quote:

Originally posted by darthfuster:
Many moons ago when Mrs df and I were in married student housing, we had a neighbor that didn't like that I could fit 3 vehicles on our assigned parking pads. This neighbor began parking her vehicle such that she blocked ingress and egress to one of my pads. I took pictures of her car and how she blocked my access.

I went to the campus housing authority and asked him a few short questions. Among them were, "Is there a limit to the vehicles I can have on my pads if they fit and do not block others? Am I afforded unfettered ingress and egress to my pads?" I knew the answers to these questions but wanted his attention to this matter focused. He answered in my favor.

At that point I showed him the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against her that I had taken and asked if I could be accommodated according to his recognition of my rental agreement. The next morning he and the maintenance manager knocked on my and her doors. We all met at the end of our pad approaches wherein he described to her that she was in violation of her agreement. He had the maintenance guy paint a no park zone where our approaches intersected and stated from now on anyone even slightly over the yellow lines at any time would get a parking infraction.

That neighbor, in her anger, disclosed that she had a sub-renter who needed more parking. OOPSIE! No sub-renters allowed. Broken rental agreement. You are now evicted.

So, with patience and the Socratic method, one can leverage his interests.

Patience and the Socratic method. Should look into that.

Have your neighbors chip in to rent one of those Toro Pro Force tow behind leaf blowers like they use on golf courses to clear fairways. Have everyone blow their shit in the street and blow it all into his yard. Fortunately, most of my neighbors are good people and look out for one another.

Never really had issues with any neighbors although currently a neighbor on one side has a boxer that has to be retarded. As soon as it gets out the back door it starts barking and anything, everything and nothing. It just barks to bark. It's annoying as you can't sit out back and enjoy the peace and quiet but to his credit he does call it in pretty quickly. I hear him calling for it to come get a treat so he's rewarding that behavior rather than try to correct it.

I do take pleasure in making a bit more noise than I should when taking trash or recycling material to the receptacles that are on the side of my house facing his as it sets is dog off and I can hear it yapping its head off inside too.

I have had one incident where a sick tree was dropping branches on the neighbor's side of the property line and he cut the limb off our tree, not at the property line, but at the trunk, which was about fifteen or twenty feet on our side of the line. He did this when we were not home. I confronted him, he said that the branches were dropping on his new truck.

I looked at him and asked, "Why didn't you come and talk to me about it? That's what neighbors do."

He thought for a minute or two, then kind of sheepishly said, "You're right." We were on good terms after that for years, until he sold and moved.

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Other than that, no neighbor problems, but the HOA's management company is a major pain in the ass, sending nagging letters to homeowners about petty, minor, cosmetic things ("you need to pressure wash your driveway" ) when they should be handling infrastructure things like large potholes in the street that were not repaired for more than eight months, entry gates (gated community) that function for a day or two until somebody tries to crash through, and then weeks or months to repair, a sidewalk next to the covered bridge that has been barricaded and unsafe for more than a year.

I've got many stories. I basically try to avoid neighbor confrontations and try to be as good as I can be with them to avoid conflict because you never know how crazy someone can be. I've seen too many episodes of "Fear Thy Neighbor" to get buck wild. Two incidences are memorable tho - three actually.

First one was when I lived in AZ. Devil dogs next door barked 23 hours a day, were left outside and given minimal care. Many calls to animal control proved futile. You could not sleep due to the barking. The owners were druggies who didn't care. My druggie roommate at the time would throw bits of Xanax bars wrapped in cheese over the fence to shut them up. It worked.

Second time was in Cleveland Heights. I lived in a large house that had first and second floor apartments, third floor was a small attic apartment, all floors shared a back staircase that led to first and second floor kitchen back door, third floor main door. Third floor kid moves in. A flamboyantly gay black kid about 19 y/o. He's turning tricks up there, a nonstop parade of middle age and older white dudes up there cornholin' him, trudging up and down those back stairs right past my kitchen 24/7. They always parked in the driveway, always blocked my car for work in the morning. I'd have to go up there and wake up a dude my dad's age to move his car so I could get to work.

