good fences
never neighbors
[Editor’s Note: This essay was first written 15+ months ago, but finally edited this week. Things have changed since then, but the tense (present) remains the same as written barring misses during the aforementioned editing. It is also quite long. Enjoy?]
They say good fences make good neighbors.1
When we set out to buy the house we currently live in almost five years ago, we had a few non-negotiables. Having lived in apartments and co-ops since we each, separately, left the shelter of our parents’ roofs, there were a number of features we coveted: a fireplace and a second story for me; a kitchen good enough for entertaining and a yard to fill with trees and gardens for my wife; that same yard to fill with, and a basement to which we could banish, our kids. We wanted something that was move-in ready, as they say, not wanting to have to live in a construction zone with two girls under 8, but we appreciated an older home, something with character, as they again say, but with good bones, as they say, too. They provided a number of options in town, but all were out of our price range and required more work than we wanted, so we continued our search.
We went back to visit a dutch colonial we liked, but thought slightly overpriced. When we previously walked through, it was furnished, the owners still living, albeit neatly and sparsely, within the nearly 100-year old structure. With the price lowered, and the owners moved a mile up the hill, we walked through again and realized the potential afforded only with a canvas that is blank. Like the blinking cursor at the start of a new essay beckoning words to a page, my wife and I worked into a cacophony of ideas. Yes, the listing touted an eat-in kitchen, but what if we moved the door to the basement out of the kitchen and into the dining room, freeing up some much needed wall space for storage, appliances and countertops? And those two steps that come down into the kitchen from the stairs leading up to the second floor, are they really needed, or can we remove them, seal up the wall, instead providing a landing of sorts and a more inviting entrance into the house while at the same time freeing up additional precious space in the kitchen? Now the fridge that's in an odd space can be moved out of the flow of traffic through what would be the only way in and out of the kitchen. But what if there wasn't a door-like frame through which to walk anymore and instead there was no wall at all between the kitchen and dining room? And why do we need that little eat-in nook anyway, what if we sealed it off, removed the small pantry - there’s this beautiful built-in opposite - and instead we put a bathroom on the first floor and bring the washer and dryer up from the basement and put it in there, too?
The semblance of a plan in place, we put in an offer, and after a straightforward back-and-forth, we had our house. We were fortunate to have come into a bit of money which allowed us to buy the new house without needing to sell our co-op which then allowed us to start demolition and construction of a powder/laundry room on the first floor; expanding the kitchen into the dining room and moving the door to the basement; closing off the Hobbit-sized door to the kitchen; deciding to add a built-in to the dining room to bring the appearance of the updated-as-if-from-the-mid-century kitchen into the space; to redo the floors after telling the contractor that given our move-in date there would no longer be time to do so; to walking into our house in the winter and finding it at 40 degrees and calling a plumber to help us with the boiler which was working but needed to be filled with water periodically because the pipes were a bit old and which no one had told us, to redo what would be the girls' bathroom (it really needed it) and making a few updates to the master bath; to painting all the rooms.
But not all of that was finished before we moved in. The downstairs bathroom was incomplete, the kitchen still needed to be finished, and the aforementioned floors were still being done. Yet two weeks before Covid hit, we moved in and savored the life provided only with what home ownership could afford.
It was just before moving in that we met our neighbor to the south via a story that our contractor told us. This neighbor took it upon himself to walk into our house while the workers were doing their jobs and proceeded to try to stop them, saying the house didn't need any work, that they need to cease immediately. This would be our first encounter with let’s-call-him John, but it wouldn't be our last.
And then we heard the dogs barking. The barks were of multiple pitches. A yippy one to the south and multiple guttural noises to the north. Our neighborhood's houses were close together - 10 feet or so in separation - so the sound of multiple dogs was unpleasant at best, rage-inducing at worst. The yapping occurred a few times throughout the day, whenever John would take Rascal, the pure-bred-of-a-name-I-cannot-place who was poorly trained from the start, for a walk. This would be followed by John barking at Rascal, Rascal yelling back, and then John tugging on the leash while trying to get the dog to stay in one place. This was made more difficult by John’s diminished mobility and a fuse that was shorter than mine. He would take to berating passersby a block away who, with or without a dog, would face an overflow of obscenities. He once called our friend, who was walking her dog Coco to visit us, a slut and while John was also diminished in his mental capacities - he claimed he was a forceps baby to my wife - it didn't excuse his behavior which in addition to the previous admonishing of our contractors included a looky-loo incident when he looked under our deck fence to take a peek at my wife sunbathing and when caught, claimed it wasn't what she thought he was doing and asked if he was still her friend. I felt bad for him and felt bad for the way he made me think unkind thoughts given his condition(s). After a few years with him as our neighbor, his wife ended up having him placed at a home that was better suited for his needs. Last I heard, he was doing well.
