The trouble with neighbours

That's not just parenthood, that's mental imbalance.

argh xpost

YOU FUCKING CUNTS

THANK YOU

As for sleeping kids- you should see me when I'm left to watch my neice. I've been known to sit on the sofa & not move at all untl my sister comes home for fear of waking up the baby. Last time I watched her & she woke up, I had to hold her -screaming her lungs out, of course- for 2 hours. She's such a sweet little toddler, but oh man, those lungs. Of course, the lesson you could get from this too is that I shouldn't do so much free baby sitting for my sister's kid. At least until the kid learns to stay asleep a bit better.

My neighbours are just fucking idiots. They frustrate me because they have idiot friends who condone and support their idiocy.

I think I may have told the story on ilx before, but I was once woken at 3am by them having a good old sing-along to Oasis' "Wonderwall". Just great. I stuck my head out the window and said "Would you mind turning that down or off? I'm trying to sleep here." The facetious cunt yelled up at me "We have to put up with your music all the time!" and I said "Yeah, well you've never complained before and I never play it at 3am in the morning, do I you stupid fucking twunt?!" Most satisfying.

anyway, I'm sort of wondering whether I should try and talk to him (or his partner, whom my parents talked to every now and then) bcz it ended badly last night.

x-post: yeah colette, its the kind of thing I'm thinking of; its awkward, but i think it will have to be done.

any way, good luck. its a horrible feeling i know.

Argh, friend (male) phoned this morning in sleep-deprived panic attack cz the guy in the flat above was being noisy all night and at 6am woke him up by pounding on his door. When friend answered, dude was stark naked in communal hall, pushed past him into his flat, and ran round looking in all the rooms shouting about his guests hiding from him.

Is there anything you can do about that except hope the guy (who's been mostly an OK neighbour but rowdy at night a lot lately) is embarrassed and calms down? Naked dude rents and the flats have a management company, so that's two people who could be complained to, but I don't know if that would achieve anything except possibly escalating nastiness.

nah get him turfed out, pronto.

yeah I mean you could have him arrested for that, let alone turfed out of the flat.

we have a phrase in my country to describe incidents such as this: "ah now that's no way to be carrying on"

"STEADY ON, NOW"

"ah for jaysus sake"

Last night my downstairs neighbour threatened to kill me. He wasn't joking and is a decidedly unsalubrious character, with what I guess to be some kind of drug problem (mebbe coke as there's no heroin-type sickly smell). I probably shouldn't have sung along to my Richard Youngs' CDs for quite so long that afternoon... :-(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh4DstK2w_Q

I had a neighbour go after a friend of mine with a hammer once. Like, chased him back into our flat trying to hit him in the head. Turns out someoen *else* had been revving/idling their car engine right outside this guys window for ages, and my awful timing, P went to get into his car to leave, angry man comes out, sees P in his car and jumps to wrong conclusion and starts chasing him.

We complained to the apartment managers, and ended up having to APOLOGISE TO THE GUY, because he was a fucking shift worker. As if I had any idea? I should have just called the police. I was only 17 or 18 at the time, it scared the shit out of me.

so we got new neighbours. three times in a week the cops have been outside the house, twice looking for her ex in my back garden and this morning investigating the fire that burnt the house to the ground, which was started at both the front and back doors.

i have no idea who my neighbours are. I have never seen them and have only heard them unlocking and going into the doors to their flat(s) (there are two other flats on my floor and i don't know which one(s) i've heard them going into as they are both quite far away down the hall from mine). I never hear any noise coming through the walls when they're in the flat. I don't know if they're extraordinarely quiet or if the walls are really thick. I have never heard noise from either above or below me and through the walls that are adjacent to the flats on the next close I have also never heard anything. It's weird.

i just tried to post something but my internet ate it. it was about homeowners who get all stinkeyed when other people park legally in front of their house, even though the street is public property. this happened to my bf and me this morning -- not in my neighborhood, but somewhere nearby where we've never had any parking trouble before.

like, what was this woman afraid of? her property value going down? a rabid attack by two bleary-eyed thirtysomething hipsters who haven't had coffee yet? that i would trample a very small patch of her meticulously watered and mowed lawn, which she shouldn't even have since we're in a goddamned drought?

