Tell me about your shitty neighbours

[SpeedbirdSquawker]

So before 9am this morning, after a lovely soak in the bath, I thought I would potter out into the garden with a cup of tea and listen to the birdsong. No chance of peace and quiet. My neighbours two doors down were out with their constantly screaming/crying young boys and playing loud music. What is wrong with people?

If it's not them making noise, my next door neighbour is out playing whatever loud on her phone and then my other next door neighbours often blast music. There's no peace!

I am on a mission to move next year though.

@JaneyGee I totally agree, I consider myself politically left but get so frustrated with champagne socialist friends and family not understanding how hard these situations are. The Roma family on my street make everyone’s lives hell. This doesn’t mean I think all Roma people are bad but their lifestyle is not neighbourly. If I say anything to friends they just think I am being racist. However they all live in posh neighbourhoods and just don’t get it. I understand why people get fed up with politically parties that are supposed to help the working class ☹️

I had neighbours who had a BBQ that would literally bellow smoke. Obviously they had it no where near their house. All of us neighbours had to close our windows and doors whenever they lit it up. Their kid was very annoying and whiney too.

I half agree

I believe they actually did this in Langley Mill/ Heanor Derbyshire. There were two roads ( not called roads) that the most truculent and difficult tenants were housed in after multiple evictions for anti social behaviour. Homes had sofas in the front gardens, partial bricks where adults would throw missiles at each other lying in the residential street, windows put in, etc you name it. The Council didn’t lift a finger, they had a duty to house the families, they did so, end of obligation and it left other roads so much happier, safer and quieter.

As a young and idealistic leftie I was rather horrified when a senior staff member took me on a ‘tour of the area’ and included these ‘special’ roads. However, having now grown up, I do think something has to happen, the sheer misery endured by many and caused by a few is horrendous and the few always seem to get away with the behaviour for a lot longer than anyone else. You can argue mental health ( some stories on here certainly lead to that conclusion) but another persons’ mental health issue should not become someone else’s misery.

Still a leftie, though just less idealistic.

Have lived in flats and on rough council estates but mainly had tolerable neighbours. Currently living in a new estate and the level of noise is incredible. It's just normal family noise but i can hear all my neighbours as if they were in my garden. I think it's the small back-to-back gardens. However a Nigerian lady down the street often sings to herself and she has a beautiful voice. I love listening to her

My neighbours think it is acceptable to park in the turning circle even though doing so blocks access to half of my driveway. I feel your pain.

I'm not going to read all the posts because it makes me too angry. I hate noise and am an intorvert, so need a lot of alone time to recover from the working week. If I had noisy, confrontational people next door, and couldn't escape, it would be a death sentence. It's bad enough being woken by boy racer idiots with their screeching, exploding exhausts.

I've known two people driven to suicide attempts by nightmare neighbours. One was a girl with severe anxiety. She was a recovering agoraphobic who ended up in a flat with a scumbag guy upstairs. He'd play loud music at three in the morning, let his dog bark at all hours, had parties, and so on. After she complained he'd kick her door as he went out, and encouraged his vile druggy friends to do the same.

The other was a sweet gay guy who lived with his mum. They had a woman next door with MH problems who persecuted them. On the other side, they had teenage boys who'd rev their motorbikes outside the window, throw their cigarette butts into his garden (all to upset him).

Also, I worked with a woman who had a drug addict move in next door. It broke her. She'd come into work a shell of the woman she used to be. In the end, she ended up dosed to the eyeballs on anti-depressants and xanax.

This shit is happening up and down the country every day – lives being ruined.😡

After having a day of one side power washing all their cars and then the street🫤 I went to the kitchen to start dinner and the other side was strimming and mowing their garden. I love the location of our house, and what it could potentially become, but the noise here is sometimes just too much 🙁

@SerenityNowInsanityLater , that sounds like my neighbours, constantly shouting on speakerphone, and having endless barbecues.

Luckily I live in a great building now with great neighbours who all came to my wedding recently! However I had a really vile one in a previous place.

I lived in a tenement flat for 5yrs in a lovely little town. Great flat, wonderful landlord, super happy. The neighbour across the landing was a single middle-aged woman who was sickly sweet with us for the first few years while creating merry hell for everyone else in the building and my landlord. She would create some wild, perceived slight and turn absolute harpy on whoever's turn it was to cop her wrath. Her family were well known in the area for being volatile, so they'd get involved too. It was all very cyclical and bipolar-esque in presentation, and utterly draining... The stints of random projects started at 4am in the shared yard were bonkers. She'd be out there for 3 or 4 days straight without sleep, blaring music, power tools and drinking. All would inevitably end in her drunk and locked in her flat for a month with various holes, piles of rubble or broken things strewn about for months. Rinse and repeat.

We were polite and kept her at arms length but inevitably it was then my turn for The Wrath. She literally stalked me for months. Every single time I left my flat she would follow me down the street/into the garden shouting abuse at my back, her and her family shouting homophobic abuse in the windows, threatening my pets, installing cameras to watch me... All because I asked if she could perhaps not put up the massive glass greenhouse she'd got on a freebie page on the shared drying green at 7am before discussing it with the other neighbours first. An absolute highlight was her coming at me with a glass bottle and having to be rugby tackled by her crony when I finally snapped 6 months in and told her to fuck off and leave me alone.

Hell on earth, all while nursing a dying relative, a redundancy, my partner's affair, our subsequent break-up and trying to find somewhere else to live. I was an absolute wreck and had a breakdown not long after. Looking back, obviously I should've got the police involved but it would've escalated it even further and I couldn't contemplate that with everything else going on while still having to live there and trying to find somewhere else to stay. I hope she stands on a plug every day forevermore.

Sorry, that’s utter nonsense!

We live on a really nice cul de sac of ten houses. Everyone gets on and we’re all considerate to each other when it comes to noise and parking, we all moved in around the same time ten years ago when the houses were new builds.
Unfortunately our neighbours moved a few months ago, they said they’d sold to a lovely family.

They have six children between them, aged between 4 and 10, and they’re not always all there together but there always seems to be at least three and they’re so noisy. It’s just constant screeching, and they’ve placed a trampoline right next to our fence and our patio.
There are also three dogs which bark non stop, I’ve just heard them have their final 15 minutes bark of the day just before Midnight. Yesterday it was 28° and we had to shut the windows at the back of the house as the noise was just too much. We’d actually planned to eat dinner outside but the noise and lack of privacy due to the trampoline being used and a football coming over the fence every few minutes put us off. In the space of 15 minutes while I was cooking dinner this evening they came round four times to ask for their ball back.

All that noise from them and they have the nerve to have a do not disturb sign on their door due to the man working night shifts every other week, that results in us being disturbed almost daily by couriers asking if we’ll take parcels in for them when it’s displayed. We did at first but refuse now.

We’re reluctant to speak to them about any of this because we had a problem neighbour at our previous house, even though we initially thought they were really nice people, and don’t want to go through that again. Their son used to throw things over the fence when our children were playing out. It started off with toys and even his mothers jewellery (!) but then he started throwing tools like screwdrivers and chisels so we had to ask if they could stop him but according to the dad their son could do “what the fuck he liked in his own garden” and after that we were sworn at and threatened by the man whenever we saw him and every time we went on holiday we came home to find things like drain pipes broken or eggs had been thrown at the windows at the back of the house. Our car was keyed on the drive once, a plant pot disappeared from by the front door.

God she sounds like hard work.