12 People Who Truly Deserve an Award for Dealing with Their Neighbors

Ever feel like your neighbors are pushing your patience to the limit? You’re not alone. Plenty of people have hilarious stories about life next door — ones that will make you cringe, laugh, and maybe even appreciate your own neighbors a little more.

• Every evening, someone’s yelling at my neighbor’s place. There’s banging, like they’re throwing furniture out the window. One night it got so loud the plaster started falling off. I called the police.
  They arrived, then stopped by my place smiling and said, “The thing is... he’s got ostriches.”
  Turns out, my neighbor’s raising ostriches in his apartment!

• I (41F) planted this oak tree 15 years ago on MY property. New neighbor Karen demanded I cut it down for her view. I refused. ’You’ll regret this for the rest of your life!’ she screamed.
  The next morning, I woke up to sirens outside my house and found Karen being arrested for trespassing after trying to cut my tree down herself.
• Once rented next door to an annoying neighbor who, after strong winds had blown his bin over into our garden, dumping trash everywhere, refused to pick it up. Now our bin collections are really early in the morning, like 7 am, so I’d move his bins back onto his driveway then wait until the collection had been, then moved his bins back to the front of the curbside.
  Overhead him talking to his wife in the back garden while I had opened my rear bedroom window. He had lodged an official complaint about it, since his bins had been unemptied for close to six weeks. © Oi-Oi / Reddit
• There are two families on my parents’ block that had a fight going on. One family was always complaining that the other family’s kids and pets were ever so slightly crossing the diving line between their lawns sometimes when they played. The family on the receiving end of the complaint decided to have a 10-foot-high wall of bushes planted between their two yards to ’solve the problem.’
  The wall also just so happened to completely obstruct the complaint making family’s view of the river across the street, which significantly devalued their house because it was no longer ’river view’. © chimerar / Reddit

• My neighbor at my parents’ house would mow and leaf blow his yard every day. Every single day. If it rained, the second it stopped, he would go out there and mow and leaf blow.
  He would leaf blow his roof. Then he would leaf blow his cars. Then wash his cars. Every day.
  The neighborhood kids did super glue a leaf to his driveway. I wish I was there to see his reaction. © dontbthatguy / Reddit
• My neighbor was a strange guy. Sometimes he’d politely say hello, other times he’d leave trash behind and respond rudely when I complained.
  One day, as I was walking down the stairs, he suddenly turned away from me. But then I walked outside and saw him — or so I thought — standing on the balcony, cheerfully waving at me. It wasn’t until a year after I moved in that I found out there were twins living in the apartment next door.
• I once had a neighbor who was a bad cook. They would constantly burn things and made the whole apartment smell pretty terrible. They also had an unsecured wireless printer.
  I made it a point that whenever they would burn something or stink up the place to send a recipe their way. © judahnator / Reddit

• A few houses down the road there was a family that was mostly quiet, but their adult son lived with them. He drove a late 90s Chevy cavalier that he would ’mod’ himself. He had a plywood spoiler that he put on it.
  The worst part was he would drive as fast as that car would take him in the neighborhood. In winter, he took a turn too fast and ended up in my yard twice. He would come into the cul-de-sac and try to spin in circles.
  We asked him to stop and he wouldn’t. We spoke to his parents, nothing. Finally, we called the county sheriff. That stopped it for a bit.
  Right before they lost the house to foreclosure and moved out, he had cut the muffler off of the cavalier and was speeding around listening to it. He came flying into the cul-de-sac and couldn’t stop. He jumped the curb, kept going through the lots and ended up in the field with tall grass. Took the keys and just walked off.
  Two days later they were gone, with the car still there. My neighbors called the city, but they spent a week trying to ’figure out’ how to get it out. A different neighbor and I used his Jeep and winch to get it out, then towed it to the city building parking lot and left it. © excuseme*** / Reddit
• My neighbor (current neighbor... it worries me to say he’s probably less than 150 feet away as I type this) is awful. We’ll refer to him as ’Bob’.
  First off, he sues people for any reason he can think of. He has tried to get us into countless pyramid schemes. My mother used to work at a flea market, and learned that Bob would take food from free food pantries meant for homeless people, and sell it in the flea market.
  Recently, he lost his driver’s license, so he occasionally asks us for a ride somewhere. Every time he’s asked, we were ’busy’. © GREAT_SALAD / Reddit
• My next door neighbor can’t stand me (to cut a long story short, we had a disagreement and our landlord sided with me). I mostly just stay out of her way, but I always pet her cat when I see her (the cat) outside. So my neighbor has to live with the knowledge that her beloved cat thinks I am awesome. © DaughterOfNone / Reddit

• Every night at 2 AM, my upstairs neighbor blasted heavy metal music. When talking didn’t work, I bought the loudest alarm clock I could find and set it for 5 AM, placing it against our shared wall. After three days of being woken up before dawn, he suddenly discovered headphones and became the quietest neighbor ever.
• I am simultaneously baffled and weirded out by the call I just received from my neighbor.
  Her son and his family are visiting for the week. I know for a fact that she is one of those people who looks over the fence at what we are doing and sends countless messages berating us for letting weeds grow in our property.
  I received a call from her, furious at me for walking around naked in my garden where her grandson could see me from her upstairs balcony. She screamed at me for 10 straight minutes without giving me a chance to get a word in edgewise. I asked her when this was, as I have never, not once gone outside the door without any clothes on.
  Apparently she saw me hanging up the washing in my gym clothes (a sports bra and short pants) and assumed I was wearing underwear. Now I admit I am not a small girl, but I am working on feeling positive about myself and therefore started wearing clothes that make me feel good.
  She demanded that I never wear such “vulgar” clothing again, or she would report me to the police for public indecency. I just laughed and ended the call. © Nimue-the-Phoenix / Reddit

A woman wrote to us, worried about her husband watching their new 19-year-old neighbor, Kate, through the window. When she confronted him, she discovered something she never expected — and it was worse than anything she had imagined.