A Beautiful Day In The 'Hood

Neighbor Stuff.

Today I met the German on the right. She was out watering her lawn. I rarely see this one, in fact, in almost a year I've only waved hello, and had very short polite conversations with her. Last night we had a horrible wind storm, and I found a mysterious trash can in my front lawn. I asked her if she was missing a trash can, and pointed to it, I had set it on the curb in case its owner came looking for it. It was in fact her trash can so that worked out quite well I should say.

We got to chatting a bit about the storm and the weather, and she told me we were making nice improvements on the house. We talked about the weeds, and so on. Then she said, "I'm not doing any home improvements to this house because we have such a pig living across the street! I would just be throwing the money down the drain!" I knew exactly what house she was referring to. She went on to say, "When we moved her in 1979 this was such a nice neighborhood, now I am embarrassed to bring people over to my house, the whole neighborhood looks bad." Which sort of made me feel bad, but then I thought, she probably was not referring to us, she's had only nice things to say to about us.

Here is the thing, the guy across the street is running his own personal junk yard. His yard is a mess, he's got junk all over the place. People come over and they say, "You should report him, he's going to drive down your property value!" I know this might sound strange, but I personally don't care what he is doing over there as long as he is not burying bodies in his back yard, I'm not all that concerned. I say, "no, I won't report him, I would rather have good relations with my neighbors, and as long as he isn't throwing the junk across the street, I don't have much of an issue with him." He did build a privacy fence which helped to hide some of the mess, and believe me it is a horrendous mess over there.

He's got an insane amount of junk out there. All he does all day is tinker around with crap, and fiddle fart around with stuff. He's got old pick ups, one of those trailers that looks like a silver Coors can, wood and lumber piles, just an enormous amount of junk really, but it is his personal property, and I just can't get the gumption to worry about it too much.

Well it bothered her, and I understand why. I didn't say anything, all I said was, "well it looks so much better now that he put the privacy fence up, you can't see it as much." That was it. I was not about to get into this feud. After we talked I started looking around our own property, I suddenly felt maybe I better do some general clean up around the place. So, I did just that. I don't want to be the one she says brought the neighborhood down. I did tell her she has a beautiful home, and I'm certain it would sell well should she want to sell it.

We don't have covenants in this neighborhood, and I'm glad about it. I would rather live with a junk yard across the street than a nosy neighbor peeking in my windows to make sure I have the proper curtains hanging, or receiving nasty grams when someone parks in front of my house, even if I didn't have anyone at my house. I can't live with that kind of thing. We do our best to make our house look good inside and out. We have spent many hours outside this summer working on the yard, fixing things up. That is the best we can do, and over all I think it is really shaping up nicely. I'm pretty proud of it.

If the time ever comes that we have to sell this house, I'm sure that a nice up and coming family will want to buy it. This is a neighborhood with chain link fences, we are not going to attract high enders here. That's a fact, and a junk yard will probably not matter one way or the other, but I could be wrong. Maybe we were the suckers who bought here.

Personally, I love this neighborhood. It is established, the trees are mature, and I like that all of the houses do not look the same even though there are only a handful of different models. I like how people have done their yards, and how everyone has done something different, to their own tastes. Some of the houses look like total crap, oh well, life isn't perfect. There is a house around the corner with the most enormous juniper bush in the front yard. It literally encompasses the whole yard, it is quite a sight, I hate juniper by the way. I think it is awful stuff.

This neighborhood is far from perfect, and I'm sure some people would not want to live here at all. I find it a wonderful place to come home to. I sure would love one of those fancy new houses with the huge kitchens, and master bedrooms, but right now this is what we have, and we are trying to make it as nice as possible so that our neighbors aren't embarrassed to live next door to us. I wish he would clean up that mess across the street, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it either, it is what it is.

Tomorrow: Yard work! Daughter and her friend, who is the daughter of my best friend since third grade, have already told me to get them up early, they are excited about our project which is to remove extremely annoying thorny, and ugly bushes from the side of the house. It will be a tedious and scratchy job, but we will get it done as best we can.