Odd Neighbours / Neighbour Problems

Rockin' Robin · Sep 26, 2020

I had a name for one set of neighbours, I used to call the couple next door Mr and Mrs Sprat (after the nursery rhyme Jack Sprat). They seemed like people, who could suck the joy out of everything.

Upintheair83 · Sep 26, 2020

I love reading all your nicknames! I thought it was just my family who had names for neighbours! At my family home we have a house opposite where a couple lives and we call him ‘marigold’ because when he first moved in he kept washing the car with marigold washing up gloves on, next to him is who my dad calls ‘sicknote’ because he never seems to have worked a day in his life, then behind my mum and dad is ‘rabbit man’ because he has rabbits! Then next to him is ‘fag ash lil’ -I have no idea why) and next door to them is ‘bill and Ben’ because no matter what season it is they always wear hats on their heads!
At my own house we just have ‘RTK’ aka Rob the knob - because well, he’s a knob! And also it’s a play on the serial killer BTK because I swear he’s a serial killer too!

Facehugger · Sep 26, 2020

My OAP neighbours opposite are lovely, but god the woman is so nosey. She's got to know your business & pass it round. I call her Hilda Ogden. I was decorating once & I decided for a laugh I'd tape the currant bun over my windows. She asked me one day why I'd put paper over my windows, and said she thought it was to stop my dog looking out and barking at people going past.

I said 'no, I'm decorating, and it's to stop nosey bastards looking in at what I'm doing'

emm · Sep 26, 2020

not really a neighbour issue as such, but the few blocks of flats where I live have a whatsapp group to discuss a legal issue. I woke up this morning (at midday ) to over 200 messages! and they're not just one line, whole essay style messages. driving me mad and impossible ot keep up (so im not bothering !)

ChloChlo · Sep 27, 2020

We also have or had the "Phantom cougher", I had no idea who it is but it would come from the old houses opposite which has predominantly elderly. It was a very loud, hacking cough that would go on ALL day and all night, constantly, if it was window open weather up until earlier this year. It sounded incredibly unhealthy so I assume they have probably passed away.

Thelife&times · Sep 27, 2020

I have to be careful not to offend here......
My old next door neighbours belonged to let’s say, ‘a religious following.’ No problems there-I’m an atheist and very much an ‘each to their own,’ sort of person.
They started by putting religious paraphernalia through the door, which I politely read, then recycled.
Then when seeing them on the street, they were inviting me to meetings, saying they would knock on for me at X’o clock to take me, which again I politely declined.
It was then that things got nasty. Banging on the walls at all hours, watching me out of the windows when leaving/returning from work, damage to my letter box that was witnessed by another neighbour.
I went around to chat and say basically that we were fine before, so let’s go back to that.
To my absolute shock they called the police and said that I had threatened them!!!! I explained to the police from start to finish what had happened and they denied everything calling me a racist and that I had a problem with their religious beliefs
A criminal record and the stain of being classed as a racist would cost me my job so I had to move.
It was the best decision though as I now live next to a lovely, like-minded couple

Sailorontheseasea · Sep 28, 2020

My MIL’s neighbours are terrible. So many stories but they make my poor in laws lives hell the majority of the time (all started over putting the bins slightly too much on their drive by about 1cm!). One particular occasion that springs to mind is when we took our newborn son over to meet his grandparents and aunties, he must have been about a week old. It was the really hot heat wave summer so we were all outside but that’s when they decided to start spray painting in the garden and by spray painting I mean literally just stood there with their fingers on the cans gassing up the garden and my in laws. The smell was horrific and choking. But what was worse is that my FIL went upstairs to look out the window and they were stood pointing and laughing at the fence just spraying all this shit into the air. Sick fucks doing that knowing there was a newborn next door. So many more stories from them but they really are vile.

Kim Mild · Sep 28, 2020

After we pulled the carpet up in my dad's house before it sold , the dust must've made the smoke alarm beep. The next door neighbour text my fil, (they had his number through their work) who was on holiday at the time , to get my husband to around and sort it out. They didn't bother to contact me directly, or even the estate agent ( as for all they knew we could have already completed and no longer been responsible). They proper pissed me off. Thing is , they were always really noisy and played instruments, so we could hear them all the time.

When I lived in my first house , a family with loads of kids suddenly appeared next door , in a 2 bed house. They were squatting and were proper dirty and never put the bin out and just let the rubbish pile up, the kids ran riot and were always on the bed for food. The mother had a row with her fella , and he reported her to the police cos he was underage when they got together and she had to go on the sex offenders register and her kids had to go live with their (different) dads.

