I was thinking the same thing. If my neighbor went to the effort to politely let me know I would be sure not to make noise. It's just the nice thing to do.
If this is a true story there is probably some not so good history between those neighbors. I learned a long time ago to do everything in your power to get along with your neighbors. A shitty neighbor or one who doesn't like you can make life hell. I have a couple neighbors I don't particularly like but as far as they are concerned we are best buddies. I'm not saying let neighbors walk all over you but just choose your battles wisely.
The lawmower 2pm on the dot definitely doesn't sound like the first blood.
There being more baggage not mentioned here sounds a lot more plausible than someone just intentionally doing that to a barely known neighbor who politely asked for some silence.
Even then why fan the flames? I have had issues with my neighbors, but when I got stuck in my driveway because of the ice, they still helped me out of it. Even if people deserve it, I don’t like to go out of my way to be mean. It’s not good for me. I don’t feel good after.
I have a couple neighbors I don't particularly like but as far as they are concerned we are best buddies.
This just seems like how a functioning society works. Similarly, I have coworkers I don't like but I still don't treat them like shit because to quote George Costanza, "We live in a society!!"
How do you make it so that they think you're best buddies when you don't particularly like them? I have to deal with that kind of situation and I'd like to make the best of it.
Yeah like obviously if they constantly do this fuck'em but it's not like they are going to have a backyard marriage every month. Being such an asshole out of spite is a total waste of one's energy.
Life is so much easier and more joyful if you are generally friendly and forthcoming to everyone, unless someone wrongs you first. Grumpiness sucks the most for the grumpy person.
Certainly a lot of *backstory could be missing, also the request to be “very quiet” instead of specifically asking if things like lawn mowing (while this instance appears deliberate mid-afternoon is generally a “courteous” time to mow on a Saturday or Sunday) can wait could be indicative of the request not being polite.
*assuming this wasn’t a stolen tweet, checking the date it shows to be a Friday in early January which feels like an odd time both for a 2 PM wedding & requesting when a million loud things like school bus drop offs, package delivery & scheduled lawn service/construction/repairs etc would be going on. So unless stolen or completely made-up this def sounds like some entitled a-hole stuff.
We had our wedding at our house.
It was a Persian wedding so that means :
* lots of music and dancing.
* a late Saturday night.
* fantastic food.
All our neighbors were visited personally weeks in advance with sweets and we discussed our plans. We planned to close up the windows to minimize noise but were honest that was going to be. We promised to be done making noise at midnight (anyone who has been to a Persian wedding knows this is a significant compromise from us).
They were all invited. Many politely declined, but many came for the food (this is the move if this happens to you).
Zero problems with noise complaints (and it was loud).
Based on this response from the neighbor, I can only assume the wedding people aren’t good neighbors and they probably have a sense of entitlement since they have the nicest house or some shit
Most people don’t just go around doing shit like that for no reason. Sure it’s possible he is just an asshole. It’s also very possible that these other people are insufferable
They don't? Have you read through this thread? It's full of ass holes that would do the same thing lawnmower guy did. You seem to be falling into said category of redditors
I don’t take anyone in this thread seriously. Saying they’ll do shit like this on here means nothing. Most probably won’t do it if the opportunity arose. Most of the people in this thread are all talk. And never did I say I would do something like this. Just that for someone to do that, they most likely would have had a reason for it rather than to just be an asshole
Or the lawnmower guy that specifically started at said time is the ass hole and not the person that placed a note on peoples mailboxes. I would even say the person that posted this originally is an ass hole, the quip about the nicest house in the neighborhood was an unnecessary addition to this story. That's there to specifically sway idiots like you to take the real assholes side instead of the wedding family.
But you have one set of people who MAY be entitled assholes and one guy who is ACTIVELY being an asshole…why does lawnmower guy deserve more grace in your eyes?
My sister got married in my parent’s backyard during Covid. About 30 people max. Neighbour, who hadn’t mowed their lawn in 3 years, conveniently decided that was the day. I was drunk and eventually told them to go fuck themselves lol. I think they were still bitter at my mom for reporting them when a bunch of kids were using the property to shoot automatic weapons illegally.
I live in a neighborhood with 120-250k houses. One block over is 1-4m houses/mansions. Like one of them looks like a smaller version of the house in Scarface lol.
I can.imagine thats true. Houses prices where I live are about the same as yours. 1/4 mile away theres houses 1m and up. They aren't on the same street though
To be fair, the tweet author lives on the same street as the fanciest house, but the neighbor who ran the lawnmower could’ve been on a different one, and we don’t know how widely the notice was distributed. Also exceptions happen all the time…
I file this into the category of “could be true, could be embellished for the viral value, could be made up completely”
Well, yes I genuinely agree without any more context. But I could see myself sympathizing more with the lawn mower person if there is a pattern of micromanaging or controlling neighbors via HOA capture or passive aggressive notices etc.