Turning our attention to the house slightly north is something we will do at this point of the essay by choice but was something that we're forced to do every morning and evening when the seven2 pit bulls were let outside for their exercise. These are massive, muscular mutts, who have a lot of energy. They are pack animals who need time outside, being walked or run. Instead, they received less yard time each day than a common criminal and when they were outside, the entire neighborhood heard it. When we moved in, we noticed a small chain link fence, appropriately sized for two or three medium-sized dogs. We had not yet put up our fence and during the days of working and living at home during the pandemic, we never saw more than three dogs at a time outside, still three more than I would typically like to see, but not completely worthy of valid complaint. We would see the dogs' owner walking the dogs, again, always no more than three at a time looking just like the other three we saw in the back pen. They were puppies then, but still managed to yank their owner this and that way during their increasingly infrequent walks. Those walks ended a few months after we moved in and we had a fence put up around our property to provide more privacy for ourselves and for our girls to run around in the backyard without causing the dogs' attention to bark their awareness at them. It was shortly after this time that the neighbor finally had someone take the pile of fencing material in between the moat around our houses and put it around their own backyard and it was a day later that we realized they had seven pit pulls when they all ran around and pissed and shat in their soggy backyard.
I can't and won’t blame the dogs. They're animals in a literal sense and bred to defend their territory. When placed outside, they would bark incessantly, but always for fewer than the 10 minutes the local ordinance - I looked it up - considered a dog's bark to be a nuisance. But what if there are seven dogs, all barking loudly for four minutes? Is that the same as one dog barking for 28 minutes? Evidently not. To be fair, the dogs would only go outside twice a day, for fifteen minutes at a time,3 and they would invariably stop their barking just as my patience piqued.
I can and will blame the owners. They chose to allow their original two pit bulls - brother and sister - to remain unspade and unneutered while they went away for a weekend and surprise, the bitch had a litter a gestation period later. We learned that they had given away half the litter but for some reason decided to keep the remaining ones. They obviously don't love the dogs and it goes beyond giving them an inadequate amount of time outside. Having noticed a two-by-four beside their steps on a jog down the street a few times, I was curious why it always remained there next to the door. My curiosity led me to witness their owner smack one of the dogs while yelling at it to be quiet. While it stopped barking, the whimpering defeat of the dog was more painful to hear. The bloodied face cruel to bear.
Yes, I called the police, and to their credit they came to check on the dogs. Having seen no signs of abuse and determining they were well taken care of, they left. While the two-by-four disappeared after the visit and we failed to see another animal abused, their verbal abuse and pleading to be quiet continued apace and aloud, being just as disruptive as the dogs themselves.
In addition to seven dogs, these neighbors had five grills. Not girls. Grills. There was a pair of smokers and two charcoal grills and a gas one. And like having seven dogs, they have exceeded the reasonable number by at least a few. I can appreciate a good grilled or smoked meat, but unless you plan to entertain for a small army, it's unnecessary. But they did plan on entertaining for a small army, typically at least once a month when the weather’s nice, as they hosted a party that started mid-afternoon after a morning power washing of the stone patio and carried late into the night, filled with loud voices and laughs at a decibel level made possible only by the club speakers that the owner wheeled out and blasted wantonly.
Yes, we asked them to turn it down. And they usually acknowledged that it was too loud. And I can understand forgetting how loud one is a second time and needing a third request to finally adjust the volume for the fourth party one hosts. But when the volume starts out the same every time, but when the police are called by us and by our neighbors and they turn it down only to start at the higher starting volume next time, but when you take the necessary steps to take out a permit to play passed the normal 10pm hour just because you can, you're just a fucking asshole.