After about a month of this, I confront gay kid. A week later someone breaks in and ransacks my apartment by climbing in through the 100 year old window that doesn't lock. MY cheap ass landlord "fixes" the problem by nailing the window shut. I moved out shortly thereafter.

Third time was this cranky old broad. I had finally moved on up to the east side and owned a house in the country with my now wife. This cantankerous old coot would scream at me everytime I did yard work. We lived in the fucking woods but she would get mad and say that I was disturbing the wildlife habitat by blowing leaves. One day she climbed the steep, 50 yard embankment that separated our houses just to scream at me. She tripped, rolled down the embankment through a briar patch and her 90 year old papier-mache skin got torn from her bones. She was bleeding everywhere, her crocks got blown off of her feet. I ran to her and attempted to dress her wounds, she just continued screaming about the wildlife habitat and ambled off to her house.

She and her husband ended up dying in that house and from what I heard, the inside was like a rat's maze hoarder house.

Old lady Schmidt lived next door to us when I was a kid. One day she dies, her niece inherited the property and moves in with her pittbull who barks at everything, including anyone in our house while walking thru the kitchen(you can see thru the window where the dog is).

Six months goes by…my dad who visited her nicely and talked nicely to her since the beginning, gets animal control involved….then it upgrades to calling the police reference to barking dogs…dad does this for months…daily and gets the records from the 911 center(it’s 1980s- so maybe it was just the cops)

Dad goes to court about the dog…judge gives her a month to get the dog under control…nothing happens..

Dad goes back to court…dog gets his vocal cords cut.

Now all it does is whisper barks at every thing and us walking past the window…

Months go by…it’s still able to be heard while we are inside the house, while the dog goes batshit crazy when we walk they the kitchen.

Dad does what he should have done to begin with. He and a friend pull the fence up from the ground and allow the dog to get under the fence, they catch it and take it somewhere else. No muss, no fuss, no witnesses.

She comes over that night and asked if we know where her dog is. Dad tells her that he has no idea and it’s been blissful since he got home and to go fuck off.

These stories are great. I'm pretty certain my next place will be in the woods, with a gated driveway and without a visible neighbor.

quote:

Originally posted by crue-dell:
These stories are great. I'm pretty certain my next place will be in the woods, with a gated driveway and without a visible neighbor.

Our neighbors are the reason we are moving during this crazy real estate market. I can’t sit on my back patio without their dog barking and then getting the rest of the dogs going.

There’s other issues like leaving trash out, loud vehicles at 4:30AM, etc.

We’ve written the HOA to no avail. So time to get the flock out of here.

My real estate plan always works out to buying high and selling low anyway.

I’m on a 70 acre farm. The back side of the property butts up to a sorta rich private road neighborhood type place. The guy that was renting our fields years ago had a cow get loose and it was walking through a guy’s yard making a mess. Rich dude drives over here in his BMW and starts walking around the property. I go ask why he’s here and he starts in on me about the cow. I said I’d go call the farmer to come get the cow. Guy won’t shut up and if I turn away to go call he gets louder. I finally cut him off and said the sooner I make this call the sooner the cow will be out of his yard. Didn’t help, still running his mouth. At this point I tell him to shut up and get off my property or I’ll have him arrested for trespassing. He runs his mouth for a few seconds then has the sense to leave

Turns out it was a tree on his property that fell on the fence so he had to pay for tree removal, fence repair and the cost to fix his landscaping. He’s had the good sense to never try me again. It’s been over 10 years.

A friend living in Charlottesville had trouble with a neighbors dog peeing in his azaleas and killing them.

So he mixed some mineral oil in some dog food and planted it in his flower beds.