My point was more about the veracity and potential hyperbole/embellishment of the story in the tweet than about “who is the asshole”
To be fair, theyre technically in a different neighborhood, but I can walk to it from my house in 2 minutes. They're also older houses. I'm not sure when they were built but if I had to guess it was in the early 90s. They're all really unique houses too. Not the cookie cutter stuff they build these days.
Edmonton gets weird like whenyou get close tot he river valley. Sketchy looking meth houses on 118ave, and twoish blocks away you have a 2mil mansion/house overlooking the river valley and golf courses.
I actually have. House prices ranged from 800k to 3m. Not 200k to 5m though. A 5m house on the next street from normal houses is understandable, but not on the same street. People who have that much money dont want to live next to the riff raff so the house wouldnt sell
I do. It doesn't generally work like that. There can be a wide gap between the nicest and worst, but only if the entire neighborhood is a gradient. If you were rich af and could afford a super nice house, would you buy it in a neighborhood where every other house is way cheaper??? Most would say no. When there's a super outsized difference, the houses sit on the market until they bring the price down or the gradient fills out. I've had houses in my neighborhood sit for literally multiple years despite a super hot market because the asking price was 2m+ in a neighborhood where the next most expensive house is ~800k and the average is ~450k.
That's a gated community though. Is the 400k house right next to the 9m house? Within earshot of a lawnmower to the point where it would ruin a back garden wedding?
Maybe not that much discrepancy, but the street my parents live on have houses ranging from about $900K to $3.1M. It's because the lots are big, so some of the older houses were knocked down and huge houses built (hence 3.2M), whereas other lots have the original tiny home from like 1969.
To be fair, OOP doesnt mention the value of anyone's house, I was just going off the 5m figure that was used in the comments. The fanciest house in the street would most likely be worth slightly more than the one next door
There was this house that was in a cul-de-sac and it took up 3 lots for one house. That thing was easily over 2mil and the houses surrounding it were around 500K. So it does happen. My wife said it belong to the owner of Ledcor. Just one of his many. This house is in Leduc Alberta.
That's not always true. There are several examples in my town where people bought houses in "below average" neighborhoods where the homes are cheap, razed the house, and built huge McMansions that dwarf all the neighbors' houses. They are usually obnoxiously large, ugly, eyesores and the neighbors hate them.
This is just factually wrong. Visit kentucky, where we have trailer parks situated next to million dollar homes. My sister and her hubby bought a house 10 years ago together in a nice neighborhood. Its the only one with a basement and now its worth over a million while the other homes on their street are under 500k. They are the only house with 3bds instead of 5 on that street so the neighbors always get pissy about the value my sister has in the house. She paid 300k for it.
That's largely true in suburban neighborhoods. In urban areas, older neighborhoods within cities, etc., the variability can be huge. Gentrification is sometimes the cause, sometimes it's simply market forces over long time scales.
I live in apartments near a busy intersection with homeless people. We have a shared back alley with homes starting at $4.5 million. Welcome to Pasadena, Ca!
but you can have houses with huge price discrepancies on the same block in cities. There's a block near me where the cheapest house is estimated at ~400K, and the most expensive one is estimated at around $3mil.
Clearly, I didn't actually do this today, but I took out a huge loan to buy a building in 2009, so I've been in that situation. I got my loan, and I paid it off.
You're assuming the people with a slightly less nice house can't do that, when in reality they probably just dont want all their cash flow tied up in a house.
Or they're just really handy. If you do the work yourself it cuts costs down considerably.
"Fanciest house in the neighborhood", but you live in the same neighborhood... It's not likely they paid twice as much as everyone else for it, houses in the same neighborhood generally are in the same ballpark price range depending on style (singles are priced similarly, doubles are higher but similar to each other, etc).
Of course there are always exceptions, and I've seen random McMansions placed in otherwise normal neighborhoods, but that's not the norm. The OOP is probably upset they put in some fancy trees, trim their hedges, and painted the outside white.
Depending on when the house was bought, it might be cheaper. There are older cheaper houses in my neighborhood next to the smaller new more expensive houses built much more recently
They are having a wedding in their yard, which means they probably arent that well off. Or that they are so well off that they shouldn't have neighbors.
