Just Venting
 

I'm really pissed off at my own lack of foresight.
I should have seen this coming. Mrs WD and I love our house and got along great with most of the neighbors. We planned to stay here until they hauled us out feet first. So we remodeled the house - $50k room addition, $12k concrete deck, $30k kitchen, greenhouse, landscaping etc.
Then this summer the neighborhood changed. Three houses within 1/4 mile of here changed hands and all three of the new owners live large and love to run their power tools.
We should have anticipated this. The nature of this area encourages a lot of outdoor landscape care and there is no reason to think the relative tranquility of the past would last. It was barely tolerable then and we never considered that it could get worse - much worse.
So Sunday morning our neighbor was out with his big backpack leaf blower from sometime before 8 until 11:30 AM. Mrs WD finally had it. "We're moving!" I had to agree. We are going to spend our retirement years enjoying our lives, and with all this noise we can't do that here - in the house we love.
I guess I should look at this as an opportunity to start fresh, maybe I'll come around to that, but right now I'm damn depressed about this.

Won't the money you spent improving the place come back to you in resale value, or most of it?

As you grow older and your hearing fails, it won't bother you as much.

I wouldn't mind seeing some pictures of your wife with headphones on...

Just turn down your hearing aid. :p

Maybe your previous neighbors got fed up with their own neighbor remodeling their house, concrete trucks pouring a deck, noisy landscape work - all with contractors and pickup trucks and other large vehicles driving through their neighborhood?

Yeah, it must have been the 30 minutes the concrete truck was here that pushed them over the edge. :rolleyes:

I don't think that you will find perfect neighbors unless you have an acreage. It comes with the territory of having neighbors being close by. If you move you may find that the new neighbors may not be any better.

I would kill to have a neighbor that took care of their property. Unfortunately the only other house on my 1 block street is someone that doesn't believe in trash bags, taking trash to the curb, taking the cans that get to the curb back to the house until a week later and thinks the street is an acceptable place to dispose of their dinner bags from McD's.

Not to mention they mow once a month when the city gets on their case, both trees on their property are dead (and have been for years), the squirrels nest in their soffits, they have a retaining wall that has fallen, when their kids break a window they board it up and a few years back they decided to install two different colored vinyl siding on the front of their house (just the front, not the sides or back).

Believe me when I say that it could be worse. Much worse. Be grateful your neighbors try.

you cant pick your neighbors....and no matter where you go, you will have neighbors.

What kind of windows do you have? We went to double pane and it helped a lot, kinda wish we went with triple pane.

I love my neighbors but they occasionally like to have late night parties with lots of adult beverages.

People are so inconsiderate, and becoming more so.

My wife and I have been hopefully in our forever housefarm on 10 acres for 22 years now. It is bordered on 2 sides by a creek/woods, and on the other side by farm acreage that has been in the same family for 100 years. The good news is even if the farm ground sold, no one could build a house on it without a zoning varience (which hardly ever happens). In the rural township that I live, you must own 35 continuous acres (not split by road, or creeks)....we really love not having neighbors, and couldn't imagine the nosyness, and noisyness of being near other people.

Amen. Sometimes it's good to look at the other side of the coin. I wish neighbors taking care of their homes on a Sunday morning was all that annoyed me about my neighborhood.

We realized that too late. Lots in our area are a minimum of 2.5 acres, up to about 5, but few of the lots are wooded, so there are a lot of acres being mowed. One of the new arrivals paid a premium for a wooded lot and spent the summer cutting down 90% of the trees (:eek:). We are looking for 5+ wooded acres.

Yes. Just Saturday the guy on the corner of my street mowed his lawn and blew all the leaves out onto the street. They were about 6 inches deep. When it started to rain I told Mrs WD this wasn't going to go well. Sure enough, a car came down the street, hit the brakes and slid on the wet leaves right across the intersection and into the ditch. Good thing no one was coming.

I probably should have used the sarcasm font for my post.

I live in a fairly rural area. Even here, where you think you'd get away from it all, you can't

When the wind blows the right way, you hear the interstate traffic from several miles away. Black powder season sounds like a civil war reenactment. They built an ammunition factory several miles down the road, and guess what they like to do after work....

Chainsaws, tractors, mowing, leaf blowers. You hear it all. About the only thing we don't get is the smell of cow manure and sounds of hound dogs screaching, which some of the neighbors raise en mass for hunting.

You almost have to live in an area to test it first, and even then, there is no guarantee it wont change.

I can only wish some of my neighbors would mow their lawns, but first, they'd have to grow grass in them.

Dont let it get to you, you will never win this one. Living on the water is great, birds everywhere, breeze, the view... then a guy in a straight pipes power boat decides its test and tune day. Then comes Freebird and some 38 special. Love it. Live in the country you'll hear guns, fireworks... Do what you want but the grass is not greener, just a different shade of what you have.

enjoy life