I think I've mentioned this before. Buying (or renting) a home does not guarantee there will be no loud neighbors or barking dogs or loud music. In fact, it makes those things worse, because if the transgressors are also home owners, there ain't no waiting for the lease to expire so they will move away. Excepting the most egregious of behaviours manifested as code violations, they are not gonna get evicted. Nor can you move as easily as you can when renting. I got stories. I've done things I'm not proud of. But necessity is a mother...or something like that.
We bought our first house in 1968. Since then have bought and sold and bought and sold, etc, and current house is number 14 (one of them was a second home condo), and I don't recall ever having a problem with a neighbor. I guess I'm a live and let live fella.
John, we bought a house back in 2003. Things were fine until the existing next-door neighbor was going thru a divorce and had to relinquish the house to the bank. After that, another young couple, with two young kids and two dogs, moved into the house. The husband worked the somewhat of a swing shift as Security for the local school district, told his wife to put both dogs in the garage before she went to bed. She didn't do that! Both dogs barked quite a bit in their backyard all night. We seen the husband on a Saturday and mentioned to him about the dogs barking. He told us that he had told his wife to put the dogs in the garage before she went to bed. I said to him, "well, it's obvious that she didn't do that" and he totally agreed. She started putting them in the garage and, somehow, they got out, came over to our wooden fence and dug under it and came into our backyard. A neighbor told us our dogs were barking a lot in the backyard and we told them, "we no longer have a dog!". The owner wound up getting both dogs and repairing our fence. He made sure both dogs were put in the garage each night before he went to work. We also had a problem with two large Woods Owls, from local small woods, landing on the roof of the house behind us at midnight. Our bed window faced that house and their "hooting" woke us up. I got our portable high-beam boat light, pointed it in the sky and brought the beam down to one of the owls and it, and the other, flew away. So, in even buying a house, we had noise problems! We thought we had got rid of noise problems moving into this house. Boy we were wrong!
I agree that mutual tolerance is the keystone of our freedoms. I had a guy buy the house behind me to "flip." He was in construction. His project stretched out over 10 years. He lived in another house, and bought a German Shepherd to guard the rental property. The poor dog was there all by itself, 7x24x365, chained to a tree with the thickest construction chain I have ever seen. It would knock over its water dish in the middle of the hottest summer days with no one but me to go fill it backup. And it would constantly bark all morning, all afternoon, all night. I've seen other people do similar things...they get a dog and they leave it outside all by itself and it incessantly barks for company. Everyone but the owner seems to hear it. Other than that, the occasional loud party & such does not bother me. But incessant barking at 1AM, 2AM, 3AM etc etc etc is more that intolerable. The same goes for a guy in an apartment to put a record on full blast, leave for the night, and have the thing playing over & over. I guess "noise during traditional sleeping hours" is where I draw the line.
That A bubble is me. The red circled Xs are the nearest houses. My worse noise issues are the early morning birds in the spring, and the occasional mocking bird that perches outside of my bedroom window. And maybe my own snoring.
Well, Hoot, there are those, especially Seniors, that are hard of hearing and that makes it very easy to not hear loud noises. When we were buying that one house, I was not yet "hard of hearing" and not wearing high-tech hearing aids. Today I'm now like that and wear those hearing aids. So, if I can hear music or whatever, without my hearing aids on, that music or whatever has to be pretty loud.
And you're probably a lot happier for it. We have lived in our home since we built it in 1994. It's on a cul-de-sac across from the HOA boat ramp on a river. In the summertime, there is plenty of noise from drunken boaters on the river, kids riding 4-wheelers up and down the ramp, etc. Sometimes it's annoying but we realized when we built here that this was going to be a busy area due to the public area. I just tune it out, grumble to myself, and get on with my life.
My wife currently works a full-time "at home" job and we both get up at 6:30AM Monday thru Friday. It really seems as if each and every time both of us or one of us has a job, we are always living around noisy neighbors! It gets quit ridiculous. There are those that just tolerate noise and those that just can't. We have residents that ignore "where to smoke" Lease rules and residents that complain about those folks. Only certain areas can a person smoke cigarettes and marijuana here and many of the young residents, that do smoke both or one, totally ignore those "certain areas". In our last apartment complex (Florida) we knew a 40ish lady that loved smoking cigarettes. The complex put up "No Smoking Within 10 Feet) signs in front of certain buildings that residents were asked about smoking. She never complied by that sign and told me "I'll smoke wherever I want to. I pay no attention to those signs."
Well, Beth, when a homeowner builds a home near an area that will be noisy, that is their choice. When we bought our house, we had no idea about the Woods Owls or that a new neighbor would move in next to us with barking dogs. Also, when renting an apartment, a manager won't tell a prospective tenant how the noise is there during the day or night.
You are so ridiculous with that "owls" thing. Seriously?? Whining about wildlife? You are never going to be happy no matter where you live. As soon as you arrive in your new place it will be more whining about neighbors and how HOT it is. You just love to whine and nothing is EVER going to suit you.
This is where people cease to care. Noise is one thing...it's intrusive and annoying, and can prevent sleep (which is used as a method of torture.) But complaining to us about someone breaking rules that don't even impact you is an act of public self-abuse that's embarrassing to watch.
And, YOU love to continue complaining about wife and I. It's just like I've already stated about how members here complain about different things. They are no better than us!
John, we have noise rules and smoking rules that DO impact us and others in the complex. And, again, how many members here complain about things they can do nothing about? Plenty!
I can relate. One house was across the fairway from the swimming pool at the country club, and in the summer, sitting on my back deck, we could hear the kids playing at the pool, but I considered it "happy noise". Kids playing. Life was good.