Tag Archives: neighbor

Thanks old dude…

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I spent most of Saturday morning outside laying siege to the trees, bushes, and random foliage that kept smacking me in the face while I was cutting the grass. Sure, I could just duck, but that’s nowhere near as fulfilling as chopping off branches and making nature look you want it to look. While I was standing hip deep in the ditch obliterating a tree that had no business growing there in the first place, I heard a car pull up behind me and a door open. It’s my experience that random people stopping by for anything usually doesn’t end well and I expected a pitch about why I should come to their church or at the very least who I needed to make a donation to some cause or another.

What I ended up with was an introduction to the old dude and his wife who live diagonally across the street from me – nice people who just wanted to stop and say thanks for making the outside of the place not look like crap. Not surprisingly, he brought up the previous tenants who apparently were every bit as worthless as I imagined them to be. Not like that’s a surprise, but it’s always nice to have confirmation. Other than keeping things mowed at a reasonable length and laying down plenty of weed killer, I haven’t actually done much. I should probably be grateful to the last guy for setting the bar so low.

The old dude would be less impressed if he saw the inside of the place with its god awful drywall patches, cut-ins done but walls not painted, doorknobs missing latches, and general lack of even the most basic maintenance. I’m fixing the things I can with the tools and supplies I have on hand, but lord knows I’m not sinking a dime of my own money into this place. I just need to nurse it through the next year or two and then it will be someone else’s problem. There’s very little I can do to remedy a cheapskate landlord or lazy property management, so the least I can do while I’m here is try to prevent this place from being that house that drags down everyone else’s property values by having that nice abandoned look about it. But seriously, thanks for noticing.

Tenancy…

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The transition from homeowner to tenent hasn’t been what I would call smooth. As a homeowner, I probably established what most would consider slightly exagerated expectations for service and reliability. When things broke, they went to the top of my list of things to fix, I either went to Lowe’s for the appropriate equipment and supplies or called in the trades to get the job done. As a tenant, obviously the process is a little different. I call the property manager and leave a voicemail. I wait a day. Then I call again and follow up with an email. Then I wait a day. Then I call again and usually manage to talk to him on this third attempt where he says “oh yeah, I’m working on that. I’ll be over tomorrow.” And then we wait some more.

As it stands as of this morning, I’m waiting on six different things to happen: 1) The former tenant’s junked Ford Expedition is still sitting in the driveway. That was supposed to be moved out sometime around June 6th; 2) The 19 inch television sitting on the deck that the property manager says he wants to take to his hunting camp. It’s been rained on three times in the last two weeks. Yeah, that will probably still be sitting there a month from now; 3) The wire dog run was supposed to go at the same time he picked up the Expedition; 4) The garbage disposal went out early this week. He still hasn’t acknowledged the messages I’ve sent about that; and 5) The $100 washing machine that he said had been rebuilt will do everything a washing machine is supposed to do… except drain the water once the tub is filled. I left a voicemail about that yesterday, but when I drove by the manager’s place on my way to the laundromat yesterday afternoon his truck and boat were gone, so there’s not much chance he was paying attention to that; 6) The moldy wall has been nicely cut and hauled away – but that leaves the small matter of having a large part of the basement I can’t do anything with until, you know, it has actual walls again.

The actual owner lives in Germany now, so once I dig up his address Monday  morning I’ll get a message off to him. I’ve tried being the good neighbor, but since that doesn’t seem to get results worth a tinker’s damn, I’ll have to start being the sonofabitch neighbor who beats on the letter of the lease. This should be fun.

Pickets…

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If a man’s home is his castle, mine is now defended by a 6’2’’ stockade fence. I was just in the back yard and not only could I not see the dipshit neighbor’s overgrown yard, but their poor dumb Rottweilers didn’t know I was out there; which means they didn’t spend the half an hour barking at me.

It was peace, quiet, and a significantly decreased level of annoyance. I know of at least a few trees that didn’t die in vain.

Fencing…

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I’m probably a lot more excited about this than I should be, but I finally found a landscape contractor and have him under contract to put in my fence. Assuming the weather holds, there should be a crew here tomorrow setting the posts. No more view of the neighbor’s ratty-assed, weed ridden back yard… Now that’s worth twice the estimate.

