Parking Wars: My Driveway Edition, Part One

Well hello! I trust you had a great weekend. Or maybe not as your instant karma for having one last weekend. I'm just kidding (Maybe).

As you know I'm now the "proud" resident of an actual house. I still have some mixed feelings about it, but I was excited to hope that maybe...just maybe it would mean the end of battling with neighbors. The end of wondering when, if ever, they would finally, mericfully, turn the music down. Hopeing that maybe when they get home at the crack of dawn they'll think "hey - you know, we should totally keep it down. Like, other people might be trying to actually sleep or something. So, tonight, lets not talk loudly on our porch at 3am. Lets not stomp up and down the stairs. Lets not scream at each other in the parking lot. Lets surely not do any of those things"

If you have not lived in an actual house since you left your parents' house, you probably get a lot of homeowners trying to convince you how great it is to not share a wall with someone. Everything is just so damn peachy in home-dwellingsville why wouldn't everyone want to do this??

LIARS!!

Home dwellers have just as many, if not more problems with neighbors as apartment/condo/duplex dwellers do. They are just dirty liars who lie so you will join them on the dark side. Noisy neighbors? Check! Loud talking outside at 3am neighbors? Check! Violating your property line? Double Check!!

I've never been disillusioned by this. I know. I've always known. Neighbors just always suck. That's life. In fact, during my apartment days, I felt slightly better than these home dwellers because one call to my landlord and the problem was pretty much fixed. If you live in a house? Good luck my friend!

Well....now I live in a house....a house with a shared driveway. With not just one other house...but two others houses. Yes that's right my little mathematicians....one driveway for three houses.

Let the games begin!

Initally the boyfriend and I were parking our one car as close to the house as possible. There is a space behind the house to park, but at the time we had yet to get a magnet roller to take care of getting the metal debris, like rusty nails, out of the way so that we wouldn't pop my extremly expensive tires.

Let me draw you a mental picture if you will: When you come to our house there is one driveway entrance. It goes between the big house (not ours) on the left and a small house (ours!) on the right. The big house dwellers (our landlord's nephews) park their two huge 4x4 full size trucks and one older black Bonneville along side the big house - so the left side of the drive. This leaves enough room for my car to drive up and park alongside our house on the left

Which would be fine except for that third house, which is behind our house and the big house.

See actual map - (also try not to laugh, there's really only so much I can do with Microsoft Word/Paint here people!)

Those little squares over there along the big house represent the trucks sticking out into the shared drive.

Anyway, the third house people are really only there on the weekends because it's their "summer house". Well la di da! So here they come one day - bright and early in the morning with their van pulling a pontoon boat! At the time, I was parked like so:

(I made my car purple...naturally)

The night before we had been moving for over 12 hours including not only our stuff but my friend and the boyfriend's sister's stuff as well. Once we finally had gotten around it making it food it was only then I realized we had no forks, so I made the treck back the the old apartment to get them and was too tired to think about people arriving at the crack of dawn with boats and vans. I figured no big deal - I'll park super close to the house everything will be fine...no bring on the foooood!

Obviously that didn't work out. When we finally heard the neighbors of the third house knocking they proceeded to lecture the boyfriend about the shared driveway and sharing. Blah blah blah. Then we just decided - screw it and started parking on our front lawn all ghetto style.

Then we come home one night to find some random person parked in our actual designated spot - you know...the one filled with possible sharp metal debris! Which - ok yeah, at the time we were surely not going to park there what with the sharp metal debris...but still. Um...that would be our one spot, aside from the lawn on which to park. At the time we figured - hey what the heck. YOU wanna pop your tires (which I was secretly really hoping would be the case - serve ya right!) knock yourself out buddy.

Still - this will be unacceptable once we get that shit magnet rolled. Which we did like the next day.

Now we get to park in our "spot"....not blocking the shared -yes we get it TRUST ME driveway.

Interestingly - the big house neighbors still like to take pretty much any and all opportunities to point out when we might possibly be even thinking about maybe blocking the shared driveway.

Maybe I need to slip them a xanex....

Next up - Parking Wars: My Driveway Edition; Part Two: It's 5am for the loveagod!