While we may not have said it to each other, my wife and I knew pretty quickly after moving into our house that it was a mixed blessing. Regret tends to imply that you wish you could do your decision over, and with the pandemic there were moments of relative silence and tranquility that having a house with a backyard at a time that we would otherwise have been confined to a few square rooms in an apartment building where the entire family would live, work, school and sleep, was absolutely the opposite of regret. But just like our tolerance for masks and social distancing waned as the months went by, the cracks around the foundation of our home - not literal - were forming.
We had moved in during the end of a cold and wet winter, filled with snow and with it shoveling. It felt good to put in work to support the house directly. And as the temperatures warmed and we were able to spend time in the greening grass of spring, with it came the sound of the dogs barking as they wormed their noses under the fence line and made a mess of their backyard. Not wanting to see their dogs and their junkyard, we put up two trees outside our kitchen window, just so situated to block one’s view while doing one’s dishes. But while trees - we planted seven in the backyard - muffle sound through absorption, and provide privacy and beauty, they were no match for the club speakers through which music was blasted, through which a DJ microphone was blasted, through which the wha wha whaaaaa of the DJ horn button was played, for no one other than a few guests in an early Spring’s early afternoon barbecue. At least once a year, bouncy castles would appear on their front yard, and their backyard would fill with 100 of their friends to celebrate a birth of one of them.
We should all be allowed to enjoy our backyards. While I've become much more of a curmudgeon as I've gotten older, I know that living in our city comes with some reasonable expectation of neighbor noise. But there is a line that is crossed when one cannot invite friends over for fear of embarrassment for what they may hear, when one cannot plan a party in a summer month for fear of having it on the same night as one's neighbor because of their bigger party with fewer people, when one expects that the permit taken out by that neighbor to go past quiet hours be fulfilled by the common courtesy - and a requirement of the permit - to alert one's neighbors.
With buyer's remorse fully set in, I headed out for a run one early fall day. Instead of taking my normal right at the top of a street nearby, I decided to take a left. A few strides down the street and I came upon a for sale sign on a three story Victorian-looking white house with a wraparound porch, the kind built for a swing and some lemonade sweating in a tall glass in Summer. After getting the rest of my miles in, I returned home to check for its listing and found it at the top end of any budget we could imagine. Though the market was against us as buyers, it was for us as sellers and with interest rates still low - this was a few years ago - we contacted our realtor to inquire. We toured the home. With a sweeping staircase upon entry through the dutch door, we were hooked; the wooded bathroom with the clawfoot tub on the third floor had us lined; and the expansive backyard with old growth oaks had us sinkered. There also wasn't a fence, but there appeared to be good neighbors.
Yes, it had drafty, old double-hung windows. Sure the bathrooms plural needed work. Certainly, the kitchen needed some mondernizing. But we could take our time with some of those things. The kitchen was workable as is (and with a fireplace!), the bathrooms functional, and the windows, well they would need work first. And despite the number of windows needing work approaching a few baker’s dozens, we decided to put in an offer. A letter from my wife to the widow selling it sealed it for us after a bit of back and forth.
The inspection took place a few mornings later. With the discoveries of a slanted chimney and knob-and-tube wiring throughout the house, we had to withdraw our accepted offer. They tried to negotiate the price down but it was not meant to be. We couldn't afford to rip open all the walls before moving in and didn't want to chance pulling out each set of fire hazards on a room-by-room basis.
While we continued our search to a few more houses, we realized that the combination of just having started a new job and the prospect of taking on a larger mortgage while still getting my footing didn't seem logical. While the sellers ended up taking it off the market making a few updates and later selling it for 40% above what we offered a few months earlier, we heard through friends that the new owners discovered issues in the foundation that among other things required another $300,000 worth of work. Caveat emptor.
Back at our house, on a summer’s evening with the volume increasing, we'd had enough and left our house and got a hotel because our walls were shaking from the sound the cops could not do a goddamned thing about it (permits, again). I checked my phone's voice memo from roughly the same date last year and sure enough, there was another party complete with bouncey castle: it was his daughter's birthday, a daughter we haven't seen more than once or twice a year.
