That’s it. I’m going to keep quiet no longer and I’m finally going to write about… the shit my neighbours have complained about.
For context, there are 3 neighbours in this discussion, which I’m going to give nicknames…
Opposite
Unsurprisingly, they live opposite us. They’ve been really good since we moved here around 10 years ago. We take in parcels for each other and have had a cordial relationship.
Attached
Their house is attached to ours. She hates cats and have told us as much. We have 2 cats.
Detached
They’re on the other side of Attached but their house is not attached.
A parcel courier told me that they’ve told them to never ask to look after a neighbour’s parcels because they’ll always refuse.
In all 3 cases the neighbours are a lot older than us and I would say for certainty are all retired. Maybe having that amount of time on your hands has something to do with this.
So, those are the neighbours.
Lights, camera.. action
A few years back I got some security lights for the side of the house. There’s a gate at the front and a long alley-way down to the back. This is between my house and Detached. Between us is a fence, which is theirs.
These were PIR lights which I angled to come on whenever it detected someone coming down the side of the house and to illimunate that too.
Soon, there was a knock at the door. It was Detached. No pleasantries, just asking for me to do something about the lights because, when they came on, the light would go into their house. Which of course, it did, but not directly. There’s a fence between us but it’s not ever high.
All I could do was re-angle the lights further towards my house. In the end they mainly illuminated the wall rather than anything else. One solution would have been to have mounted them lower but they’re not very secure if they’re within grasp of anyone suspicious.
In the end, the acute angle meant that water got into them and they stopped working anyway. I took them down.
Meanwhile, Detached has put up their own bulkhead light, directed straight towards us. The PIR is around the back of the house so it comes on even if they’re not down the side of their house. It shines directly into our side windows.
I’ve not complained as I don’t feel the need to but it’s odd that they feel they can do exactly the thing that they didn’t want me to. It was some time after my lights too, so I don’t feel it was done out of any kind of petty revenge. Pretty odd, though.
Anyway, that’s the lights. Now the camera.
After I got rid of the lights, I put up a camera instead. It had been up for some time before Detached spoke to me about it. Again, no pleasantries, just a passive-aggresive grumble about how it can see him coming out of his side door (that’s the one with the light directly above it). I’ve no idea how he knew that – looking at the camera footage it was capturing probably centimetres of footage above the fence. I adjusted it – so minutely that you wouldn’t have been able to see the difference from the ground, but enough that it would only capture below the fence line. Again, though, I had it mounted so low an angle that it wasn’t as useful as it should have been. In the end, WiFi issues meant that I gave up on this and took it down.
Car Parking
The other week I was packing the car for a holiday. Opposite came out and asked if I was going away. I hesitatingly said I was because I don’t like people to know.
“I don’t want to fall out with but…”
That’s not a good start to what they were about to say, because it means they already have.
They had 2 issues…
- Guests came a couple of weeks previous and parked their car outside their house. And it was part on the pavement too.
- My wife’s car was currently parked outside their house and they have guests coming next week, whilst we’re away
I’m not sure what the first issue is to do with me. Why didn’t they say anything at the time? How someone parks is not my problem, nor is it even illegal. Just a nuisance.
For the second, let’s just remember that the road space outside your house does not belong to you – you have no ownership over it. And the fact that they expected us to know that they would have guests whilst we were away… who knows. I was puzzled.
I should also point out that Opposite have a good length of drive, as well as a garage, neither of which I do.
I smiled nicely, thanked them for letting me know and agreed we’d move the car.
My wife promptly moved it to outside Detached’s house – she can’t park it in front of ours because Attached park one of their cars there. Detached also has a garage and an even longer drive.
Within minutes, they were out. Was I going on holiday? Sigh. Yes, I was. They had guests too which we someone were expected to know to accomodate. I explained that we’d already been asked to move it from opposite and compromised on my wife moving it up further so that they could get a car behind. In the end, it was so far forward that it was partially blocking our drive (we have a short drive that can fit one car on it, usually mine), which wasn’t great.
tl;dr – neither neighbour wants my wife to park outside their house and expects us to not do so when going away for any length of time in case they happen to have guests. Unreasonable?
Certainly from the aggressiveness of Opposite, they seem to have fallen out with us about it, despite never having mentioned it before.