Did she come out and yell at you or something? Who does that?

she was just very obviously glaring at us. we parked across the street instead and she was still glaring. people like that are why homeowners' associations have a bad reputation.

It's my experience that although you can always move, and always hope for better neighbors next time, invariably there is some new horror to be discovered. Through the years I've suffered through having neighbors who are either loud with their music past reasonable hours, who have made loud love with the bed banging against our shared wall, and who have whistled incessantly while walking up and down the staircase that was just beyond a door to my bedroom.

Currently my lateral neighbors are fine. I even get along with them rather well. The problem now, however, is the upstairs neighbor, who has what seems like a pack of dogs living in his apartment who like toys that bang on their hard wood floors, and the downstairs neighbor, whose cigarette smoke comes up through the radiator and into the room of my soon to be newborn son.

The next step for me is to move out of the city entirely and get a house, though I am wary of what other kinds of horrors lurk when the scenario changes.

i once had a ticket officer call me to tell me i wasn't supposed to park in front of some assholes house. i had a permit for what turned out to be a different part of the road so when they called and complained instead of giving me a ticket he got my # and rang me to ask me to move my civic.
i guess now it doesn't sounds so weird but at the time it was sort of surreal.

xpost

downstairs neighbour woke me up early to say that water was coming through his bathroom ceiling (via the light fitting!), what was happening?

ans = another neigbhour, who i'm paying to do some work in *my* bathroom (laying a new floor), had yesterday driven a screw into a pipe in the heating system, inadvisedly placed too close to the boards that form the floor. the screw had caused a leak, not at all visible from above

pipes and heating all turned off, floor all pulled up (newly laid floor all unlaid again): much email diplomacy and promises it will be fixed tonight

FINGERS CROSSED

ayiyiyi

"inadvisedly placed too close to the boards that form the floor"

I used to always blame the plumbers if screwed into a water/gas pipe as well, what else can you do?

I had that once, seconds after the builders had laid perfect new flooring in my kitchen. They were screwing boxing-in material in place and zapped a pipe. We have district heating in this building so there was a geyser of the foulest oily water that flooded inch-deep in the kitchen and hallway. Contractors tried not to change the MDF boxing-in material even though it sucked up loads of moisture and got tide marks (no you can’t just paint over it, you workshy cretins) and refused to tile half of my destroyed hallway even though I could supply my own materials (they used half my tiles, and refused to believe the existing remaining tiles were blown). AAARGH

the pipe seems to be fixed now -- he said it was fine to turn the heating back on and I have -- and he's downstairs now cleaning up, he thinks there's not much harm done: just let it dry out etc, it's only water. "Don't use the light switch for a day or two." The ceiling will need a bit of work, but I'll let my neighbours talk that out between themselves when the one who lives below me is back from work this evening.

Luckily he hadn't actually fixed the vinyl in place yet and while the floorboards look a mess all pulled up they will go back down again tidily enough, as will the plywood underlay for the vinyl.

he lives round the corner if there is harm done, i can see right into his kitchen from my work-desk

ok the water and electricity and downstairs neighbour's temper all smoothed over

new floor still very extremely unlaid (and won't now be sorted till friday)

It is the plumbers fault really, anywhere cables, pipes are routed through joists at 1/1/2-2 inch screw depth they should be protected by metal joist plates fwiw.

there's quite a lot of weird work in this flat tbh, some i suspect via bad DIY committed by the ppl i bought from in 1990

(a plumber i called in to fix an earlier leak a few years back found two overflow pipes of different sizes fitted into one another with lashings of superglue: he was amused and appalled and found it quite hard to sort out)

lol! that is textbook rough as fuck.

