The trouble with neighbours

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

Smoke coming up through a radiator sounds a bit wrong, is there not something you can do about that? I mean you can hardly fault a man for smoking in his own home but you dont want that near baby obv.

um, so darraghmac - your neighbour's house is now burnt down?!

yes, that's pretty much where we're at with that.

Trayce, I've done a smidgeon of research on it and it looks like it could go either way in terms of the law. I recognize the right of the guy to do what he wants in his apartment (it's a coop), but when it starts to effect someone else, I think the situation might change.

If it keeps happening I'm going to raise the issue to (in order, depending if anything gets done about it) the super, the building management, and finally my lawyer. As it is I have stuffed the space around the radiator with old towels. We'll see if that works.

darragh: yeah I was going to say something... do you assume its this poor woman's ex? Sounds like she moved to get away from him and... ugh. No one was hurt I hope?

nobody hurt, though if she'd been home she wouldn't have had much chance. from what i could glean from the landlord this morning yeah it's exactly that- she's moved to get away from him, even though they've been separated for a while.

Jesus. Does she even know the place is gone yet, has she been back home? I always live in fear of coming home to a detroyed house.

i don't know- she only moved in about a week ago, i've never met her. i think she's probably made herself scarce since wednesday night, which was the last time he was seen hanging around.

Hope they catch the fucker. Ugh thats horrible.

catching him vs proving it was him. strong circumstantial evidence, certainly.

I came to post something but now I want to know the end of darraghmac's story -- mine is abt disagreement about how to resurface a path shared between several blocks and how the person involved who put in least effort to attend meetings or make their opinions known early or clearly is now very belatesly being a d!ck when the work has started, i.e. mildly tiresome stuff involving no shouting, at worst a testy exchange of emails between ppl who otherwise needn't ever interact

ok the situation has evolved a bit -- turns out the uninvolved person has been having quietly to wrangle a difficult slightly frightened old lady who demands everything to be as it always was -- not always an option when you're refashioning something used by many people, and when the crumbling and decaying aspect is the aspect everyone else wants tackled

the builder running the project did a fairly stellar job trying to calm her fears and talk her round but i suspect she will go back into her flat and alarm herself again, and keep her foot put down

i think the beef has been resolved since builders have carried on as they began (ie not dug up the section they laid down yesterday, as was being demanded)

i ended up doing a dull day's work on not enough sleep (it all blew up last night in email, and i worry even when it's not me going to be shouted at) but the completed section of path looks nice from here -- sadly the one cat who looked as if he was going to walk right across it per tradition sniffed at it gingerly and walked round on the flowerbeds

where is darraghmac, i need closure

She never came back, we moved away.

I realise this isnt great closure.

Id Google house fires in my home town but no thanks tbh

fair enough

Every now and then, the upstairs flat throw their cigs out of their window and into our garden. This can irritate the fuck out of me.

it probably irritates the dogs too

er, ha, i read that as "dogs" and not "cigs"

the resident most noisily active to get the paths resurfaced in the fierst place -- she is late middle age, quite unsteady on pins and (i suspect) has aspergers-related balance issues -- is now very vocally cross that halfway through the process the dug-up path is much worse than the path as it used to be (it will be finished in a week)

just heard her say loudly "i can't believe it" (my flat overlooks part of the path)

(i.e. this too will pass:, she is not the worst by any means and i feel for her plight, not being able to balance is p awful: i just sometimes wish "grit yr teeth and soldier on" wd occur to ppl dealing with short-lived processes THEY INITIATED, she is an intelligent person if a bit obsessive)

A bit unbalanced you might say? Sorry.

~post for "posts you didn't even for a second consider posting g to the "posts you had second thought about" thread~

lol it is all kicking off, the block that made least effort to contribute to the process and most fuss about the costs now HAAATE the result and are all angrily piling in proposing extremely expensive cosmetic changes which none of the other blocks want or will agree to

moral: (a) make yr block director turn up to meetings and represent you, (b) if you want it done a different way, do the research and legwork!

also a person and a cat have has already walked in the wet cement

I always think its a tragedy when municipal cement doesn't have graffiti or footprints in it

Especially paw prints.

