I would not block my kitchen (or any other window) in any way because my neighbors were bothered by lights inside my house. Not my problem. That is their problem…and they can put up curtains or potted flowers outside their window.
Not my problem. This is their problem.
Plus…what do they expect? That as soon as it gets dark, you will turn your kitchen lights OFF…so they are not bothered?
Ridiculous.
I’m sure neighbor mom has dementia issues. I’m sure my lights wake her up – but she’s hallucinating that they are on all night. She is sick – I think she has cancer. I do have a certain amount of sympathy, but part of my issue is the way they’ve dealt with it – pouncing on it even before we moved in.
I totally agree with PG and mathmom, that this is their problem and not mine and that I’m not doing anything unreasonable. Really, if I wanted to cook at 2 am and had the lights on, I should be allowed to do that – it’s my house, I own it.
Oy, a lawsuit. Yuck.
There are blinds in the kitchen window. My husband talked about lowering them at night. I don’t think they’d solve the problem – they aren’t blackout shades – light does filter through them. I’m certainly not buying blackout shades for my windows! I’m intrigued with the idea of hanging plants or somehow covering the window in an attractive way, because frankly - I don’t really want to interact or see them!
I wonder how they would have dealt with the neighbors we had at our very first house. This guy used to come home from working the night shift – 11 pm, I think – and snowblow his backyard. I never really understood the point – he put all the snow along the edges and the center would be clear.
I’ll add that one of the interesting things about this is that the kitchen was gutted and redesigned 15 years ago. The sink used to face the backyard, and the renovation moved it to under the window that faces their house. The new design is really really stupid, and I would much prefer the original layout, which had a mudroom/entryway on the neighbor’s side. This makes a lot of sense – our houses are close, and the original design took that into consideration.
I think their frustration and anger comes from the original renovation – which I obviously had nothing to do with. But I’m not spending $75,000 to gut and redo the kitchen – well, I’d like to, but it’s not going to happen.
What about the mornings! It’s dark here in the winter in the morning…and we all turn our outside and inside lights on.
Also, when someone is out late at our house, we put our outside lights on…for safety reasons.
Does the neighbor object to this?
I would buy a shade and pull it down at night. When rolled up, you don’t even notice them and they don’t block your own light. $5.00 at Lowes. She is probably dying. This problem is self-limited and I would have compassion about such a small issue.
So they’ve been bothered by this for awhile and still haven’t put up blackout shades or even curtains?
That’s just odd.
I have a very active 4 year old boy living on top of me. He likes to jump a lot. The only time I complained was when he was bouncing a very large ball for a long time. I spoke with the doorman and he took care of it. I even asked the doorman to be nice about it.
I rarely had any problem with my neighbors in the city, but while living out in suburb, we had more issues. Neighbors were complaining about other neighbors for not mowing their lawn or dogs pooping on someone else’s lawn.
I think it’s ridiculous that the neighbors don’t buy their own shades if the light is so bothersome. Obviously the light comes in THEIR windows somehow. Like I said - I have this problem with my neighbor’s bathroom light, which is angled in such a way it hits my bedroom (their property is higher than ours). And so I see the light go in in the middle of the night if they use their bathroom, etc. But it would never occur to me in a million years to ask them not to use their bathroom light as they see fit. It’s their house.
Don’t argue or reason with crazy. They have obviously discovered their raison d’etre. If it wasn’t a light in your house it would be something else.
Im so glad that we dont have anyone higher than us looking into our house. H already has a phobia about people looking in, even though all they could see is that we had a light on, they would not be able to see anything.
I have cabinet lighting that I turn on at night if I need to use the kitchen, rather than an overhead, but thats just because I dont like to blind myself in the middle of the night.
Still, if its something you might be interested in anyway, it might help.
I wasn’t suggesting that you get blinds or curtains; I was asking because I wanted to know to what extent the lights could even be a bother. If there were blinds or curtains and they were drawn and the light still bothered her, then clearly nothing would please them.
Now that we know there aren’t curtains and that there are blinds but that they aren’t lowered, wouldn’t an easy fix be to lower the blinds at night? I always close my blinds at night because I don’t want people seeing inside my house.
I get that they are nuts, but their behavior is clearly bothering you so wouldn’t it be in your best interest to do what you can to reduce interaction with them? I’ll trot out my favorite Dr. Phil-ism – Do you want to be right, or do you want to solve the problem? Obviously, you have the right to turn on the lights in your own home. But you know it bothers them and then they bother you. I’d lower the blinds in the kitchen at night and keep them from bothering you about the light. The old woman is sick and dying, and I’m sure her dd is at the end of her rope. Lowering your blinds at night seems like a small thing to do to give yourself and them peace of mind.
I would be fearful that they will do something, or tell someone who will do something (a tenant looking for a few extra bucks?).
The options I see are:
I do not know why the first option has not been considered. There are sometimes older people who own their house outright so have no mortgage, but struggle to make ends meet on social security, and they don’t want to spend the money. Or they don’t even know such things exist.
The younger neighbor seems to be trapped with her mother. Her mother seems to have psychological issues, possibly relate to pain/end of life. That points to an eventual end to the situation.
What would I do? I have enough money to buy blackout shades and curtains, and I would draw them at dusk on the side towards their house. I am up at all hours and my neighbors do notice lights, but no one screams about it, heck their dog doesn’t even bark. They figured it was my kids getting up in the middle of the night.