The sort of thing you'd take a picture of for the archive.

ugh the fkn bin wars are started again

the other week I drowned my phone in lager by putting a can that toppled in a very spacious waxy and watertight jacket pocket with it while I was talking to some complete fucking idiot who I didn't want to talk to. I give it to the fix it man across the road who operates as Pete The Geek - the guy who can fix anything and said to him don't do any major surgery on it I've already got a replacement on the way but maybe just a quick expert brushing will get it operational enough to get my contacts, photos and stuff onto the new phone.

He disappeared for a week with it and when i saw him again he said it was fucked so I said ok i'll have it back and how much do you want for work done on it and he said just give us a fiver. He then turned up with just the sd card from the phone in an envelope and I went into a rage and said give me the fucking phone back dickhead, I'm actually worried that you still have it! I gave him such a bollocking for his conduct and mentioned that there might be cookies linked to my bank account on this CPU etc.. that he posted in an envelope and scurried off when I opened the door. He had taken the sim card out which had all my contacts saved on it but it is cancelled so I'm hoping he can't do any damage with it.

I saw him earlier and thought lets try and rise above this and was civil to him and he stormed past me like a late 40's adolescent. This is why apart from my immediate family I much prefer the company of my dog to most humans. I'll probably end up screwing his tires one night when I'm drunk because I'm still paranoid he might be the cunt who made the malicious complaints that put us under the section 47 for 18 months that nearly killed me whilst other events were nearly killing me.

we have a 3ft fence between our neighbours and us. we want to put in a 6ft but theyre not keen

are there any obnoxious behaviours I can develop to make them keen? who wants to have to make small talk everytime youre in your garden?!

a.... 3-foot fence?

buy a bunch of new pets that are easily able to scale the fence and run into their yard

not my neighbors, but I went to a house party on the Fourth of July in a tucked away lakeside community. I knew the friend's neighbors would be trouble when parking my car. there was a custom, illegally made No Parking sign in front of legitimate, community approved parking spaces because parking there would block the lakeside view, and the sign said "We paid for a LAKE view, not a CAR view". I deliberately parked in front of the sign as it was the only space left and my alternative was parking in the next legal spot two blocks away which..nope.

so keep in mind this is July 4th and it's not even particularly late, and our friends are setting off some mild fireworks, and once again, passive aggressive neighbor who is sitting outside with her husband walks by and mentions "shame you all have to do fireworks, my husband doesn't like it", and walks away before anybody can reply, then asshole husband starts screaming "knock it off" even though it's literally a holiday where fireworks go off and there's no reason for them to be sitting outside otherwise, because it's dark and mosquito-y.

we stopped because we were tired of their shit (I honestly don't care for fireworks anyway so I didn't care).

Starting to wonder if it’s the neighbors that are the problem in this thread

I, on the other hand, haven't met or talked to a neighbor in years, and haven't had issues, so I think you are correct.

I mean I did have some that did nothing but smoke weed and stink up the stairwell but i was more aggrieved they didn't share with me

we need to clarify that housemates are neighbors (or not)

on the Sunday before the last one my Co2 alarm started doing a treble bleep in a 60 second cycle because the battery was dying. I chucked it out the front door for until i could be arsed getting out the lump hammer to kill it. Because it is a sealed pvc unit with no on/off switch, it seems you do have to smash the bleeping thing to shut it down. The noise of it was still travelling through the walls from outside and you'd almost be tempted to think it was still inside the house. I thought fuck this cursed thing. So that gave me the idea to chuck it into some briars behind this chump's house at the edge of the estate.

I've quarrelled with the chump numerous times and he's an absolute knave who has a snarling joyless pit-bull terrier and he has this habit of trying to blame other people's dogs as the guilty party that "started it" when his poorly socialised teeth on legs ugly bastard tries to bite them. Anyway I pass his house every morning on the way to the "mountains" (just a hill really but the locals call it the mountains!) and twelve nights later Co2 alarm is still going blip blip blip every 60 secs! Even with a dying battery, the recent deluge followed by frost - it is still going strong. I feel a bit guilty that some of his neighbours will have been suffering this every night as well, but war is hell. It's amazing how far the bleeping sound carries as well, you can hear it from almost quarter of mile away on the mountains. In the early morning it blends in neatly with the dawn chorus but it must seem loud at night when your house is only 20 yards from it.

