evergreen oak foliage) from his kitchen window which faces his back yard, at a distance of 100+ feet, maybe 150. He can't even see the light sources as they are recessed in the ceiling, just the fact that the room is lit makes it "shining right into" his house -- one window of an illuminated room, at 100+ feet, through branches, just the sliver above the fence, only visible from ONE window of his house, if he is standing at his kitchen sink.

When we realized what he was complaining about we shrugged it off. We have curtains, sometimes we use them sometimes we don't, but his complaint was nonsensical and unreasonable to worry about. We aren't ever allowed to have a room light on inside our house without closed curtains? GTFOH.

Well, the 7 foot fence between our properties wasn't tall enough for him, but we has built it just on our side of the property line. So a few feet onto his side he built a second fence. He bought 6 foot fence boards, so he built it 3 feet off the ground. A floating fence, 9 feet at the top, but doesn't touch the ground apart from the posts. Looks craptastic from his side, but at least he can't see the far away top sliver of our family room window from his kitchen anymore, I guess.

[Tree Lady]

16. We had a motion detector light

On side of yard by one neighbor when we lived rurally 10 yrs ago, each neighbor had a full acre so we weren't close. Neighbor came over mad because light would come on and shine in his house. The wind would sometimes do this but being motion detector it would go off.

So one night at 2am I hear a noise but don't see anything, next morning I find light bulb broken outside.

Same guy came over drunk yelling at us because a tumbleweed blew into his yard during a storm of 75mph wind. He said it came from our yard, which we had all grass not weeds like that, probably blew down from close hills.

Then there was the time our sprinkler watered a bit of dirt driveway we shared...ugh...

He was a real ass and one of the reasons we moved.

[cksmithy]

15. Really good neighborhood that has had many changes, since 1982,

when we first moved in. Our house was built in 1920, but lots of young couples, in their 30's with a few kids moved in around the early 1980's. It was great, a nice grandpa and ma across the street, kids next door the same as our youngest. A girl from our oldest daughter's middle school, moved in across the street. We had block parties on the July 4, summer potlucks, Northern Exposure tv parties, where we gathered to watch tv. There was one couple who never had any visitors, we all thought they were in witness protection. They never participated or even tried to get to know their neighbors. When they moved, that's when our daughter's friend moved into the neighborhood.
Anyway, there were several older neighbors who passed, a few with children who needed a larger home, and then the nuts moved in. Drugs, parties, it was horrible, for several years, for the most part it is ok now. We have always had a smoker who lives next door, and always smokes outside, cigars and cigs that smell like shit, up wind, so the smoke blows directly onto our house. I couldn't open our windows for years. Often shouting "Stogie Alert," and we would shut windows and turn off our evaporative cooler. Nothing worse than the smell of damp cheap cigars. We have air conditioning now, we can leave the windows shut.
The current next door smoker, has screamed F... at the city tree trimmers, who come around once every 15 years, to cut out the dead wood, on the city trees planted on the tree lawn next to city side walk. She has screamed at tree trimmers we have hired to trim our tree that hangs over into her yard. We were being nice. Her partner, who was very nice, died last year and the smoker is much more quiet and has a regular work schedule. I can now open windows in the morning to cool the house down, then shut windows as the sun breaks over my very good neighbors house. Our block, is all two story, only 3 one story houses. Our neighbors are retired teachers, as am I, professors, judges, scientist, doctors and only one republican who put out a sign after the election that said something like, "we can relax, we have a republican in the whitehouse." We also have an Airbnb across the street, that creates parking problems for my neighbors.

[sakabatou]

17. Let's see...

There's a guy with a loud remote control car, and a woman who seems to play the piano loudly.