Dex · Sep 28, 2020

When it’s sunny and sitting out in the garden weather my next door neighbour plays the same 4 ABBA songs on a loop alldaylong

Custard cream · Sep 28, 2020

Glamourelle said:
My next door neighbour is my ex....so...there’s that

Omg!! I can’t even imagine!

Facehugger · Sep 29, 2020

I know someone who's next door neighbour toddles out in the garden for his morning fag and cough.....then undoes the tap on his catheter bag and empties it down the drain underneath the kitchen window not as bad as getting his whatnot out and actually piddling in the kitchen drain, but not what you want to smell when you're making your morning cuppa all the same

Sam Wood · Oct 1, 2020

I love this thread!
My grandma is a little old woman in her mid 70s, rather large lady and she’s not scared to speak her mind, she lives on a row of terraced houses. She once had a spat with someone down the road Over something and nothing and her teenage daughter called my grandma saggy tits. When she was telling me the story her actual words were “so I threw my tits over my shoulder and got on with my day” and it bloody cracks me up.
all the family have her saved as grandma saggy tits now and it’s been years. All the street refer to her as saggy tits too

Justhereforacreep · Oct 1, 2020

Sam Wood said:
I love this thread!
My grandma is a little old woman in her mid 70s, rather large lady and she’s not scared to speak her mind, she lives on a row of terraced houses. She once had a spat with someone down the road Over something and nothing and her teenage daughter called my grandma saggy tits. When she was telling me the story her actual words were “so I threw my tits over my shoulder and got on with my day” and it bloody cracks me up.
all the family have her saved as grandma saggy tits now and it’s been years. All the street refer to her as saggy tits too

This is the best thing I’ve read today and put a proper smile on my face, thank you

Sam Wood · Oct 1, 2020

Justhereforacreep said:
This is the best thing I’ve read today and put a proper smile on my face, thank you

It still makes me laugh and it’s been years

Chablis1 · Oct 4, 2020

Facehugger said:
Bless you x not nice is it, I feel for you too. Thing is, if I'd not noticed those bits of loft insulation on my landing, they could have been coming through any old time. It was around the time Les Battersby on Coronation Street crawled through into next doors house, we reckon that's where the druggie thickos got the idea from

Goodness! I remember that story line.

TheRealCarolDanvers · Oct 4, 2020

The man who lives across the street from me is a miserable twat. He’s obsessed with his car and other people’s cars, particularly how they are parked. The paint of the communal bays where everyone parks have dissolved away so sometimes people don’t park within the lines without realising and he gets angry about it. He doesn’t dare say anything to my fiancé who gave him an earful once after he banged on our door to complain that his tyre was on the line next to his but he still says things to me. Sometimes I see him standing in his doorway watching me park which puts me on edge. The other day I came out to find he’d done a really shit spray paint job on the lines around his car and it made me laugh out loud. Funny thing is, his car is an old banger and really not worth much yet he acts like it’s an Aston Martin. Very odd bloke, he has a partner who used to live with him but they argued a lot - sometimes in the street at 1am which would result in the police being called so she moved out, but I do see her very occasionally.

Neighbour to our right is lovely, he’s nearly 90 and his wife died a few years ago and throughout lockdown we’d buy groceries for him if he needed them. Neighbour on the other side is weird - we’ve lived here over 3 years now and I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve seen him. Always has the curtains shut and his garden is very overgrown.

ClockworkDolly · Oct 8, 2020

emm said:
Yeh I agree, not very feminist of me but when my bf (who is very strong and tall) moved in I made sure that my problematic neighbour knew about it and since then issues with them have stopped (fingers crossed until now anyway)

Funnily enough, the same tactic worked with me some years ago. My then-ex who was a strong, tall, well-built bloke made his presence known to the mouthy gobshites next door and they left me alone after he moved in. In fact one of their gobshite mates came round one day, mouthing off to my boyfriend and he walked up to gobshite and said, “yeah you want some then?” Gobshite backed away with his tail between his legs and his friend who lived next to us, also got the message. They were really nice to us after that and we never got any trouble from them. But before my ex moved in, they would ride roughshod over me and the anxiety I suffered because of their awful behaviour, nearly drove me mental.

Karma came and got them in the end though. They split up a good few years down the line and subsequently had their house repossessed. They were into all kinds of criminal behaviour, money laundering, drugs, etc.

I never felt bad for them, they deserved it. My ex though did feel sorry for them losing their home.

