There are ups and downs to having a neighbor, especially one you share a fence with. Some ups are that they could be really cool and become your friend. Or they are just thoughtful and help maintain the shared area. Plus, it's just nice to know there is a person near by in case of emergencies. The downs are now you have to get along with a stranger. So what if you two don't click ? What if they turn out to be en entitled Karen? Or worse, what if they disrespect your land and those residing on i…

It's incredible how easily a loud noise for a short duration at an inappropriate time can drive even the most level-headed person to madness… Now, I'm not claiming any sort of enlightenment or monkhood, but I'd like to think I'm a reasonable sort of guy. However, waking up in the early hours of the morning to my neighbor's car radio blasting at an unnecessarily loud volume while he's warming up his car is enough to make my blood boil. Dude, you're not even in the car. Do you really need to be a…

Living in a neighborhood with an HOA is like having a stern substitute teacher in school, overlooking your shoulder and telling you to start writing in cursive because it looks better. You don't actually hold any respect for them but you are sort of forced to listen… to an extent. That's what this Reddit user's experience was when dealing with their HOA who told them off for setting up cameras that partly overlooked one of the HOA board members' yards. Let's call her Karen because OP insisted.…

No spiders were harmed in the telling of this story… A lot of people don't like spiders, and it makes sense; what's not horrifying about something with many legs and too many eyes, complete with a set of monstrous fangs—lurking in the dark corners of our homes with watchful eyes as they guard their clutches that will soon spawn thousands more of them. Further, we've given spiders a place of sheer horror in popular culture, depicting a cartoonish lust for our demise and solidifying their place a…

The last thing HOAs seem to do on a daily basis is provide structure and order to a neighborhood. Instead, they are a magnet for that person from high school who would correct the teacher, interrupt people in the classroom, and snitch on everyone without proof or context. This was the kind of person who made more enemies than friends, and as it turns out, they haven't changed in the slightest years down the road. Instead, they have just become more obnoxious and they're an annoying parent now r…

It's the holiday season, which once meant that you'd venture forth into the world to carefully select gifts for all your loved ones, making sure to get everyone something that they truly desired but wouldn't have bought (or even have been able to find) for themselves— ensuring that they know how much you appreciate them and how special they are in your life. For every father in the world, that's apparently a new shirt and tie for the office and a single pack of boxers to last him until next yea…

We know all too well at this point that HOAs are full of obnoxious type-A individuals who will stop at nothing to make your neighborhood experience a living nightmare. No HOA is immune to these extremes, so it is up to homeowners to find some level of healthy distance from them so that life in the neighborhood is at least slightly bearable. Now, as someone who lives in a city, my personal encounters with HOAs are nonexistent, but I also know full well what it's like to be taken advantage of by…

This guy works for an HOA management company, and it's his job to go around to different communities and provide maintenance work. Trash pick-up is part of the job. So, the OP gets to a community park at 7 in the morning to start his job. He knows the park technically opens at 8 a.m., but the garbagemen come at 7:30 a.m., so he has no choice but to show up before it opens to make sure he can get the trash out to the curb in time. Then enters the neighborhood Karen.

Imagine paying a premium to work your way into this crazy housing market, purchasing a house from someone who paid a quarter of that amount for it 15 years ago. You're probably still going to be coming to grips with the weight of your new mortgage when you're confronted by your new neighbor, a “lifetime” resident, who regards you with disdain because, for one reason or another, they don't think you're worthy of replacing their longtime neighbors whom they had grown fond of. The reality is that…

When you live in a small town, word gets around, and if you have beef with the city council, you had better giddy up for a long ride… of malicious compliance. One woman took on her HOA (that wasn't really an HOA, but more of a city council of sorts, as they were a small town) when they came with multiple complaints on different occasions about her property. The issue this woman had was not with their complaints, but rather with the fact that they did not bug any other of the neighborhood reside…

Common sense isn't gifted to every person. Sometimes things will seem so crystal clear to you, and so obvious, that you can't understand how anyone could mess it up. But without common sense, people do dumb things. This woman in particular had a bone to pick with her neighbor, and I bet you can guess why her neighbor was refusing to mow her lawn for her. While some people really dislike mowing the lawn , others find it cathartic. If you can listen to music or a podcast over the crazy loud sound…

In life, it's not worth worrying about the little things, especially when there are much bigger things to worry about… Yet, each neighborhood somehow manages to have that one neighbor who has nothing important to worry about and spends their days obsessing over petty details and perceived slights, plotting about how they're going to hold their neighbors accountable for that single blade of grass that went unmowed, or that leaf that blew over the property line that one time three summers ago.

HOAs are determined to keep their neighborhoods looking pristine , no matter what. If you happen to live a neighborhood rules by a home owner's association, you don't always have a lot of choice about how to keep your home. For example, you might want to paint your home a nice warm yellow color, but lots of HOAs have a strict color palette you need to choose from. So the HOA could easily reject your request , and insist you paint your place a boring gray color instead.

It's fairly perplexing when a company is particularly bad at providing a service, especially when that company's sole purpose for existence is to provide that service. When you're a leaf collection company, that kind of implies that you're going to be collecting a lot of leaves, and it would be fair for people to expect you to be adept at doing so. Well, it turns out that while a lot of companies brand themselves as providing such-and-such service, really, their main priority isn't providing go…

Moving house is a stressful affair that is capped off by the uncertainty of who your new neighbors will be. It's like you're spending your entire life savings to get a single roll of a D20, which could very well end up in a critical failure. After all, nothing makes or breaks the enjoyment of a peaceable existence like ending up next to the wrong people; you could have the most perfect abode that you'd ever dreamed of and still be more miserable than you were in your little old decrepit one if…

Sometimes, your petty actions go much further than you had originally intended, and without realizing it, you're pulling on a thread that will continue to unravel, causing a cascading effect that knocks over the first domino in a chain that "Rube Goldbergs" into a house of cards and sends the whole thing crashing down. Well, it turns out that when you accuse your terrible neighbor of being a serial cheater, sending anonymous messages pretending to be his mistress, that might be pretty upsetting…