The waiting was the hardest part…

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It’s said that patience is a virtue. It’s never been one of my particular favorites, but sometimes it pays off. I got home from work this afternoon to find that one of my neighbors has finally started putting up a privacy fence… meaning that I can put in the two end sections (saving beaucoup dollars over having to install the whole thing myself) and be relieved of the annoyance that is the back yard of my neighbor to the west. My new favorite neighbor’s contractor is supposed to drop off an estimate for me tomorrow. Next time I see her walking the dog in the morning, I’m gonna kiss that woman… Tongue, no tongue, totally her choice.

Dear Neighbor… again…

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Dear Neighbor,

Maybe you’ve been reading my blog, since it seems that you’re managing to get your trash can in from the curb by the time the weekend rolls around these days. Of course your lawn still looks like shit, so maybe you haven’t been keeping up after all.

It’s Sunday morning and I know I’m not really a late sleeper these days. It’s something close to physiologically impossible for me to sleep later than 7:00. You, on the other hand, were clearly up at 6:00, because that’s when you put your two Rottweilers out in their cage in your back yard (Incidently, I don’t really think an 8×6 cage is really big enough for two full-grown rotts). I know it was 6:00 because that’s when they started barking. You might remember it because we made eye contact as I glared at your sweat-suit wearing ass through my just-opened blinds.

In case you missed it, when you put your dogs out in the morning, they bark the whole time they are outside. It’s not so much a big deal during the week when I’m up at 5:30 anyway, but on the weekends, and since you know they are going to spend the next half hour barking at God knows what, maybe you could get up, put on their leashes and actually take them for a quick walk rather than sticking them in the cage 20 feet from my bedroom window.

So, dear neighbor, you are the clinical definition of a fucktard. I don’t usually wish bad things on people… mainly because I’m ambivalent about most of the asshats I’m forced to deal with on a regular basis… but in your case, I’m making an exception.

Regards,

Jeff

Suburban bliss…

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I think ranting about my neighbor is going to become a regular feature here. There’s just too much good (bad) stuff to pass up…

Given the ridiculous heat and the fact that my lawn is staying alive only through the nourishing power of fertilizer and thousands of gallons of irrigation, I mow, on average, every other weekend. I did the mowing, did the trimming, and was putting the power equipment away when my neighbor fired up his, much more wussy than mine, mower. Not a big deal, glad to see the guy take an interest in lawn care. I won’t get into the fact that he actually ground it down to bare earth or that in the 6 months grass has been growing, he has never actually done any trimming.

Hearing the neighbor shut down his mower, I stepped onto the back patio for a tasty smoky treat and to look askance at the travesty the guy regularly inflicts on his lawn. I know my lawn and it only took a quick look over to see that something wasn’t right. Somehow, this putz had managed to leave a three foot tall swath just on his side of the property line between our houses. I know it’s on his side of the line because there’s a steak at the back corner and another at the front curb and that remembering my high school geometry, I can identify a line using those two points.

I’ll be the first to admit that property boundaries on our subdivision are a little odd, but they are all straight lines, rather than the gently curving arc that now appears to separate us. Really, numbnuts, how the hell can you not know where your property stops? And even if you didn’t know, the part I cut twenty minutes before you started should have been a pretty damn good indication. Yes, I know it seems strange and intuitively, you’d think that the boundary would be equidistant between our houses, but in reality, 2/3 of the open space is on your side of the line.

If you can’t get something this relatively easy figured out, how in the name of all things holy do you function in actual society and deal with issues that require more than breathing and walking all at the same time?

Someone once commented on good fences making good neighbors… do you suppose that’s still true when you make your fence out of razor wire and seed it with claymores?

On my side of the fence…

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It’s taken thrice weekly watering, half a dozen applications of fertilizer since early March, weekly trimmings from the lawn service, and going nearly bankrupt to pay for water bills, but my lawn is finally greener than the neighbors. That’s not to say it’s green, however. The 13 inch rain deficit in Memphis has helped assure that it probably won’t reach that milestone any time soon. But it is a better shade of dark yellow than the next guy, so I’m formally declaring victory.