Letsspillthetea said:
Mine are pretty tame compared to some. One of our next door neighbours is a nosey bitch my husband refuses to cut the grass when she's in as she stands in the window watching him, also when her husband is doing anything in the garden she watches over him overseeing everything, she also thinks she owns the street.

Before we had kids we got a new car, a neighbour came and complained and said we were showing off the way he was going in you'd have thought is was a Bentley not a chuffing hyundai, said neighbours wife has had god knows how many new cars since then.

A few years ago a family moved in directly across, they had 2 dogs that would just constantly bark and when they were let out they would get out of the garden and just run around the street, they would also argue especially after a few drinks then last year the bloke was clearing out the house and was doing work on it then just before lockdown the bloke who brought it moved his in laws in and christ they are something else whenever it's not raining the woman just sits outside with a crate of strongbow and works her way through that, she also keeps accusing the bloke of having a affair with her sister the argument has been going on for about a month and most nights she's screaming at him she likes to call him a cunt ALOT

They are the kind of neighbours who deserve to be hung, drawn and quartered.

wotdidijustwatch said:
We have nicknamed one of the houses near us Shameless. Always has 3-4 hoodies stood outside, honks of weed when you pass it and usually a blazing row the middle of the night
Does anyone else nickname their neighbours? Funny things mind not nasty. My mils neighbour 4 doors down got this Jeep thing once and she nicknames him safari and its stuck ever since.
We nickname our next door neighbours just eat as they always seem to have food deliveries. Example... "Courier left the Parcel next door at just eats....i'll go get it now"

I often wonder what the neighbours nickname us

Yes, I use nicknames for neighbours too.

I have just moved house and left Dumb and Dumber behind, thankfully.

Trixabellee9393 · Oct 8, 2020

Hairraiser said:
My neighbour asked me to stop our cat from going into his garden. Am I supposed to be watching his every move and stop him from doing what cats do?
if you don’t like him in your garden, just shoo him away! something so small and trivial, but he’s a miserable arsehole and I’ve never liked him so this annoyed me even more. Bear in mind here that he is literally only wandering around sniffing things, just being a cat, not doing anything wrong.

out neighbours hate mycats too and I find it hilarious that one stares into his porch from his own fence she winds him up

leoladyxo said:
Has anyone lived next door to someone who is a little odd? I would love to hear stories to this effect or anything about dodgy neighbours!

I live in a rented barn conversion on a farm. The neighbour’s family used to own the farmhouse, the property that I live in (now owned by her sister who lives abroad) and the barn on the other side of me, which she lives in now. They have a horse in stables opposite our house. When we first moved in a couple of years ago, they would come through our garden gate and go across our patio with the horse in order to put him in the field behind. It didn’t matter what time of day this was. It annoyed us pretty quickly, especially when we would be eating our dinner only to suddenly hear a clattering of hooves. We started putting our wheelie bin in front of the gate as a gentle hint, but they would pay no regard and move it out of the way to come through. After a couple of months, we asked if it were possible for them to ask us whenever they wanted to come through, as we knew they had access to the field another way. Obviously this didn’t go down well. A couple of weeks later things were fine and they haven’t bothered us since.

Cut to today. I get a text from the neighbour that she “will be coming into the garden to trim the hedge as it’s getting a bit overgrown”. For clarity, this hedge sits on the top of a wall. The wall is not adjacent to her house, it’s on the other side. It was now only slightly above the wall, but it obviously had bothered her. I texted her back to say, “only do it if you would like to, I can probably do it on the weekend”. I then get a phone call basically saying she’s going to do it today, so I said OK and let her do it as I figured it would be easier. We had a chat whilst she was cutting the hedge back and once she was done I said thank you and that I felt a little bad that she had done it. She smiled at me and said “well if you feel that bad about it, you could always get me a bottle”. I thought that this was a little cheeky considering I had never asked her to do anything in the first place, but for the sake of neighbourly relations, went in the house and grabbed the only unopened bottle I could bear to part with, which was a big bottle of Baileys. She looked me dead in the eyes and said, “oh no, not that, my drink is Gin - I really like ginger and rhubarb”. I laughed this comment off, but the more I think about it, the more it has annoyed me. Firstly, when someone offers you something, just accept what you are given. Secondly, I know we are all missing the pub but you can’t really expect me to buy you a thirty quid bottle of gin when you offered to do something I never asked you to do in the first place. She will be waiting on that bottle forever now! It’s a principle thing! Anyway, we ended our conversation nicely but it has irked me.

Please share your stories too!

