They say good fences make good neighbors. Does that mean bad fences make bad neighbors? Maybe. So, the least you can do is try your best to be a good one and hope they will too.
However, if they are acting like they’re the only residents in the neighborhood then you have probable cause for retaliation.
After considering the entire neighbor situation, a few weeks ago, Redditor u/Robwaudby made a post on the platform, asking “What’s the worst thing you have ever done to an annoying neighbor?” And people immediately started replying with their stories—as if they were just waiting for someone to confess to.
From destroying lawns with bouillon cubes to filling locks with superglue, here are some of the most memorable stories from the 6,000 comments the post has received so far.
1.
My wife and I had a neighbor who hated us because their family friends who went through a divorce lived there before us, and we bought the house. They were mean to my wife, parked across our driveway when she was about to go to work, threw pieces of wood over our fence, and let their dog cr*p on our lawn without picking it up. I tried talking to them a couple of times and was promptly told to f-off. The husband used to brag about his lawn to everyone, so the next time it rained, I threw an entire box of bouillon cubes into their backyard and let the rain melt them into the grass. Their dog absolutely destroyed their yard looking for the smell, and I would make sure to comment on it every chance I got.
u/Robwaudby usually scrolls through Reddit to see what funny questions people have come up with. This time, however, he was doing the asking.
“I was sitting on my sofa watching TV and like most people, I have an annoying neighbor,” the Redditor told us. “She thinks she’s the queen of the street.”
“I thought to myself, ‘I wonder how many stories people have about annoying neighbors?’ That’s when the question came together; I wanted to know how far people go to get back at them.”
2.
My house is right on the corner of an area where the road turns into a T, I had issues with people cutting the corner and driving through my yard( one day someone damn near hit my dog) I went and bought a Boulder probably 300 or 400 pounds and put right on the corner. Come winter and we had a bad snowstorm. Someone was coming through in a lifted dodge and hit the Boulder going about 20 and totaled the truck. Since then though I’ve had 0 issues with people.
3.
I had a terrible work schedule and had to wake up at 2:30 to be at work by 4. My downstairs neighbors would blare loud music at all hours of the night, and I could feel the bass through my mattress. I went downstairs and politely asked them to turn it down, and they seemed to kindly agree. As soon as I got back in bed, they turned it up even louder and kept it going until about 1:30. Before I left for work at 3:30, I turned over my amplifier so the speaker was facing the floor, turned the volume up, and set my guitar on top of it. I left for my 12-hour shift, and the feedback was still screaming when I came home. The neighbors never blared their music again.
A recent survey by Porch says that the worst neighbors are nosy ones — those who cross the line of a friendly wave to peeping into other people’s yards, getting too personal when meeting at the mailbox, or just a general invasion of privacy.
The other top four irritating activities of neighbors include being too loud, not being able to pick up after their pets, parking in someone else’s designated spot, and leaving their children unsupervised.
4.
Friend had a neighbor who put in a very bright yard light that was pointed at her bedroom window. After a negative interaction when asking neighbor to re aim or dim the light or such, cue theatre stagehands. She put up a parabolic mirror pointed directly at dudes bedroom, used an old projector dowser, and an old lighting board to program a chase sequence that was hours long and repeated. End result was a beam of randomly blinking light that was aimed at neighbors bedroom window. When he complained she let him know that it was his light source and all he had to do was turn off his yard light.
5.
Did you know you can sign up for the Jehovah’s Witnesses to come to ANY address to teach you about their religion?
YOURE WELCOME.
6.
When I was really young our neighbor (druggy) demanded we move our septic tank because he claimed it was partially on his property. He was a complete jerk about it and kept at it. My dads a really laid back person, eventually even he got mad and had the property line surveyed. Turns out not only was the septic tank on our property, not his, but the corner of his house and part of his drive way was actually on our land. Dad spent the next few months asking him when he was going to move his house off our land.
7.
Not particularly exciting, but amusing.
We briefly had a neighbor who was a complete jackass. My personal pet peeve was when he would yell at our kids to “shut up” while they were playing in the backyard.
Next to his driveway was a big tree and I noticed he’d throw occasional hissy fits over the birds cr*pping on his car.
One week he was out of town but his car was still in the driveway. Each day I put a heaping pile of berries (blueberries, strawberries, etc.) next to the tree. He returned home to a car absolutely COVERED in technicolor bird poop.
u/Robwaudby didn’t expect that their post would get 16k upvotes or 6k comments. “Some people are really willing to fight back at an annoying neighbor and really go extreme on them,” the OP said.
“[But I] think most people have good and bad neighbors. Some of the reasons for falling out with them tend to be garden fence-related or simply loud music, something along these lines.”
