Batshit Neighbours

[peonyblossom]

Please people of mumsnet regale me with your tales of batshit neighbours.

I have just been approached by my neighbour, who happens to be moving in two weeks (thank fuck because they are noisy inconsiderate arseholes!) , because her extended family have come to stay to help her move and are being disturbed when sleeping by noise from my house. Shocked - because though we are very considerate with noise, we have two small children so I was well prepared to apologise and see what we could do - I asked what the noise was.

The rain last night was far too noisy on my conservatory roof.

Now, the rain, especially when it is heavy like last night, is very noisy on the conservatory roof. It makes a right din and wakes me up too, it did last night. I got up and closed the window. However I am at rather a loss as to what I am supposed to do about it?

In any event I said I was very sorry that the weather on my building disturbed them, and invited her to bring me practical solutions on how to rectify the issue! She huffed, said I was unhelpful and left.

Couldn't make it up! Roll on two weeks....

My current neighbour is a 30 y old man who is obsessed with cats. He has 3 pedigree cats inside and every week there seems to be Amazon deliveries of new cat castles for them to play on. We have shared access across the back garden and every time we walk past his window his entire house appears to be kitted our like a cat softplay. He’s also taken it upon himself to start feeding all the neighbourhood cats (that are not strays). He leaves food out for them everyday and I’ve seen him chasing them down the street trying to entice them into his garden so he can fuss over them.

@Zippy1510 we had a cat mad neighbour. Problem is he was pretty much the opposite. A friend who had to go in his house one day for a job told us they came out scratching because it was like a cat hoarder tv show in there. Shit and piss everywhere, fleas all over, the cat flap was a hole in the door and they had no food. None of the cats were neutered and didn't live inside. Most just roamed the farm breeding with their siblings, starving and diseased and being completely feral.

With the help of the CPL we started trapping and neutering/spraying them all. The babies were trapped, treated, de-fleas and tamed by me before being re-homed. I don't give a shit what their actual "owner" thought. Our joint LLs had always left him to it as he'd lived there for about 40 years but supported me in catching all the 30+ farm cats. They weren't too happy when new cats started appearing though. Turns out he was picking up more! That's when they stepped in and told him no.

@Zippy1510

My current neighbour is a 30 y old man who is obsessed with cats. He has 3 pedigree cats inside and every week there seems to be Amazon deliveries of new cat castles for them to play on. We have shared access across the back garden and every time we walk past his window his entire house appears to be kitted our like a cat softplay. He’s also taken it upon himself to start feeding all the neighbourhood cats (that are not strays). He leaves food out for them everyday and I’ve seen him chasing them down the street trying to entice them into his garden so he can fuss over them.

Aww, he sounds lovely. So long as he keeps the house clean, I don’t see the problem. Some people are just passionate about animals.

Once had someone next door but 2 decide to keep their bins on our drive. (complicated set up with 2 rows of terraces at right angles with various rights of way through back gardens) Why they couldn't keep them in their front garden like everyone else does I don't know. When I objected they called me arrogant

@LillianBland His cats are very well looked after. Unfortunately he’s not the tidiest man and he tends to leave his cat food out in old pans and paper plates that blow into our garden. There’s also a lot of cat vomit around (I’m guessing from all the neighbourhood cats who pop over for their second supper) and a ton of flies when it gets warm. He’s very quiet though so that’s a plus!

You think you have a problem we have a neighbour who has an electric car which bleeps when it goes backwards on to their drive. Our next door neighbour has a retired chicken who has decided she is now a cockerel and crows every morning. Not even say about the neighbours who have bbqs ( the smell is gorgeous) and don’t invite us. Another neighbour has a wonderful apple tree which we can’t reach, should have planted it closer to us. Then there is the biggest neighbour The Sun, it makes the air too hot and we get sweaty and can’t sleep at night.

We have a neightbour that lives in a massive 6 bedroom barn conversion, so its very long and thin, one room wide. The huge kitchen diner (with adjoining games room) is down the far end away from our house and would be perfect for holding large noisy parties as we wouldn't hear much.