Oh wow she sounds horrible! That’s so greedy! And she offered to do it....

minnietribe · Oct 13, 2020

I’ve got a cracker sorry long story here -

We moved into our house about 18 months ago and when we first moved a neighbor across from us mentioned we should watch out for our immediate next door neighbor (semi detached) and that the lady who owned the property before us had a whole host of issues with her and had bought it as an investment to be an air bnb but due to problems with the neighbor decided to just sell it on (and we bought it). We decided to not take much notice and had always found her very polite to us albeit a bit too chatty.
Fast forward to a year later, this summer, we spent a lot of time in our garden which was just all stone gravel and our next door neighbor was always out in her garden (she’s retired) the boundary wall between us has a waist height stone wall so we couldn’t go outside without having a 30 min convo with her which I know sounds trivial but not being able to go and just read a book or listen to a podcast in peace or when you have friends over and she’s just there it began to feel quite intrusive. We had planned on doing so anyway but decided to do our garden up put in decking, plants and grass and also a higher fence on our side of the boundary to give us some privacy.
We told her of our plans beforehand but kept what we were actually doing vague as she is very nosey.
Once we actually started to get the work done and put up the fence etc she stopped talking to us and ignoring us if we passed and waved then one day I met her on a walk and she said she wasn’t happy with what we had done to our garden and she’s annoyed that there’s now a fence up blocking her view (of our garden, nothing else!) so I just explained it wasn’t personal it was just because we wanted a nice garden we could enjoy and wanted a bit of extra privacy. Throughout the rest of the work she either got a ladder and went up onto her garage and looked in on what was being done or we saw her watching from her window inside. She would come out and make comments on what we were doing as well and then wanted to paint a fence that’s got nothing to do with her is an the opposite side of our garden as she had painted it every year for the past 20 years saying she has access to our garden and making up some lies about the boundary. Anyway the garden is now done but if he go out to sit or even put something in the bin she opens her back door or mysterious appears outside! The lady who we bought the house from got in touch via Instagram to ask how she was and told us a whole host of stories of what she did when she owned the property.
Hopefully we don’t have any issues going forward but it’s not nice having issues with a neighbor!

emm · Oct 13, 2020

minnietribe said:
I’ve got a cracker sorry long story here -

We moved into our house about 18 months ago and when we first moved a neighbor across from us mentioned we should watch out for our immediate next door neighbor (semi detached) and that the lady who owned the property before us had a whole host of issues with her and had bought it as an investment to be an air bnb but due to problems with the neighbor decided to just sell it on (and we bought it). We decided to not take much notice and had always found her very polite to us albeit a bit too chatty.
Fast forward to a year later, this summer, we spent a lot of time in our garden which was just all stone gravel and our next door neighbor was always out in her garden (she’s retired) the boundary wall between us has a waist height stone wall so we couldn’t go outside without having a 30 min convo with her which I know sounds trivial but not being able to go and just read a book or listen to a podcast in peace or when you have friends over and she’s just there it began to feel quite intrusive. We had planned on doing so anyway but decided to do our garden up put in decking, plants and grass and also a higher fence on our side of the boundary to give us some privacy.
We told her of our plans beforehand but kept what we were actually doing vague as she is very nosey.
Once we actually started to get the work done and put up the fence etc she stopped talking to us and ignoring us if we passed and waved then one day I met her on a walk and she said she wasn’t happy with what we had done to our garden and she’s annoyed that there’s now a fence up blocking her view (of our garden, nothing else!) so I just explained it wasn’t personal it was just because we wanted a nice garden we could enjoy and wanted a bit of extra privacy. Throughout the rest of the work she either got a ladder and went up onto her garage and looked in on what was being done or we saw her watching from her window inside. She would come out and make comments on what we were doing as well and then wanted to paint a fence that’s got nothing to do with her is an the opposite side of our garden as she had painted it every year for the past 20 years saying she has access to our garden and making up some lies about the boundary. Anyway the garden is now done but if he go out to sit or even put something in the bin she opens her back door or mysterious appears outside! The lady who we bought the house from got in touch via Instagram to ask how she was and told us a whole host of stories of what she did when she owned the property.
Hopefully we don’t have any issues going forward but it’s not nice having issues with a neighbor!

I had a similar (less extreme issue) I live on the ground floor and have a balcony which I often used to sit on. After about a year of living here I finally saw some neighbours to my left on their balcony, so we had a chat, all fine they seem nice, but bearing in mind I had never seen them on the balcony before this, now EVERY time I go out they are there. I feel bad for the woman as she has young children and clearly has very few friends but it is so annoying not to be able to just have some time I can sit outside in peace!

Odd Neighbours / Neighbour Problems

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