A Remarkable Turn of Events
A Remarkable Turn of Events.
If there was an upside to being 32 weeks pregnant and on strict bed rest, it would have been the vast amount of time I had to spy on my neighbors from the privacy of my bedroom window… Let’s just say I have never felt closer to Hitchcock or Jimmy Stewart… or Mrs. Kravitz for that matter, than I did in those five weeks. I refused to be on social media, acting like the voyeur everyone becomes on there because the idea of reading all the posts of wonderful things people were doing while I was laid up in a bed, my stomach as big as a circus tent and scared to move because my baby might fall out of me 8 weeks early, had me reeling with need: Need for gossip. Attainable gossip. Not the stuff you read about celebrities in People. I only like to read those rags at the doctor’s office… because it’s either that or Golf Digest. Anyway, my neighborhood is ripe for the picking when it comes to drama and gossip, it just is. It is sort of Roseanne meets Sanford & Son meets Perfect Strangers.
First, the most interesting thing about our house is its aesthetics. It’s a corner lot on a small plateau that is higher than the surrounding neighborhood homes. A bit pretentious? Sure, but that’s just the way the land in our town slopes and rises with little hills and canyons, and we got lucky with our little abode, which used to be a barn (not so pretentious, now, eh? Unless you’re a hipster…) Basically when our windows are open, and they always are, you can hear everything. Everything from all directions – that’s 360 degrees of conversations, noise, car horns, and urban choppers. Imagine me, big as a circus tent, upstairs on bed rest, just lying there, windows open, listening.
Creepy, I know, but also quite boring most of the time. Occasionally the neighbors would come over to visit and fill me in regarding the latest happenings. Including the oddest one-sided conversation I happened to overhear. I thought it was just a strange cell phone exchange at first, but it was bizarre when I continued to hear the man screaming, “Can you hear me?” and never hanging up because of a bad connection. As it turns out it was the Retired-PTSD neighbor yelling at a contractor he hired, who happened to be deaf. As in: can’t hear anything, only reads sign language and lips. So when I heard Retired-PTSD yelling it turns out he just mistook lip reading for loud speaking.
That relationship didn’t end well and resulted in Retired-PTSD neighbor doing the work himself… on a very unstable garage, which is now probably worse off than it was before. We ended up hiring the deaf contractor and in Retired-PTSD’s defense, it is very hard to communicate your building and contracting needs to a deaf contractor when you don’t speak ASL. Wild hand gestures result in constant miscommunication, and to be fair, lip reading with a Midwest accent is also very misleading. So we resorted to drawing pictures and using arrows, until I realized we all read English. So now we text everything – which, to be honest, is how everyone who can hear communicates these days too, so hey, our contractor isn’t missing out. We are still over six months past the date our project was supposed to have started, but if I am correct, that’s just standard contractor time and has nothing to do with, well, you know. Sigh. That was just small potatoes to what happened next over here, in the ‘hood…
There have been some major developments regarding what I now refer to as Deckgate, or Lerpgate… wait, maybe it’s Treegate? Whatever it’s called, it is a debacle. If you haven’t yet, I suggest you read my previous blogs on the neighborhood. It will bring you up to speed on Deckgate and entertain you simultaneously. For everybody else, we last left it at an agreement to disagree between the Disgruntled Neighbors and Nice Guy & Girl.
Since the last email exchange (see previous blog entries) Nice Guy and Nice Girl carefully trimmed the lerp infested and dying eucalyptus trees/not-trees-but-branches-that-created-their-own-version-of-a-tree themselves in an attempt to clean them up, and decided to just let lying dogs lay. (Or is that “let laying dogs lie??” Those are both wrong, I just looked it up and it’s “let sleeping dogs lie.” Okay, so you get the idea.) Everyone was just going to go about their business in a passive aggressive neighborly way in order to maintain the peace. No chopping down of diseased trees and no planting of new ones.