One of my lasting regrets is that I didn't sneak a dying yet persistent smoke alarm into a very hidden place in the home of someone I despise.

Please know that you are living my dream.

under some floorboards would be best!

ironically, i smashed up a similarly bleeping selfcontained snoke alarm in our place in 2004

Ha I've been on the other side of that when my dickhead neighbour chucked his smoke alarm into a skip and the rain triggered it and my wife was trying to sleep. He wasn't in so I chucked everything out of the skip until I found the alarm and stomped the shit out of it until it stopped going off. The great thing about that was I left all the shit all over his front yard and they came and collected the skip the next day and left a load of crap including doors and other bulky shit all over the pavement and he had to dispose of that himself. Fuck that cunt anyway

This prick told us to stop complaining about noise because he's 60 and we should respect our elders. I don't think that applies to people in their 40s but I just need an excuse to punch that cunt in the face

He's a leather worker and does it in his house right next to ours and doesn't give a fuck what time it is or that he's next door to a dying woman

Now I don't have to be nice because fuck it who gives a fuck my wife is dead I don't have to try not to get kicked out by the landlord

we have a bro infestation in our building now

I probably shouldn't post on ilx when I'm drunk, he says after mostly posting on ilx when he's drunk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdZRN1bs200&feature=youtu.be

15 days later and it is still beeping!

essential 5 second youtube vid of beeping Co2 alarm

Reminds me a the 2000s prank gadget the Annoy-a-Tron, versions of which seem to still be available on etsy. They are probably easier to hide than a full-fledged CO2 alarm, but excellent work calzino for your inventiveness in this situation.

https://www.etsy.com/search?q=annoy%20a%20tron

from the youtube demos I've seen of them I don't think they'd survive the days of torrential rainfall the seemingly indestructible built-by-SkyNet Co2 alarm has!

I can't even remember if Co2 alarms are supposed to have an IP rating in UK safety regs, but this one would get a high number for sure.

last year for the 4th of July, my good friend P@m warned me about her neighbors. So I go to park, and where she lives there's nothing but street parking really, but there's like one space left when I get there. all of a sudden, I'm parking and I see this obnoxious sign on a stick next to a LEGAL parking space that says NO PARKING - I PAID FOR A LAKESIDE VIEW, NOT A CARSIDE VIEW.

nonetheless, I ignored it and left my car there.

was it a true lake or an orlando puddle lake?

oh compleeeetely the latter

we have glorified retention ponds

lol i moved from volcanic new zealand to orlando and was dismayed by the lake designation standards

One of my ILX neighbors keeps telling the same story.

not my neighbors, but I went to a house party on the Fourth of July in a tucked away lakeside community. I knew the friend's neighbors would be trouble when parking my car. there was a custom, illegally made No Parking sign in front of legitimate, community approved parking spaces because parking there would block the lakeside view, and the sign said "We paid for a LAKE view, not a CAR view". I deliberately parked in front of the sign as it was the only space left and my alternative was parking in the next legal spot two blocks away which..nope.

so keep in mind this is July 4th and it's not even particularly late, and our friends are setting off some mild fireworks, and once again, passive aggressive neighbor who is sitting outside with her husband walks by and mentions "shame you all have to do fireworks, my husband doesn't like it", and walks away before anybody can reply, then asshole husband starts screaming "knock it off" even though it's literally a holiday where fireworks go off and there's no reason for them to be sitting outside otherwise, because it's dark and mosquito-y.

we stopped because we were tired of their shit (I honestly don't care for fireworks anyway so I didn't care).

― ill fuckin put a paste on those (Neanderthal), Saturday, February 8, 2020 9:11 AM

the weirdest fucking thing about that is even that post wasn't from when it happened, but many months after, and I have no recollection of writing it.

jesus even used the same fuckin' wording!!!

the other fucked thing is there have been quite a few times where I've randomly written something on FB and then gone on Memories and see I wrote the same thing like 8 years ago on the same date

I've done it once or twice myself.

oh dear lads