But we kept dreaming of a quieter place. We saw a few other properties in the months that followed until we decided to pause and make do. About a year later, we even thought it would be beneficial to sell our house and move into an apartment co-op again. Our house was just a place we lived, it wasn't a home, so what was the point of us being miserable every time we heard the dogs bark and every time the neighbors had a party? Sure, we can't always pick our neighbors and it could have been going from out of the frying pan and into another frying pan.4 But we knew our neighbors now were no good, that good fences did not make good neighbors. But again while we dabbled in a search, we didn't move forward with anything other than attending a few open houses and dreaming a bit more.
But that dream trended towards reality when one of the neighbor’s dogs put its head under the fences and bit my wife.
My wife and I don't think of ourselves as picky buyers: we know what we like, and we're more willing than others to see the potential in something (see above). Our realtor must love us as a result. We sent her a message the next morning inquiring about a few listings - they all were already under contract as the market moved fast around here - and she shared a few she had seen as well that she thought would meet our criteria.
That Wednesday, the one on Rose Street that she sent had just dropped $26,000 and she suggested we see it that day. So we did. And we loved it. And we put in an offer that evening and the next day it was accepted. We were under contract to buy the house.
We got our current house in order to sell, taking care of the little things we never got around to doing that have now been done in less than a week. What is it about moving that finally compels one to clean out the garage, to having it painted, to cleaning out all the junk from the basement and from the office cabinets and drawers? We filled 10 contractor garbage bags for garbage and another seven that made their way to the donation bins. What is it about realizing that all the things you clung onto -the tchotchkes, the taxes from 2014, the office supplies you found in the bottom of the drawers that you've replaced multiple tiems over but still could never find, the literal garbage that was kept for no reason? Yes, I love paper, but know how to cull, too. And all of this was done in week, in the stolen bits of time before and after work, in full days off and on the weekend.
And through the packing and the cleaning I found myself asking if, with the changes we could still be happy here and I think that could be possible, that if for some reason the house fell through and we had to live her another few months or another year, it wouldn't be that bad. And then the dogs bark and our neighbors yell the name of one of the seven dogs and I can't get out of here fast enough.
We stood to make a profit when we sell and a sizable one at that. We bought the house before Covid and while interest rates are still high, house prices are higher. Average DOMs - Days on Market not DOMS, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness - is counted in days not weeks or months. When we list the house, it should go quickly. And while it is easy to be greedy in a seller's market like this, I also know that we have a number in our mind and if it's hit and we accept and the contract is signed, we would take it sooner and lower than later and higher.
Sure, there are things I'll miss about the house. The first fire in the fireplace; the first - and only - 5am Fire in the backyard; shoveling snow in the shared driveway; reading in the front yard in the morning sun, saying hello to the passersby; reading in the back yard in the shade of the maples on a hot summer's day; the Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners in the dining room that opens up into the kitchen and living room with a blazing fire within the hearth and a warmth in the heart; the bike trainer workouts in the basement while training for the Ironman I never completed; the girls watching TV and laughing in the basement we turned into a place to hangout, not too different than the one my brother and I had as kids; the way the sun would come up and light up my office as I was reading a book in the morning, with a cup of coffee, the steam rising like a Phoenix from yesterday's ashes.
But these memories are for the moments the house provided, not the house itself. New memories will be made in the new house. It's both bitter and sweet, yes. Our kids survived the pandemic in this house, and for that we'll be forever grateful. And even after we made five donation runs, filled 22 contractor bags worth of what prior to this week felt like necessary items but once the need to sell presented itself felt like unnecessary clutter, while we throw away the past, we clear the space for a potential home owner to see their family grow up here as we did with our girls these past five years.
While we took the time to make it our own when we moved in, within the last week since we decided to move, we checked off more things on our lists than the prior five years minus two weeks combined. The cabinet door to the built-in at the back - fixed; the smoke detectors we never replaced since they ran out of batteries - replaced; the cleaning up of the garage, the painting of its outside walls - not just one side like when we moved in - the painting of the cement with those little confettis like things, storage shelves built - done; the newel post that was wobbly and left a gap between its bottom and the post’s top - mounted; the painting of the stairway to the attic that doubles as a closet - almost done; the hanging of the automatic light above the garage door - would have been done if it wasn't for the C batteries in our house having expired years ago; the fixing of the light in my daughter's room that we thought required an electrician but only needed to be replaced with a working lightbulb instead of a non-working lightbulb that I tried last time - shining; the replacing of the shades in my oldest's room with pull-down versions without that silly pull cord - hung; the replacing of curtains in the upstairs bathrooms with similar pull-down shades that allow more light in but provide better privacy - hung, doubly. What is it about something we’ve grown complacent to living with becoming something we would absolutely want someone else to live without, and that being a generous thing, not a selfish thing?
