Neighborly disagreements are certainly nothing new, and they’re definitely not uncommon either. To be honest, if you’ve never had any issues with the people who live next-door, you’re one of the lucky ones.
The rest of us know that these kinds of problems can happen any time over just about anything.
Did your leaves fall over the property line onto their lawn and you didn’t rake them fast enough? Well, you’re going to be hearing about it. Did their kid’s hockey practice in the driveway result in a puck through your living room window? Yeah, it’s time to go talk to the neighbors about that.
For the most part, these kinds of disputes can be settled with a frank discussion and some sort of agreed upon resolution.
But that’s only if your neighbors are the kind of unproblematic, understanding people who will listen to reason.
Sometimes they’re the opposite, and sometimes you find yourself scrolling through real estate websites at one in the morning, suddenly desperate to get the heck out of that neighborhood and as far away from them as possible.
One woman recently aired her grievances with her neighbors online in the hopes of finding out whether she had gone too far or not.
In a post submitted to the subreddit r/AmITheAsshole, the unidentified woman explained that she was recently forced to build a fence around her yard to keep her neighbors out following a few too-many uncomfortable and inappropriate encounters.
It all began earlier this year when the woman received an inheritance that allowed her to purchase her first-ever home.
“It was a godsend.” she explained. “I finally got to move out and get my own place after living paycheck to paycheck.”
While the home itself is a “dream”, she admitted her favorite part (and perhaps the biggest selling point) was the pool in the backyard: “I love it, I’d swim every day if the weather let me. It has helped me get in great shape.”
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So by all accounts, the house should be absolutely perfect, right? Well…wrong.
The neighbors have been making that “dream” of a home more like a nightmare.
The family of five who live next door consist of dad Mark, mom Kaylie, and their three kids: teenage boys Brad and Chad, and 11-year-old daughter Lea.
(Note: all the member’s actual names were changed in the woman’s post to keep the family’s identity a secret.)
When the woman first moved in, she said the family was actually fairly friendly, even the mom, Kaylie, who she said is “dripping with housewife, yoga, PTA energy.”
One day, Kaylie actually came over to the woman’s house bearing a plate of homemade cookies, and shared some information about the previous homeowners.
Apparently, they were an older couple who actually encouraged Kaylie’s children to come over and use the pool, since their own children were all grown up now and “they didn’t like the quiet.”
Here’s a very important distinction to make: those previous owners may have hated the quiet, but this woman (AKA the *new* owner) happens to *love* the quiet.
A self-proclaimed “introvert,” she told Kaylie that she wasn’t exactly comfortable keeping up the use-the-pool-whenever-you-want arrangement that the children had with the previous owners.
But, as she told her neighbor, “perhaps they could come over OCCASIONALLY if they don’t abuse the privilege.”
“Cue the children abusing the privilege all summer.”
Yeah, who didn’t see that one coming?
Kids can be great, but they can also be pretty ignorant of other people’s property. If it’s hot and they’ve been given permission to use their neighbor’s pool, they’re going to go ahead and ignore that all-important word “occasionally” and swim to their little hearts’ desire.
As the woman wrote, her entire summer was spent trying to enjoy her pool while it was filled with the neighbors’ kids.
“Every time I was out swimming, it would not be long before Chad and Brad would run over and jump in, followed by Lea with her floaties,” she recalled .
Imagine just wanting to spend a few leisurely hours floating in your pool, only to be interrupted by kids jumping in, screaming, splashing about…I would honestly probably lose my mind.
As the summer progressed, the pool situation definitely got worse, especially when the young boys next door started inviting friends to come swimming with them.
“Being teenage boys, they’d always want to roughhouse, or gape at me or my friends when we’d get out of the pool and make gross comments,” the woman explained.
While she admitted this may be “tolerable” if it only happened once or twice, she confirmed it actually happened constantly .
On more than one occasion, she actually had to tell the boys to leave because she “was with adults doing adult things”, like drinking in what should have been the privacy of her own backyard.
So to summarize, this poor woman spent the entire summer dealing with her neighbors’ incredibly entitled children hopping into her pool whenever they pleased, as well as having to suffer under the hormone-fueled stares of a bunch of teenage boys who apparently don’t know not to ogle adult women in bathing suits.
Feeling frustrated, uncomfortable, and downright violated , the woman decided enough was enough.
She made the decision to install a fence around her yard, partly because she’s adopting a dog, but mostly because of the events of her terrible summer.
Of course, when the mom next door, Kaylie, spotted the woman installing the barrier between their properties, she rushed over to find out what exactly what was going on.
After Kaylie pointed out the fence would make it harder for her kids to come over and play, the woman simply replied, “yup.”
After all, that’s kind of the point.
“She asked if I was planning on putting a gate between our yards,” the woman continued. “I said ‘nope’. Finally she asked, a little choked up, if I was depriving her kids of our pool.”