Several days later, there are rugs and towels hanging on the neighbor's cloths line. After several incidents, no more dog trespassing on his property.

quote:

Originally posted by Leemur:
I’m on a 70 acre farm. The back side of the property butts up to a sorta rich private road neighborhood type place. The guy that was renting our fields years ago had a cow get loose and it was walking through a guy’s yard making a mess. Rich dude drives over here in his BMW and starts walking around the property. I go ask why he’s here and he starts in on me about the cow. I said I’d go call the farmer to come get the cow. Guy won’t shut up and if I turn away to go call he gets louder. I finally cut him off and said the sooner I make this call the sooner the cow will be out of his yard. Didn’t help, still running his mouth. At this point I tell him to shut up and get off my property or I’ll have him arrested for trespassing. He runs his mouth for a few seconds then has the sense to leave

Turns out it was a tree on his property that fell on the fence so he had to pay for tree removal, fence repair and the cost to fix his landscaping. He’s had the good sense to never try me again. It’s been over 10 years.

Not sure about VA, but around these parts it's your responsibility to fence cattle out of your property rather than the cattle owners' responsibility to fence them in.

I have to say this has been one of the better threads on SF in quite a while!

While I don’t have any issues with my current neighbors worth writing about I do have one particular event that took place in our previous home about 30 years ago…
We lived in a rural area with large multi acre lots and we had just purchased the adjacent lot to ours so that I could take a few trees out and improve our views. We didn’t know our neighbors all that well having just finished the house a few months earlier but there were two brothers that lived in adjacent homes just about 1/4 mile up the road from us. They both had Rottweilers. One was well behaved and relatively friendly. The other was a complete terror and would just as soon attack you as look at you…. So one day I was on our lot with my backhoe taking out the tree stumps when I distinctly heard 3 shots close by. Now this isn’t that unusual living in the country but it seemed closer than normal. About 3 minutes later a neighbor about 200 yards from us comes up in his pick up truck and walks up to me carrying a large black plastic bag… He asked me if I could just bury this in a hole on my property…Alarm bells start going off in my head as I know he had two very small kids and I wasn’t sure what was in the bag so I told him to show me what was in there… He hesitates for a moment, then opens the bag and I see the now dead Rotty in the bag. Before I could ask WTF just happened he told me that his small 3 year old daughter was playing on their back deck with his wife and the dog came up on the deck and started going after his daughter. His wife screamed and when he saw what was about to happen he pulled out his pistol and killed the dog, right there on his deck.

So I burried the dog deep in the ground and about a week later I saw the owner ask me if I had seen his dog, nope, not for a while!

Back when I was living in a more dense suburban area we had a single female next door neighbor who was a bit out of control. She ended-up with this dirtbag boyfriend.

At some point this boyfriend had ended-up in the slammer. Got out, and the circus resumed. After about the third incident between her and this guy I marched over, knocked on the door, told her "I'd like to have a word with your boyfriend." She took one look at me, opened the door, and let me in. I gave him a steady look and told him calmly, but firmly "This is a nice, quiet neighborhood. I'll have no more of this. Understand?" He nodded.

There were no further incidents.

In our current home the off-the-leash wife of a neighbor let one of her younger brothers move in with them. Guy turned out to be a pervert. One day I come home to have my wife tell me this guy had been exposing himself to her. Told neighbor "Make it stop."

He failed to make it stop. Consulted cops. "Do not approach the pervert or the neighbor again. Take photos if you can. Call us." So one day another neighbor got photos. Cops were called. Formal complaints were filed. Pervert was arrested.

Subsequently, the neighbor (who was no doubt catching a raft of grief from his wife) had a conversation with the other neighbor and me. At one point "Are you threatening us, <name>?" He hastily back-pedaled. "No!" "Because <blah blah blah> sure sounded like a threat to me." He back-pedaled some more.

Eventually there was a court date, at which the pervert publicly apologized to both us and the other neighbor. (I think he got probation and an order for counseling for that.) He moved out of the one neighbor's home shortly thereafter.