Well, imagine my dismay when Nice Girl came to visit, bearing a gift (my first ever Cook’s magazine – dying still over the article about Brie) and told me the most disheartening news: the Disgruntled Neighbors decided not to let sleeping dogs lie.
Now let’s get into this. The Neighb’s, Nice Guy & Girl, came home to a notice from the Dept. of Building and Safety - a Notice Of Inspection - on their front door, that in no way referenced what it was regarding. Could someone at the LADBS at least mark a box that says ‘don’t panic just give us a call’? No, and because it came on a Friday, it took an entire weekend of suspenseful waiting to find out what on earth the Dept. of Building and Safety could possibly want – not to mention there’s a 7 day Must Comply tag. Ugh. When contact was made they were alerted that someone had reported their deck as unpermitted, and by law the LADBS would need to send out an inspector at the homeowners’ expense: a $350 fine expense.
I think it’s fair to say that at this point we are now dealing with two sets of Disgruntled Neighbors, but for consistency I will be keeping the name-titles the same.
Now, let’s keep going, I attempted to do some research on permits on the LADBS website, which did not result in a clear answer as to whether Los Angeles requires a deck to be permitted – and every jurisdiction is different. Certainly it seems that it may be the case considering you cannot even put a new dishwasher in without a permit (this is when I say yes, that’s too much government.) Here are the sites and pages I found:
http://ladbs.org/LADBSWeb/services-permit.jsf
http://hcidapp.lacity.org/lahdinternet/Portals/0/Rent/CommonPermitforOnline052610.pdf .
And to be transparent, I have not at this time called the Customer Care Center for the LADBS to investigate further because at this point that’s not really what my story is about. The deck that was built was done by a contractor and an engineer, and with that in mind was designed to not require a permit, according to the contractor, who happens to be – yes the deaf contractor (oy vey).
Let’s pause for a moment, we live in a city and neighborhood that takes upwards of a year or more to get a permit. Yes, you read that correctly. Say you needed to install a new bathtub in your bathroom, this two hour job would require a permit and that permit would take no less than three months and up to a year to obtain. In the meantime you'd have to hose off outside. Most people say “screw it, I’m moving forward.” Right or wrong it is what it is. And lastly, our neighborhood is full of do-it-yourselfer-home-repairers and flippers that don’t wait for permits or even apply for one. Half the listings in this town read as follows:
Adorable two bedroom, two bath bungalow with mother-in-law suite, or possible third bedroom and bath. Buyer to verify permits.
Um, that is code for, “we built this addition without a permit and the bank may not give you a loan because, blah, blah, blah,” and so on.
Now, back to the story. Who called and reported the deck? You guessed it, Disgruntled Neighbors. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the inspector felt there was no issue with anonymity in regards to the complaint, or maybe Disgruntled Neighbors didn’t care - I’m not sure - but it doesn’t matter because the cat was out of the bag, (shoot is that one right?… Yup, nailed it.)
Let’s get to the meat of the situation: the inspector advised Nice Guy & Girl that they would have to lower the deck six inches and make it wider, and while this cost them $2000 at the end of the day the deck is now bigger… and more visible to the Disgruntled Neighbors… and permitted… So, to summarize, by filing a complaint in the hopes (which to be fair I am assuming this was their hope based on the history) to have the deck removed, Disgruntled Neighbors have now imposed upon their neighbor financially, and taken up their time to redo the height of the deck which is now bigger and more visible to the Disgruntled Neighbors.
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face (nailed it again).
I wish I could rename Nice Guy and Girl to Disgruntled Neighbors, but that would make everything very confusing in a blog that is well underway. But you should understand that they are now quite disgruntled.
Let me briefly pause again, in the interest of more exposition, these neighbors have still never had a conversation, a sit down over coffee and had a one-on-one (or two-on-two, or two-on-one or one-on-two) meeting, neighbor to neighbor. No introduction, no stopping by the back fence and saying “hello…” No “welcome to the neighborhood” baked good (is this just a Midwest thing?), no introduction what-so-ever (except one Housewarming party hosted by Nice Guy & Girl post deck construction, before complaints and emails were made/sent, where the Disgruntled Neighbors were in attendance and never said a word about anything. I wasn’t there, so again all hearsay)! And so I ask WHY? Why so much resentment towards a new homeowner you’ve never met and who has not caused you any harm or damage? Sigh.
