the travails of shared housing are many and petty
It took me a lot longer than Downstairs Neighbor S (who has been complaining since they moved in this spring), but I have finally gotten fed up with my upstairs diagonal neighbors treating my half of the front porch as their private junk room. It is unsightly, it is presumptuous -- I pay rent on that porch half, just like they pay rent on their half of the upstairs porch balcony! -- and it has become an active obstacle to my everyday life. You see, what started as two or three plastic storage containers and one child's bicycle, which I said nothing about on the assumption that as they unpacked they would carry their shit upstairs, has instead accumulated and expanded to the point that not only does the bicycle frequently block my access to my mailbox, the junk piles have begun to block everyone's access to the recycling bins that I graciously keep on my half of the porch so they're not cluttering the yard and/or our respective kitchens or something.
So I wrote a letter and clipped it to their mailbox:
Hello,
Please remove your plastic containers and other detritus from the south side of the front porch. While I don't use my half as an annex to my apartment the way [Downstairs Neighbor S] does, and am quite willing to keep the four recycling bins there, I don't appreciate the area being turned into a general junk storage room. If you have not removed everything (aside from the chair and the bicycle) within the next two weeks, I will assume whatever remains is unwanted and will put it out for trash and recycling collection.
Removing the junk will create a much nicer living space for everyone in the house, and will also allow the bicycle to be placed up against the railing so it won't block access to the recycling bins or the south two mailboxes, as it often does in its current location.
Thank you, and sorry for the inconvenience.
Elizabeth Culmer
[apartment number redacted]
Hopefully that will work. And if it doesn't, I am perfectly willing to carry through on my ultimatum. Sometimes that is the only way to get through to people.
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So I wrote a letter and clipped it to their mailbox:
Hello,
Please remove your plastic containers and other detritus from the south side of the front porch. While I don't use my half as an annex to my apartment the way [Downstairs Neighbor S] does, and am quite willing to keep the four recycling bins there, I don't appreciate the area being turned into a general junk storage room. If you have not removed everything (aside from the chair and the bicycle) within the next two weeks, I will assume whatever remains is unwanted and will put it out for trash and recycling collection.
Removing the junk will create a much nicer living space for everyone in the house, and will also allow the bicycle to be placed up against the railing so it won't block access to the recycling bins or the south two mailboxes, as it often does in its current location.
Thank you, and sorry for the inconvenience.
Elizabeth Culmer
[apartment number redacted]
Hopefully that will work. And if it doesn't, I am perfectly willing to carry through on my ultimatum. Sometimes that is the only way to get through to people.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)