But no. They have a flimsy canvas Marquee/Party Tent in their 4 acre garden, which they have positioned to be as near to our bedroom as they can possibly get, a few feet away in the very corner of the boundary. Here they have parties until the early hours, loud music, shouting, laughing and the stench of weed drifting up to our bedroom. I lie there rigid with rage. The wife says things like "Oh sorry, that was , I was in bed down the other end and didn't hear a thing". Bitch. The husband is famous and i would so love to out him, but he's alright tbf, its just his wife who is an absolute cow.

@BigusBumus next time they start setting up tell them that they need to move it to the opposite end because it disturbs you unnecessarily. They have other places to have the party that doesn't infringe on others.

If they refuse, classical music on full blast towards your fence should do it. If you can't sleep then they bloody well can't enjoy their party.

Complained bitterly to us, landlord and council about my ants spilling out of my garden and congregating at the back of her house and besieging her in her own home! Every year without fail.

Wow you should be congratulated that you managed to train your ants so well!!!

Obviously the letter box during the daytime was not an option.

We have a similar situation and the man always insists on ringing our doorbell and waiting to hand us the post. In the daytime or evening, but it still always seems to be when we're in the middle of something and we're distracted and called away for no reason at all. It's a bit like when you get people who insist on calling you every time to tell you they've just sent you an email (that you can see on the exact same phone screen).

It's hardly any distance at all between our houses. I don't know if he's wanting us to thank him profusely for his bounteous munificence or to somehow make us feel personally guilty for having a postman who can't read.

When we get their post, we just go and post it through their letterbox - as any normal person would surely do.

DH and I once lived under a Chinese couple who fought constantly. They would scream at each other in Chinese and from time to time the woman would jump up and down in the middle of it and screech 'Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!' at him. It cracked us up.

Not that it did anybody else any harm, but we once had an old lady at the house opposite ours who would go out twice a day, every day, and water the flowers that she had all around her front door, inside her small storm porch. If we were ever outside at the same time as her, she would proudly show and tell us how nicely they were thriving.

To be fair, they did look OK and made the entrance to her door look quite attractive. The people at the plastics factory who made them should have been rightly very proud....

Just last night mine asked if I would be averse to them buying a trampoline and putting it up in my garden because there's is so full of crap.
It got a swift feck off from me!

DH and I once lived under a Chinese couple who fought constantly.

We had neighbours like that at our last house. They were perfectly pleasant to everybody else, but they seemed to really hate each other. They were just like John & Mary from Father Ted.

During one of their magna opera, he was down on their small front lawn shouting up at her and she was in the bedroom shouting down at him. She quickly realised that she had a natural advantage over him which she could exploit to gain the upper hand: gravity.

All manner of things came sailing out of the window in the direction of his head - cushions, pillows, bedding, clothes etc. It escalated quickly until she decided that a 'job-lot' approach would be more efficient and a complete (full) chest of drawers smashed down on to the ground, very narrowly missing him. She must have had quite some strength in her arms and big, wide-opening windows! We heard a police car siren very soon after that....

@HouchinBawbags

Oh yes! Someone who thinks like me.
Elgar’s pomp and circumstance ????
Mwah ha ha...

I'm loving this thread, more neighbour batshittery please!!!

I used to live opposite an elderly man in a block of flats in Liverpool - he lived with his sister. They hated each other. I used to work away a lot and would come back to find things in odd places - I began to suspect that one of them had a key and was letting themselves in as they pleased - probably to get away from the other one. So, I arranged for a deadlock to be fitted - it was just a Yale before. Better for my insurance, better for my peace of mind.

The locksmith had the grind out the space for it with a router - lots of noise for 2 minutes. The old man went batshit and kept saying he wasn't going to put up with this noise every time I went in and out. He couldn't seem to grasp it was a one off event to fit the lock.

His sister then went ape at me for upsetting him and ended by saying I must have something to hide and banging on about lack of trust. I think she had the spare key!