Now in the midst of deck reconstruction or maybe before or maybe after, our Disgruntled Neighbors noticed that Nice Guy & Girl put up a camera. It is mounted to the back of their garage pointing towards the paper alley, which, in fairness, would also be facing Disgruntled Neighbors backyard. The camera is a decoy, it’s not an actual working camera, but a $10 dollar toy used as a preventative measure to discourage unwanted activity behind the homes in the alley (see previous posts). However, due to the heightened emotions and general Hatfield’s and McCoy’s situation we now have on our hands, the LAPD was called to Nice Guy & Girl’s house to investigate said camera… and yes, the complaint was filed by Disgruntled Neighbors.
I’m going to ask a redundant question here: Why didn’t they just ask their neighbors about the camera? I am so confused. If I thought my neighbor had a camera pointed at me I wouldn’t hesitate to walk over and question them. And if there was some weird Peeping Tom, Big Brother B.S. happening, then I would call the cops. Oy vey, can’t we all just get along?
Well, the police investigated, and confirmed the camera is in fact just a decoy and so it remains a fixture on the back of the garage further provoking the Disgruntled Neighbors. At this point I think it’s fair to say that Nice Guy & Girl are thoroughly irritated and have no patience left for the Disgruntled Neighbors, but they have tried to remain civil enough to bite their tongues and not fan the flames of an already absurd hatred… to an extent.
As the months go by the tree limbs continue to gnarl through each other like a hideous pair of arms reaching and strangling at each others throats…hmm, is that symbolic? Whatever it is, it needs to be dealt with and that brings us to today (well the past weekend)… Nice Guy & Girl employed a professional tree service to come and trim the branches on their side of the easement/alley. Trim. At their own cost. And when the tree trimmers arrived, so did the Disgruntled Neighbors, and for the first time ever they came to the back fence and conversed. Well, actually yelled… and screamed in protest demanding that the tree trimmers not trim the trees or they will be sued or something. Now, I was not there to hear what happened and am reiterating the information third party, but what I’ve been told it was an awful verbal assault on both sides and the trees were not trimmed that day. I am waiting to see if they will be trimmed at all and I promise to let you know. However, the email exchanges have started again. That’s right and though I want to publish them, I am going to respect the request of Disgruntled Neighbor and not publish their last email.
…
But I will paraphrase:
TO: Nice Guy and Nice Girl (yup, correct spelling! See previous posts for history)
Cease and Desist being our neighbor Nice Guy and Girl or we will pursue legal action.
--Disgruntled Neighbors
I’ll publish Nice Guy’s response in a future post because I want to wait and see how things transpire and it’s a long and hard email response.
Here’s the thing: imagine how different this story would be had the persons feeling threatened and angered over a neighbor’s home improvements had a simple conversation with their neighbor. Had Nice Guy & Girl known that the Disgruntled Neighbors were harboring resentment over the construction of their deck, I imagine they would have found a way to address the matter positively and resolved any concern the Disgruntled Neighbors had/have. I say this based on my experience with Nice Guy & Girl as neighbors and friends. They have gone above and beyond for the neighborhood, making hot meals for the lonely and depressed older woman across the street, learning Spanish to better communicate with the non-English speaking elderly on the block, brokering compromise between the immediate adjacent neighbors who had a long standing beef with each other that dates back decades. It’s unreasonable to think that they wouldn’t have handled the situation with the best of intentions. Now, I don’t know the Disgruntled Neighbors. My interaction has been merely the emails sent regarding the light post and Neighborhood Watch. I have met their dogs on two separate occasions when they found their way to my yard. The dogs were adorable. I love dogs.
And so at the end of today I have no words. I am in awe at the escalation of events. There are no winners here today, people.