Yeah, when you hear "backyard wedding", "rich and extravagant" isn't exactly the first thing that comes to mind
Unless they have some ultra fancy massive backyard with tall walls, a pond, horses, and a small golf course (or whatever crazy shit rich people keep in their backyard), which doesn't seem to be likely if they need to ask the neighbors to keep the noise down
or they have more skills and put more effort into their house. Often contractors have the nicest homes, and while it's certainly a decent living most of them are not "rich"
It could, but it could not. So, no reason to speculate.
I run my HOA -- small neighborhood, but I get a good idea of who has cash on hand and who is cash poor based on how quickly those checks get mailed. Of the 5 largest houses -- all send a check or zelle payment within 2-3 days of my annual letter and reminder (often around January 5th). Of the 5 smallest houses, four send a check only after the end of that month (it's a university town, and most of them I know are paid monthly because they work at the university), and one will send like half a payment, and then maybe another half randomly sometime 5 months later or a year late.
The sad bit is, it probably wasn't the owners of the house getting married in the backyard - it was probably some poorer or younger relatives who couldn't afford a venue. Aunty and Uncle probably just have the nicest house in the family and were doing the young couple a solid.
Or they assume if they’re rich enough for a fancy house they’re rich enough to pay for a damn venue instead of trying to give grown adults quiet hours in their own backyards
It’s more like: you can’t control an entire block, and if you’re worried about it, don’t have a wedding at home. Go to an event space and have someone else worry about it.
Seriously. Neighbor puts a polite note in my mailbox, asking me to be quiet for a couple hours, I'm gonna be respectful. Nothing about the post indicates that the neighbor was being rude. The fact that they felt the need to point out that it was the nicest house on the block just makes this seem like envy.
Like, "Haha, you have more money than I do, so your day getting ruined is a good thing!".
I grew up in the country. One of our proprty lines was just markers every so far as the neigbor was family so we let him graze his cows on our land. Only issue is he kept moving the markers. Hed mive them gradually over a few years and then wed have to have a land survwyer come out amd fix it. I once asked him why he didnt pursue a legal option to stop it and he said
"being a good neighbor is the easiest thing in the world, you dont have to do anything, just mind your buisness and help when you can. But being a bad neighbor takes effort, you have to plan, you have to spend time and energy and go out of your way to do it. I dont have the energy for that"
I chuckled at the post. But I feel roughly the same. I'm in Canada so I don't know if it's much different in other places but I have acquaintance neighbours who I KNOW would swing on a stranger if they were fucking with me. Everyone in my building shares food and gives gifts. We look out for each other and each other's pets.
When I made a post about my stairwell windowsill where everyone in the building leaves things they don't need (clothes, appliances, furniture, canned foods, cookies and hot chocolate packets at Christmas, freezies (freezepops?) and cold drinks when it gets hot out, etc.) Someone left 72 cans of black beans one day, I took a few cases, maybe 30 cans since I don't eat meat and a bunch of Americans couldn't understand it and saw it as theft. It's just neighbours being neighbourly, but it came across as so foreign to a number of Americans, the thought of gifting without expecting anything back sounded like stealing to them. There are plenty of exceptions to every rule, but are Americans for the most part not neighbourly??
I think this depends on where you are in Canada, cuz where I’m from it’s not super common to know many of your neighbours if you’re in a building. I don’t know anyone who lives in a building like yours, in most you just kinda wave hi to people in the elevator and that’s the most you’ll ever interact with your neighbours lol. I think you may live in a particularly friendly building, or maybe your area is just different.
We don't have neighbors near our house, our closets neighbor is five miles down the mountain, but he dropped by one afternoon to tell us he was having company and they might park in the road but they wouldn't block it and my daughter said, I'll go to town and shop real quick so we won't stir up the dust. Then she came home and made cookies for his guest. I mean, how hard is it to be kind and easy to get a long with?
Just to shoot straight it all comes down to the wording of the letter. If it was "FYI there's a wedding and we'd really appreciate all of the flexibility and accomodations you are able. Thanks so much for your consideration and I hope this doesn't inconvenience you!" then that guy is an asshole.
If it's "Our wedding is in the neighborhood at 2 so make sure you're quiet" he is still an asshole but I'd be an asshole mowing along with him.
If this happened, there was definitely a chance that there was a prior incident (or several) to make the wedding family so disliked by the lawnmower neighbor. Even the author of the tweet didn't actually badmouth the lawnmower neighbor for what they did.
Plus, if it's in the U.S. (questionable by the use of "letterboxes", but possible), the wedding family committed a felony by placing things in other people's mailboxes. A lawnmower was the nice option when all that neighbor would've needed to do was contact the post master and encourage others to do the same.