A year or so later we heard he'd been charged with sexual misconduct, convicted, and was in the slammer.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:

quote:

Originally posted by Leemur:
I’m on a 70 acre farm. The back side of the property butts up to a sorta rich private road neighborhood type place. The guy that was renting our fields years ago had a cow get loose and it was walking through a guy’s yard making a mess. Rich dude drives over here in his BMW and starts walking around the property. I go ask why he’s here and he starts in on me about the cow. I said I’d go call the farmer to come get the cow. Guy won’t shut up and if I turn away to go call he gets louder. I finally cut him off and said the sooner I make this call the sooner the cow will be out of his yard. Didn’t help, still running his mouth. At this point I tell him to shut up and get off my property or I’ll have him arrested for trespassing. He runs his mouth for a few seconds then has the sense to leave

Turns out it was a tree on his property that fell on the fence so he had to pay for tree removal, fence repair and the cost to fix his landscaping. He’s had the good sense to never try me again. It’s been over 10 years.

Not sure about VA, but around these parts it's your responsibility to fence cattle out of your property rather than the cattle owners' responsibility to fence them in.

I responded to a number of neighbor disputes over the years. The worst was shots fired over parking places on the street. If you want to get a feel for the stupidity of humans, just respond to a few of these calls.

I now live in the country 13 miles from the nearest town. There are rednecks on my road with their trashy yards and junk cars but I can ignore that. But the developers are building like crazy in the area and I am sure I will have assholes to contend with before long.

I've got nosey neighbors, and they stare over the fence when we are outside on the deck.

I had a long running neighbor dispute involving a wealthy dude who wanted to own a zoo. Which included Peacocks. Peacocks can fly. And they scream a very loud creepy scream. And they like to do this early in the AM. So the Peacocks would fly off the wealthy dudes property at the crack of dawn, land on the neighbors roofs and screech at the top of their lungs. And thats when I had to become Peacock P.D. The most requested action from residents was for me to shotgun the birds off the roof. Tempting, but no! I tried to resolve it but wealthy dude just made excuses and ignored the problem. The situation resolved itself when the neighbors (who were fairly well off themselves) filed suit on the Peacocks owner, claiming the presence of the birds caused their properties to lose value. When the situation began to cost wealthy dude money, the Peacocks disappeared!

I lived once in a zero lot line community. A zero lot line is where the back wall of your house becomes the wall separating your property from your neighbors. There are no windows in that wall. The front and back walls of your property are seven foot high concrete thus forming a huge rectangle in which you live.

My neighbor on the back wall had two dogs. Those little bastards would bark continuously and non stop while they were not home. The car they drove had a turbo whine that was unmistakable. As soon as they would turn in the street, the dogs would go silent. I mentioned the barking but they denied it as the dogs never barked when they were home and they never heard them when they pulled in the driveway. We were loosing sleep with the constant barking.

One day they were packing their car for what seemed like a long trip. They left another neighbor in charge of the dogs. I knew this guy enough to say hello. Sure enough, the little fuckers started up again. I went
over to the guy they left in charge and asked him to come over to my house. When he got there they were in full bark mode. He listened for a few minutes and said he'd take care of it. His solution was to put the dogs in the house.

Now for the karma. The people returned from their trip the next day. As soon as they entered the house the screaming started. In one night these little fuckers tore up a sofa and chair plus chewed the crap out of their kitchen cabinets. They never spoke to me again and were thoroughly pissed at their friend for putting the dogs in the house. They sold and moved a few months later.

The ugly overgrown pine tree for 20 years on their property I trimmed the branches on my side, offered to pay half to take it down. Now it is a $7k removal, prior was $2K Still in touch with another previous neighbor.
Suck it Keith and Maria HAHAHAHA!

I strongly intend to buy land and plenty of it to not have anyone near me when I retire. I should probably start looking now.