Yes we asked them to tidy up the humanprint but leave the catprint.

next installment: suspended work now continuing once more, which i assume means angry complainers have been mollified, fingers x-ed this is sorted for now

probably doesn't belong on this thread (and besides i am in two minds abt it, since editing & rewrite are my meal-ticket) but blimey ppl's write-ups of meetings can be useless and unhelpful, how do you get thru adult office/professional life not being to do this competently? and yet many do! (and i am paid to tidy up after them so hey-ho, i don't actually mind this it just baffles me)

i love catprints in cement but spindly bird toe prints are my favourite, they look frail and absurd.

omg neighbour beef opened on a second front: old lady next door -- not part of blocks referred to above -- has someone in removing ivy (fair enough)

the ivy is actually growing up the wall of the recalcitrant block mentioned above (which looms over her garden) and round the side of her house on walls that overlooks my downstairs neighbour's garden -- i just heard her demanding that we and the middle block pay for its removal as a consequence

as far as i can see the roots are mostly in her garden (tbf they might also be round a corner where i can't see, in the garden of the recalcitrant block): anyway as far as i can tell from googling, the main responsibility for dealing with invasive ivy belong to the person whose land the roots are on (which seems definitively NOT to be our block) rather than ppl whose walls it is growing on (also not our block) -- though she is entirely within her rights to request access to cut it back when it's on her house, and the best access is via our garden

our blocks have serial history with this lady, she has more than once tried to get something for nothing before now in various shady instances

(meanwhile paths saga shd be over tomorrow, they have very nearly finished)

there was a huge furore outside my flat this morning - don't suppose you heard it mark? my downstairs neighbour's brother was going absolutely mental - i'd never seen the brother before, but the downstairs neighbour is fairly crazy, guy in his 50s, smokes weed all day, shouts at his wife and kids, probably violent, certainly sounds that way. for about 20 mins (and i left for work as it continued) the brother was outside the flat shouting up at my neighbour "you fucking pussyhole crackhead, come down here and i'll fucking kill you. you insult my wife, you beat your wife, you're a fat dumb cunt, i'm going to fuck you in the bum you pussyhole crackhead."

it was pretty insane - at one point some people tried to reason with the brother, i heard a posh voice say something that included "civilised human beings" in it which basically felt like racism to me. i did for a second think about advising the brother to maybe leave it, given someone was surely bound to call the police.

was a strange morning, knowing what i do of the neighbour, i'm inclined to believe the brother had legitimate grievance, and the ferocity of his anger suggested a long frustration with having such a c*** for a brother. i suggested to my flatmate i go down and pay the brother £20 then let him into the building to do his worst.

yes i did! just as a noise in the distance though, till i realised it had been going on for a LOOOONG time -- can't see that bit of the road from my flat so i went up on the roof to rubberneck, just as the shouting guy got into his car and drove off, laughing in a kind of loudly despairing way :(

laughing in a kind of loudly despairing way

hmm, board description or screen name?

given someone was surely bound to call the police

not i think just for shouting, even prolonged shouting -- there's quite a lot of that (which is why it didn't really register immediately with me)… ppl often yell up and down the passage, coming from or going into the square: the sound bounces right up into my front rooms (which is why i work at the back, where it sounds much further off), and i think most hearing it just shrug and wait for it to move on

(changing demographic may have bearing on this) (haha ie YOU)

haha - this went on for ages though and it was EXTREMELY loud and aggressive - like people were visibly distressed walking past - it was about a half hour of it. i feel like people are okay with indiscriminate street shouting, or even a few minutes of violent verbal barracking, but this was like deep obscenity and profanity over and over and over for 30 mins at about 0830.

A DISGRACE.

We've just moved into a new building and I'm trying to systematically talk to everyone in the surrounding flats and it appears that we have a very low bar to clear because everyone fucking hated the woman who lived there before us.

of the 32 flats in the blocks there are now maybe three whose occupants have lived here longer than me, i realised to my mild distress recently (26 years in november) (and 15 of those an ilxor)

Under 100 posts? I'm a bit surprised this thread isn't one of the top 25 longest threads on ILE.

I've had numerous others on the go over the years

paths update: project completed!

except that one of the other blocks has piped up saying that a small element outside their front door has been completely forgotten (which is true! i had forgotten abt it and so had the contractor -- so they are arguing it out over the phone, i don't think it's a big deal)

however one of the other blocks just gave me a bottle of champagne for all the work i did getting this to happen so i am fairly pro-neighbours currently :)

sometimes a bit of appreciation goes a long way. congratulations on your success.

ok i think the project is complete, all beefs squared all debts paid X[

I've done it once or twice myself.

oh dear lads