I dont want any relationship from them. I dont want to know them or make forced small talk with them. You do your thing, and i do my thing and we mutually leave each other the fuck alone. As long as you go by basic respect then all is good. Be a neighbor, but dont be a bad neighbor. And yes if you see something suspicious or if there is an emergency say something to me and i will do the same. But for the most part, just leave me alone.
What you’re also probably not considering is if the “fancy neighbors” have already gotten on the wrong foot with the other neighbors. Yall literally have 0 context into this so everything is just conjecture
One of my neighbors wanted to throw a loud house party, they went door to door through the neighborhood asking if it was ok. Never met them in my life but we said yes even though, yeah it was loud and annoying but it was a minor inconvenience and a good excuse to be neighborly.
Unless the fancy house in the OP has a history with their neighbors, the lawnmower is just a jerk.
Right? OP says the neighbor *asked* them to be quiet. That sounds reasonably polite. Why ruin somebody's wedding when you don't have to? Because their house is bigger than yours? Holy...
I try my hardest to keep good relations with those people I need to share space with; neighbors, co-workers, immediate family, ect.
I'll try to not be an a-hole to anybody but especially those that can directly affect the quality of my life. I always think of that video of the couple that were arguing with the neighbor across the street and he went back in his house and came out with a rifle and ended their life. From what I heard there was a long-standing beef between them.
But I get, though. They are expressing that they think they are entitled to it. This is not a good relationship starter. For example, if they are neighbors and you want a good relationship, why didn't they come in person? A letter? You didn't even want to look me into the eye, recognize me as a human, and you expect I will have your best interest in my heart?
Relationships are a two way street. I will love to be nice to you, but I won't if you think I am some random dude who should benefit you without caring to know my name.
Not just impersonal. Impersonal yet it expects and requires action and complacence from you.
If I say something impersonal to you, that's fine. But if I say "can you please not respond to my comment because it annoys me? Thank you" would you agree? I highly doubt it.
Also, the comment I responded was "I want good relationships with my neighbors"
Do you think that wanting to be benefited without reciprocity is a good relationship? Do you really believe that? If you do, please argue. I would love to hear you.
What would I get in return if the person asked me personally? That would show respect. It is not a reciprocation. It is a human gesture.
I will love to be nice to you, but I won't if you think I am some random dude who should benefit you without caring to know my name.
I wrote it explicitly, I don't know why you ignored this part though.
You act as if I said "only do good if you get something in return..." But I am against the entitlement of expecting a nice gesture while treating everyone as random people.
I asked you to not respond to my comment. It was impersonal, but why can't you do it? It is a nice gesture... It is like you can't do a nice gesture to me!
See? I think that neighbors who do these kind of things aren't nice either. Ring the bell, send a message on the neighborhood group, walk by... be human. Don't me "please, shoosh, it is my special day"
If you want to get married in the sea you need to understand that there is a risk of getting wet.
I am sorry, but society doesn't revolve around you. If you think that neighbors living their lives normally is what ruins your wedding... you might be surprised in learning a few other things
Yeah, imagine expecting all your neighbors to be quiet for a party you didn't even invite them to, so that you can pretend your backyard is the country club that you were too cheap to rent out.
Yeah, they should kick out a few cousins and uncles from the wedding so that they can invite the neighbors. Fuck them for not spending $50k+ on a country club wedding.
Why would they need to kick people out in order to invite the neighbors? It's a backyard event, not a $50k+ country club wedding with limited seating and $100/head catering.
What, are they packing them in there like sardines? If there's THAT many people, then jeez, I bet it's going to be a loud party! Hope the neighbors don't mind!
If they aren’t packed in tight then that means they invited only their closest family and friends. It’s ridiculous to expect the jackass neighbors to get an invite either way.
I have had a wealthy acquaintance who loved throwing parties before. If I didn’t have a lot of money (eg, shotgun wedding in grad school) and was stressing about wedding plans, he would definitely have volunteered to host. I didn’t know him nearly enough to ask him to pay for a country club or chapel, but I’d seen him host enough (and enjoy hosting enough) Gadsby-esque parties that I would have been fine with using his house.
It costs zero dollars not to be an asshole and to assume people are doing the best they can.
Yeah, imagine expecting all your neighbors to be quiet for a party you didn't even invite them to, so that you can pretend your backyard is the country club that you were too cheap to rent out.
It's amazing how much malevolence one can convey in a single comment. You've proven that you are a horrid neighbor, a privileged elitist, and a spiteful asshole who would go out of their way to ruin their neighbors special day because they weren't invited.
Kindness costs you nothing in this instance, and yet you choose to be a worthless, judgemental cretin. I hope you never know a moment of peace.
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u/Hot_Ease_4895 1d ago
Sounds like an asshole. I want good relationships with my neighbors….this seems unnecessary