8.
Our neighbors were constantly fighting, would get drunk every weekend, and blasted loud music until 4 a.m. Well, the girlfriend went out of town for a week for a work training, and we saw another girl park outside the house while she was gone. We heard the new girl and the BF going at it very loudly too. So the next time they were being super loud at 2 a.m., we went over to ask them to turn down the music. They both yelled at us to mind our own business. My wife just casually asked, ‘Oh, did you get back together? What about that nice blonde girl who was over all last week? Is this a thrupple situation now?’ Then we went home and enjoyed listening to them throwing everyone out and having their last fight.
9.
My grandmother had a neighbor who refused to help her repair the fence between their properties. It was still functional, but falling apart. Any conversation about fixing the fence ended with him saying that it was on her property so it was her fence and therefore she was fully responsible.
My grandmother took a fall and was hospitalized for a few weeks, only to return home and find a new fence built an extra 5 feet into her property and a bill in the mail from the neighbor. He argued with her for months that she owed him, that the original fence was on his property, and that where it was now was the boundary line.
My grandmother got a surveyor and, surprise! The original fence was correct, and the neighbor had taken 5 feet off her yard. At this point she was very old, frail, and tired of fighting her a-hole neighbor. Instead, she let nature take over. She planted blackberries along the back fence, and within two years it was covered. Every year, she’d walk the fence and throw seeds over because, of course, it was still her yard. After five years of fighting, the blackberries had reclaimed her property. She’s been gone for a few years now, but the blackberries remain, her way of haunting her neighbor. He’s tried ripping up the ones on his side of the fence on numerous occasions, but the plants reseed themselves and grow back every year from her side.
10.
The rich brats next door always threw loud, drunken parties when their parents were out of town. One Sunday morning, I went out to find the corner of our lot (which was a school bus stop) littered with used condoms. That night around midnight, I gloved-up and collected a bunch of them, snuck into the neighbors’ yard, and scattered them around the pool, the garage, and the back door where mom was sure to see them. There were no more parties.
While the people that Porch surveyed called out their neighbors, they also admitted their own shortcomings. 1 in 10 said they sometimes play music too loudly or talk loudly enough that it might annoy their neighbors. 2 in 10 said they don’t know the names of any of their neighbors, while 6 in 10 said they know the names of only some of their neighbors.
As cliché as it sounds, I guess change starts from within, huh?
11.
My great-grandfather was one of the last people in town to get indoor plumbing, so he had an outhouse in his yard. Every Halloween, the neighborhood kids came into the yard and knocked over the building to expose the cesspit. He got tired of it, so one year on the night before Halloween, he moved the building forward and covered the fess with burlap, disguising it in leaves and grass clippings. In the dark, it was almost impossible to tell it was there. On Halloween night, he sat in the outhouse and waited. It wasn’t long after sundown when he heard the wet splat outside as a couple of kids fell into the muck. He lowered a ladder into the cesspit for them to leave after making them promise to never mess with his outhouse again. The kids honored their promise and even spread the word around the neighborhood not to mess with that outhouse any more.
12.
Neighbor used to insist on mowing his lawn at 5:30 am every Saturday morning. He had to drive on our property to access his back lawn and would buzz right past my window with the mower deck down waking me up. I asked him to stop but was brushed off.
One Friday night after working a late second shift I left my dogs chain in the tall grass on our property between our houses. 5:30am Saturday comes around and I woke up to the sound of the mower sucking the chain up into the mower deck. The next weekend I got to sleep in.
13.
My mom’s neighbor called the city to demand my mom repair the fence that divided their yards. This lady had been a crab apple for 10+ years, but this move pissed my mom off. The fence did need mild repairs, but my mom was already in the process of getting quotes to fix it and would have done it if the neighbor had just talked to her. When the city contacted my mom and said she had to maintain the fence, she asked if she legally had to have one. Turns out there are rules about maintaining a fence, but not requiring you have one, so my mom paid a contractor to tear it down entirely. The neighbor asked my mom when the new fence would be built, and she said, ‘You want a fence? Build it yourself!’ A couple weeks later, my mom had a nice new fence, courtesy of one annoying neighbor.
14.
Poured salt all over my neighbors lawn after his living s**ts for kids threw bricks at my dogs. Best part is, he owned one of the largest lawn care companies in my hometown. He lost a tremendous amount of business once his prize winning lawn turned into a barren wasteland.
15.
In college I lived across from a frat house that would let people park in our spaces.
Their router password was admin. So I logged into their router, banned all of their MAC Addresses and changed the password.
16.