Hang on a second…”our” pool? What?! Is she serious?!
Feeling rightfully infuriated over Kaylie’s choice of words, the woman decided to lay out the situation in the hopes that this oblivious mom would finally understand what’s really been going on all summer:
“I told her how in the beginning I had said they could use the pool as long as they did not abuse the privilege, and they did. I said now they can only come over if invited.”
Likely sensing she was losing her free summertime babysitter, Kaylie decided to take an emotional approach in her plea to make the woman reconsider the fence.
As the woman wrote,
“She told me they were going to be crushed and saw me as a big sister, I told her no teenage boy looks at their sister the way those boys looked at me and my friends. She took huge offense to that, and it might have been gross to hear, but so were the comments on my bikini from her boys.”
In the aftermath of this encounter, the woman has started worrying whether she’s wrong to stick a fence between the two properties.
Although she really doesn’t want to have to deal with her neighbors’ kids anymore, she fears she may have actually hurt their feelings.
So she wants the people of Reddit to answer one question for her: is she an asshole for installing a fence?
It should come as no surprise that Reddit responded with a resounding, “NO”.
“Not at all,” this user wrote. “In fact, however high you were planning on building this fence? Make it a foot higher.”
Another added, “It’s also a liability if one of the kids or their friends gets hurt while at the pool. Imagine what dear mother would say if something happened to one of her kids.”
Other people were quick to point out that it is definitely not the woman’s job to take care of her neighbors’ children all summer, just because she has a pool.
“Even if the kids were perfect little angels, it’s your frigging house and your frigging pool,” this person said. “They can buy their own pool, join a gym or swim at school, or get bent.”
Some users even suggested the woman install cameras, just in case mom encourages her children to sneak over and swim anyway. But also because, as others pointed out , “Those teenage boys are going to find a way over the fence with their friends.”
While this story is about the need for a fence, there’s actually another neighborly story in the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit that involves a fence not being *enough* for a neighbor.
In this particular tale , the female poster shared that she and her husband recently purchased a home on half an acre of property, and have taken to enjoy their hot tub at night while in the nude.
It should be noted that their property is surrounded by 6-foot fences, and they’ve also enlisted the help of some tall plants to block any outsider’s view of their naked soak.
However, one old and “kind of conservative” neighbor didn’t appreciate the view she was apparently receiving every night.
As the woman wrote , despite telling her outraged neighbor that it’s perfectly legal for her and her husband to enjoy a nude dip in their hot tub (as per Florida statute 800.03 , the elderly woman wouldn’t relent:
“She threatened to call the cops next time I did it…[and] report me to the HOA and the police anyways if I continue.”
Since it seems like her neighbor isn’t about to back down, the woman came to Reddit to find out whether she was the “asshole” in this situation.
Of course, people were very quick to confirm that no, she most definitely is *not* the asshole here.
“It’s your property,” this person pointed out. “I’d be raising questions as to how/why she’s peeping on you and your husband.”
Someone else agreed with this and added, “I live in a neighborhood with a lot of elderly folks, and the first thing I noticed is how they have literally nothing better to do than snoop on the neighborhood.”
Much like the pool story we discussed earlier, there’s another post in the AITA subreddit involving an issue with a neighbor’s children.
As this particular person wrote , they live in an apartment building with their partner, and recently got some new upstairs neighbors who happen to be a young family consisting of several small children, “all under the age of 5.”
After weeks of listening to those kids whine, scream, cry, and just make obnoxious noises, the Reddit user said that one day they finally reached their breaking point.
On that particular day, one of the children was standing in the hallway outside the upstairs unit shouting for what seemed like an eternity.
Fed up, the person marched up the stairs, opened the door to the hallway, “and told the kid to shut up.”
That’s it. No cussing, no physical gestures. They simply told the kid to do what they hadn’t done in weeks, and that was shut up .
Of course, the child’s parents didn’t take too kindly to this, and they later approached the Reddit user to demand an apology.
As the person wrote, “I didn’t want to, and we disagreed on it being normal to raise kids to understand not to shout like that in the common stairway area.”
Since that interaction, the person has been wondering whether they were right to take matters into their own hands, or whether they do , in fact, owe the obnoxious child an apology. So they posed the question to Reddit: were they an asshole to tell that kid to “shut up”?
Interestingly, Reddit users weren’t so unanimous in their opinions this time.
Some agreed with the poster. As this person wrote, “You should do it again if the child persists. They aren’t outside. They aren’t in a play area. Screaming is disrespectful to people who live there. If they plan to be that way to you, then you have every right to do the same.”
However, someone else added, “You told a kid to shut up…I don’t like other people’s kids, you don’t have to like kids, to know that’s not appropriate for an adult.”
What do you think of this situation, or any of the other neighborly disputes we discussed? Let us know!