But what should you do? Consider how nutty they are, and whether they are worth antagonizing. I think not. But if they are worth “getting it on” with, call the division of senior services (usually county-based) and ask them to check on the poor woman who screams in the middle of the night when a light is put on in the next house. I would not call the police, but maybe there is something wrong with one or both of them and they need help.
Sometimes I think I’d rather move to the boonies and have lots of land, and I can play my music and leave my lights on at all hours. But there are benefits to living in a suburb.
If they were otherwise reasonable people, I’d suggest arranging a visit so that you could experience the light issue from their point of view. Maybe the light does beam right into someone’s bedroom, and changing the fixture in your house, or pulling a blind, or helping them install a blind or re-arrange the bedroom furniture, might make all the difference.
True story:
Over the years, in our old apartment different downstairs neighbors commented about hearing our movements in our apartment. Most neighbors weren’t particularly bothered, one left crazy notes, and one had a house guest who came upstairs, banged on our door, and read us the riot act for “stomping around” while the tenant was lying sick in bed with the flu. When I went downstairs to check on things, sure enough, unless the people in our apartment walked very carefully, it sounded like elephants were stomping from one end of the ceiling to the other. There was no noise at all in my apartment from the very same movement. We were mortified, but there was nothing to do but s-l-o-w d-o-w-n while moving around our apartment.
Maybe I’m missing something really obvious, but you said you have blinds on that window already. It seems like the easiest thing to do to solve this issue is to lower your blinds at night, even though you are within your rights to leave them up. You can’t see out anyway at night, and it provides privacy for you as well.
If that doesn’t suffice, well, you’ve done what you could without any great inconvenience or expense. Beyond that, the ball is in their court.
Sort of off topic, but I suggest you take some photos when their tenants block your driveway or block your trashcans from getting picked up. Not that you have to do anything with that evidence, but if they were to start an all-out war with you, you can show authorities what things you have had to put up with.
And I encourage you to put your kitchen blinds down at night. If they are there already, why not use them? I know it is catering to the crazies, but it also might lessen the amount of crazy they dump on you.
You are totally within your rights and certainly have no moral or ethical obligation to pull down your shades at night, but you might want to do it anyway just out of a sense of compassion.
People tend to go a little crazy when their loved ones are dying and rapidly deteriorating. From their perspective, the world can seem so unfair and so cold. Dealing with those kinds of emotions can cause people to lash out inappropriately. That may be what is happening here.
If they had come to you and said, “i know this is not your problem but my dying mother has irrationally become fixated on the light in your kitchen and she makes life miserable for us when it is on. Anything you could do to minimize that light – perhaps pulling down the shade at night – would be an enormous act of neighborly compassion that we would be very grateful for. You certainly don’t have to do it, but we would appreciate it if you could indulge us just for a little while,” do you think you would have a different reaction? If so, maybe you could mentally pretend they’ve asked that way. Or, alternatively, you might just express concern and compassion for their situation while explaining why you can’t accommodate their request. But I’d assume that it is the stress over their dying, demented mother that is causing their irrational behavior. Just saying, “i’m so sorry about your mom. We’ll do what we can to minimize the light,” EVEN IF YOU DON’T CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOR AT ALL may be enough to smooth things over a bit.
Tell them you cannot sleep at night knowing that their curtains are open.
I live on a lake and the street on the opposite side has the same name, but with South vs North attached to the address. I would get these horrible ranting calls from the daughter of the woman who had the same house number, because my mail was going to her address. Then the daughter wrote the local postmaster AND the main postmaster in DC demanding that I be permanently denied the right to receive US Mail as it was causing her stress.
Fast forward…Twice in one week I received UPS boxes which should have gone to her South address. I brought the first one over and an adult son was visiting and he simply scowled at me. With the second package, the elderly woman was at home and she was so grateful and so charming and thought I was so honest that she invited me to sit on her front porch and visit! I think the daughter (who lives elsewhere) was simply tired of listening to her mother complain about the mail…
@happymomof1 Your story reminded me an incident way back when DW and I were living in a small apartment. We’re pretty quiet people, but somehow we managed to annoy the downstairs couple who otherwise seemed like decent people. Anyway one evening we were sitting on the sofa watching tv quietly. The neighbors came knocking on the door demanding that we stop stomping around. We just looked at each other in confusion since we’d been literally sitting on the couch for the past couple hours. Thank God we’re no longer in close quarters like that!
Okay, I was with everyone who wrote that it’s not your problem until I read @nottelling’s post which points out that it’s the sick mama that makes all the difference here. If it was just some crazy lady who was bothered by the kitchen light, I would tell her to suck it. But having cared for a dying mom, I can tell you, one operates from an emotional point of view twenty-four-seven. Maybe some compassion is called for.
It could very well be about the sick mom who is dying, but it is also weird that the daughter didn’t put up blinds/curtains in the room affected by the light. I kind of wonder if the daughter is all there, either because mom is sick, or maybe she has something wrong with her, because someone sane would have talked to you about the situation instead of being aggressive and saying “don’t leave your light on all night”, and more importantly, they would put up curtains or shades, even a blanket tacked over the window would cover most light. It is one thing to say “my mom has trouble with the light from your kitchen at night, would it be possible to have your windows covered, I realize ti is a burden, but I would appreciate it” to doing what they did. I suspect the mom wants the window not covered, she might have paranoia or something on top of dementia, but the fact that the D didn’t try to explain is just weird…and the fact that the D doesn’t get along with others on the block also says something, if I was a caregiver I would be looking for places to socialize or whatnot…