Our house goes on the market tomorrow. The photographs were taken, the highlight reel cast, the net of potential buyers ready to be caught. There's a strong possibility that we'll sell our house for more than the house we have an accepted offer on. I say accepted offer and not contract with escrowed payment because the sellers have hit a snag due to an IRS witholding requirement for non-permanent residents. They've fired their lawyer as a result. We're still confident the contract will be signed, though I think about how I was about to hit submit on wiring the escrow payment to their initial lawyer and the use of an ampersand in the lawyer's name not being accepted by Chase giving me pause on sending and needing to wait until Monday to clarify only to find out on Sunday that the sellers were consulting their account and soon-to-be-fired lawyer.
There is a chance, however remote, that the house falls through, but given that the issue is not with our terms but with the US Government's, if they plan to sell their house and still retire in Canada, they will have to solve this issue no matter who buys the house. They've (correctly) taken the house off the market temporarily while they sort it, so no new offers can be made leaving us in our position primed to finalize and move forward. In some ways, it may be a blessing: with our current house coming on the market and the days on market short like the days this time of year, we may not have to carry two mortgages for too long.
We drove by the possibly-soon-to-be-new-to-us house today while I dropped my wife at school. The school and the house are less than a half mile from each other. She'll be able to walk and if she listened to this essay as a spoken piece, she's only be 1/4 of the way through by the time she arrived.
As we drove today, she thanked me. She said that I listened to her, that I took charge of the situation, that my reduced stress about it all reduced her stress. I replied that focusing on trying to limit her stress in the situation reduced my own stress. There's something in that related to how we've approached getting the home ready not for us but for the new owners: we focused on someone else's needs and wants and preferences instead of focusing on ourselves.
Our house is now listed. Within hours, we received four showings requests, including two tomorrow ahead of Sunday's open house. It's feeling more real, more inevitable, that the sale and the purchase and the moves are going to happen. Every time I see the neighbors and hear those dogs, I want to both scream and give thanks. They will continue to disrupt the neighborhood, continue to be bad neighbors. They won't listen to others; they won't change. Unlike when we sold our co-op and we were excited to meet the purchasers, we want to keep this sale as professional and business-like as possible. We know that whoever buys this house will have similar experiences that we had. And while our time here was brief - about five years - the time has been valuable - cosmically and financially - for us. Perhaps the market will continue apace and in five years time, the new owners will come to the same realization and move to another section of town. Had the dog not bitten my wife, we likely would not be moving. Instead we would survive the winter with dog barking but without the parties. We would be resigned to our station and get complacent, thinking things have changed. And then the warmer weather would return and with it the six grills and smokers and the parties late into the night. And we would begin to curse the neighbors again. And the anger would increase like the rising temperatures of Summer before the annual reduction in volume in Winter would lead to forgetfulness of what came before and what's still to come.
Yes, caveat emptor. It's a phrase we should have heeded when we bought the house and is one all new buyers should, too. Yet the excitement of finding a new home clouds the vision. I completely missed that our current house had a shared driving when we made our offer and didn't realize it until we conducted the inspection. I'm sure I missed things in the new house, too. That is the chance we all take. Home ownership, like any investment, comes with risks. We decided a neighborhood close to town would be better and it was. Until it wasn't. Things change.
I type these words as the barking of a dog further up the street who is always left out and barks incessantly staccatos like the key strokes. Like before, I can't and won’t blame the dog, but I can and will blame its owners. When we move into our new house, I plan to walk and introduce myself to every neighbor. It's something we never did here and is something that I wish I had done. Maybe it would have created a better relationship and opened communication on what it means to be neighbors. It's worth a shot.