My grandpa’s neighbor’s septic tank started leaking into my grandpa’s backyard. He repeatedly asked his neighbor to fix the tank and clean up the mess, and the neighbor completely brushed him off. So my grandpa took matters into his own hands. He rigged up a ‘plumbing system’ in his yard — an upright PVC pipe that pointed at the neighbor’s backyard. It was set up to spray the neighbor’s own septic waste over the fence and into their beautiful and polished yard. Just like that, the neighbor fixed his septic tank.
17.
On my last day in my old apartment, I peed on a plate and stuck it in the freezer. I then waited until it froze, then detached the frozen pee disc from the plate and slid it under his front door so that it would eventually melt on his carpet.
Thanks for three years of loud music at 3 AM every night, neighbour.
18.
I had a noisy neighbor in the apartment above me. The music was SO loud in the hallway that I couldn’t tell which unit it was coming from at first. I knocked on his door and politely asked him to turn it down, but he refused, and I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere with him. After a few more days of this, I decided to take action. The laundry room on my floor had all of the electrical panels for individual units clearly labelled. Every time he blasted his music, I would go to the laundry room and turn his power off. I started off with a few seconds (to give the illusion that he blew something), but when he STILL wouldn’t put his music lower, I would just shut his power off for hours. I could hear him swearing, but I didn’t care. My lease was almost up, and as soon as it was, I was out of there.
19.
My dad was talking to our neighbor about what color he should paint the house, and as a joke he said, ‘Well, I might as well paint the old one (house) blue!’ The neighbor became almost angry and started going off about how that was stupid and he couldn’t do that. Well, that’s the story of how I grew up in a blue house.
20.
Neighbors dog kept pooping in the front , like they open the front door let him out and he poop in our yard. I asked them like 10x to just clean it up no problem.
They outright refused so for about 2 months I went out picked it up put it in a 5 gallon bucket outside in the back yard when it was full of rain water and poop I walked over and dumped it on the front porch. It actually worked they started cleaning up after the dog. We actually have been cool since then.
21.
When I was 10 or so, an old lady was nasty to my brother and I for sitting on ‘her’ curb. So we got the bright idea to have an estate sale for her. We got up at like 4 a.m. on Saturday morning and put up homemade cardboard garage sale signs with her address on them and ‘early birds welcome’ in bold letters. We then sat on the curb a little down the street across from her house and watched people bang on the door for an hour or so. The best part is we didn’t put a date on the signs, so if she didn’t find all the signs, presumably people would keep showing up every Saturday.
22.
They assaulted my dad because he told them to stop yelling at a woman parked in the road, so I bided my time for a few weeks then filled all the locks on their work van with superglue.
23.
We lived in a neighborhood of townhouses. One neighbor let their dogs [poop] all over everyone’s lawn and never picked it up. We tried asking them, we tried picking it up and putting it on their doorstep, but they still refused to do it. My one neighbor decided to get a piece of it and smear it all over the front of the house. After that, they started picking it up.
24.
There was a really quiet, meek guy on our street, and a neighbor would constantly let their dog poo on his front lawn. He tried all the normal things like pepper on the lawn, motion sprinklers, and little signs, but the dog owner didn’t care. Well, one day the guy got so mad, he mashed up and liquified his OWN POO and put it into a super soaker. He followed the man home, then returned in the middle of the night and emptied the super soaker through the man’s letterbox. The impact splatter hit the walls, hallway, stairs, ceiling and even reached into the kitchen at the end of the hallway. Apparently the stench was HORRENDOUS.
25.
My parents have an extremely nosey neighbour who would just stand at the fence and watch what we do. I mean with her nose resting on the top of the fence. This woman is 60s with kids and grandkids. I found out the other day my dad was in the garden with a shovel. Turns out he throws the slugs and snails in their trampoline and on their veggie plot for being annoying every time they aren’t there. I couldn’t stop laughing at how petty and hilarious this was. Still makes my day.
26.
They would party on weeknights until 3a playing music outside and being loud AF. Cops said there was nothing they could do, so I started doing yard work at 5a. Yard work consisted of me using a chainsaw with a loose muffler to cut up an old tree. It was so loud that I had to wear ear plugs and ear muffs.
27.
Years ago, when you could advertise house sales in the paper without too many pictures, my brother put in an ad for his obnoxious neighbor’s house. It was just an exterior picture and was priced about 75K under market as a private sale with the neighbor’s phone number. He found out the guy was inundated with calls for weeks but never found out who had listed it.
28.
I poured a bunch of instant mashed potato powder boxes on their lawn, so when it rained, they had a lawn full of mashed potatoes.
29.
I told his wife everything that I knew.