Maybe not batshit, but I'll tell this one anyway.

I used to live on the top floor of a 3 storey converted house. The bottom two floors were one family, but the mum lived with the two kids on the ground floor and the dad had the middle floor. He used to play stupendously loud music at all hours, but he did come in useful once when I had been viciously attacked by a massive bloody spider that had crawled out of a big old hole in my bathroom. That thing had a flick knife and was wearing gang colours, honestly.

I chucked my cat in the bathroom and waited for him to finally do something useful but, as usual with cats, this was in vain. He just looked at it and then proceeded to wash himself. So I trotted off downstairs to ask the strapping 6ft-odd bloke to help. He did the patronising help-the-little-lady laugh, who's scared of a weeny little spider thing and duly entered the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

Next there came a series of sounds that would not be out of place in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Banging, crashing, swearing, splashing (I don't know how this happened, no water in the bath), shouting and general mayhem. He emerged 5 minutes later ashen-faced and sweating having finally defeated the monstrous 4-inch beast. "Fuck me, love, that was a right bastard!" I just nodded and gave him a beer. We were comrades in arms ever after.

@AlltheRs

Didn't believe in flying ant day. Anything she didn't like was to do with us or from us. Complained bitterly to us, landlord and council about my ants spilling out of my garden and congregating at the back of her house and besieging her in her own home! Every year without fail.

Are you Hank Pym?

When I was extending my house the neighbours complained to the council how my extension would cause a shadow on their house and prevent them from having sunlight. Except that the sunlight comes from their side to ours. Idiots 🙄

Having communal gardens seems to bring out maximum bat shittery.

One of neighbours walks their cat on a lead right outside everyone's windows. She gets arsey when you ask her to go to the opposite end of the garden.

Another has taken it upon himself to water the grass everyday. It takes about 2 hours every evening and he leaves the place like a swamp. He insists on doing it on days that it's forecast for rain too.

My absolute favourite at the moment though- the people who are clearly missing out on winding up German tourists in the Algarve by using 1 towel to reserve 4 sunbeds, and are taking to recreating the vibe by reserving the communal washing lines with just a single tea towel!!!

Communal car parks are just as bad - I was once woken up at 5am on a Saturday by a neighbour banging down my door, screeching at me to move my car as I was blocking her in and she needed to go to work. I was most bemused as I wasn't really awake and my car was parked in my allocated space as usual, nowhere near her space (which did indeed have a car parked over it).

I told her that it wasn't my car and got a tirade of abuse how she didn't fucking care and I needed to fucking come and move it anyway or find the person that could move it.

I'm not entirely sure why she felt it was my responsibility to sort this out (given there were 5 other flats in the block too), but eventually a sheepish teenage visitor (assume friend of her sons woken up by the racket) came out of HER flat to move their car.

She said nothing to him, shot me an evil look and screamed FUCK OFF before tearing out of the car park.

@FattyBoom has she said anything to you since? Can she look you in the eye?

I don't know about batshit...

We've lived here for a couple of decades. In that time we have had convicted child abusers, drug dealers (they were always lovely to me), a house of ill repute (which was quiet apart from the ladies' dog which barked whenever someone unfamiliar came in, roughly every half hour throughout the night), the actual drug farm (and all in all, if it wasn't for all the stuff that goes on around it, I'd ask them back as they were lovely and quiet), the guy who had eighteen vehicles in the street as he was something of a mechanic (and totally lovely), the woman who due to circumstances took an axe to a cooker (and I really saw her point of view), the kids that literally demolished our wall, the neighbour who had fights every Friday, Saturday and Tuesday which needed the police and who had a broken living room window for over a year...

And I'm never one to be up on all the gossip. I sometimes wonder what I've missed.

A ndn once complained that my then 4yr old dd had come into his garden and moved his washing around.

1. The line was full of black socks so how would he know?
2. She couldn't reach.
3. She'd been at nursery at the time of the dastardly crime. 🤷‍♀️