But first we need to sell this house. After multiple offers, we told the prospective buyers that last and best were due by 5pm this afternoon. There was still another showing tonight at 6pm so we took the girls to run a few errands while we waited. We had agreed to call our realtor at 6pm and when we did, she said she was still putting together the final offers for our review, and would call us back. When she did, we were in the middle of grabbing dinner and said we'd call her back in 20 minutes. Nothing like a little bit of anticipation to warm things up like the bread bowl of potato chowder I was about to consume. I noticed an email from the realtor with the subject "8 Offers". I started scrolling through them and caught a text from our realtor saying "there's a clear winner". When I got to one with a digit in the left-most place that was one my wife and I wished to see, I exclaimed and we shared excitement. It was moments later than I realized there was an even better offer. And one above that one. We were shocked. I was found dumb.
When we called our realtor, we shared our gobsmack with her. She shared a bit about the buyer's agent, and the family looking to purchase the house. They had fallen in love with the aesthetic, the pristine nature of the house, the proximity to places of worship. In the end, it really does come down to that old adage: location, location, location. Pending an inspection tomorrow, we'll go to contract.
I told my wife the other night as we were headed to bed that if felt odd selling our house for what were the previous high offers that we would have been completely comfortable taking. It felt like we didn't deserve it, that it was unnecessary, even unfair. I felt awkward, like this isn't the way that house selling shuold go. I felt like I would be taking advantage of someone.
I still felt this way as we received the offer we accepted. We've taken the house off the market while we work through the contract. We feel bad for the other offers, each stronger than the last, including families looking for their forever home. While the family moving here is in a different stage of life, it's no less of a pain on my heart. I think of the neighbors. I think of the summers ahead. And I feel awful.
But how I feel shouldn't dictate how I act. I have to be rational. I have a daughter starting high school next year, and college not far behind, if that's what she chooses. I have a second daughter starting middle school, with high school and college not far behind, if that's what she choses, too. My wife and I have our own future to think about; we are middle-aged after all.
Yet we remain conflicted.The family of one of my wife's students submitted a strong offer, and while they love the house and they love the neighborhood, and they think they'd be happy here, the neighbors' behavior would dampen those feelings. Or so we think. We'll keep this to ourselves for now.
The inspection was the last thing required before moving to contract, and it was only for structural and environmental reasons. It was really the only thing that could still scupper the deal. Perhaps the roof needed replacing; or the foundation needed shoring up; or the cross beams were weak.
Or perhaps they'd hear the dogs next door. With us out of the house from 1:30pm until 5pm, they had time to examine it all. At 5:30p, the email from our realtor came across with an update from the buyer's agent. The only request was to remove the oil from the heating oil tank - that currently isn't used for heat - and to have it cleaned as this would become a liability for them. Without reservation we agreed and we go to contract tomorrow.
It all still doesn't seem real. These past just-under-three weeks, triggered by a dog bite, a straw on the camel's back, have been intense. I'm not sure I know another family who has made the decision to move on a Sunday, seen a house - and only one house - on a Wednesday, made an offer that same evening after calling the bank to obtain a pre-approval, had that offer accepted on that Thursday, started cleaning out the house on a Friday and secured a painter that same day, had an inspection done that Saturday on the new house, continued to clean out the house that day and the next, had painters in on Monday, gone to contract and been about to wire funds to the escrow account only to have questions about the wire information causing me to delay it until Monday, continued to clean up the house while having the outside of the house and fence power washed, decided the garage could use a deep cleaning, had that cleaned and updated with new 2 x 4s along the ground, had its exterior repainted and interior painted and speckled for the first time, have the photographer come on a Thursday, the listing go up on a Friday, the first showings on a Saturday, the open house with 26 families on a Sunday, more showings on Monday and the first offer, a second offer and then a third, a call for best and last to be due by Wednesday at 5pm, for us to talk to our realtor to find out we had 9 offers, to accept one on that same Wednesday to be followed by an inspection on a Thursday, that will allow us to sign the contract on a Friday while at the same time possibly signing the original purchase contract now that they have a new lawyer.
The saga is not yet done, but it is getting closer.
Dog bites woman; man buys house.5
Robert Frost’s poem, Mending Fences, is where it first appeared. At least that’s what they say.
Not a typo.
Again, not a typo.
Meat Loaf reference intentionally avoided.
Since our move, a few of our former neighbor’s dogs jumped the fence attacked a family walking to services causing hospitalizations for a mother and daughter. A number of their dogs were euthanized that day, and from what we’ve heard, others were taken away. The owners were charged.
A sad, yet unsurprising, coda.