It still amazes me how little people think of others. I don’t care if it’s going to be a bazillion degrees that day, you don’t do stuff like that before 7a unless you live in the countryside.
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My neighborhood is actually quite rural, but we still have noise ordinances. It doesn’t apply to farm equipment, though. Still, you won’t catch me running the tractors before people are awake on the weekends - half my neighbors have kids that I assume like to sleep in during the summer (that, and I am not a morning person).
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Our “neighborhood” is very rural and forested without any noise ordinances and boy do I wish we had them. Most neighbors are considerate and reasonable with their racket; time of day, duration, etc. But one or our “next door” neighbors is utterly oblivious to anyone but himself: LOUD music, running power tools and machinery, using firearms, even arguing at any time of day or night, but usually night. There’s a 5 acre wooded parcel between us in addition to some of their outbuildings, but we can still hear all these things - often through closed windows, wearing earbuds. Not illegal and they don’t care at all about others.
I will say that in the last year or so it has gotten less frequent, less late, and lower volume in general, but not always. Sigh.
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Ugh. That kind of thing makes a girl wish for a big log cabin on 300 acres. Seriously, there’s a whole site dedicated to cabin real estate and, well, a girl can dream.
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These people were not cut out for public consumption… or having neighbors anywhere near. I won’t go into all the details, but they absolutely should’ve looked for property at the very end of a road with house dead center of way more than 10 acres.
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I can’t imagine you’re 5 acres away from these people and still hear so much noise!! How loud are these people shouting? The impression that I get from you is that you live absolutely in the middle of nowhere in the woods on a mountain. We sometimes experience the same level of noise from our neighbours, but we’re in a terraced house, so we literally share our side walls. I dream of little cute houses on 5 acres but apparantly that’s not enough land.
We are allowed to cause noise related to “common building and renovation work” between 7am and 11pm on Mon-Sat. That’s quite late, we’ve never worked that late, but I suppose people need to be able to do some DIY after work. In general, in the city noise is more a part of life that you just have to accept. We live on a square with 20 homes from the 1940s, we’ve been here for the past 8 years and I think in those years nearly everyone did some sort of work on their house. From 6am buses start driving past our house, and trucks that need to deliver supplies to the stores around here. Not to mention the neighbourhood cats’ wars at night!
We got solar installed the other day. And hopefully today we’ll get kitchen appliances delivered and installed as well. Having solar panels is really a lot of fun, we keep checking our app to see how hard our solar parels are at work for us.
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I will say that the sound carries oddly here sometimes, but shouting… they do that. They have also bellowed and shrieked. Outdoors for some reason. Phone calls have been made, but… . This activity has drastically decreased.
WOW! 11pm is late! Most places I have lived or know people who live there, their ordinances require construction sounds to end by 7 or 8pm.
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I think by “common building and renovation work” they mean drilling holes or using a nail gun, not tearing down a whole house. And if the daily average noise level is over 80 dB, you need a permit. But I was surprised as well when I looked it up, it’s later than I expected.
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I get tired of people mowing early or mowing in general. We use one of the old-fashioned mowers that are just rotating blades and it works great!
We had a neighbor at the old house that power-washed his truck every weekend. It’s not like this guy went mudding and it was covered in dirt. The power washer he used was SO LOUD. Then he would wash his driveway and whatever else he could. The neighbors across the way would stay up late working on their cars. The person staying with them would wake up early, start his truck (not the same truck guy), then let it idle for twenty minutes or so. It was a clunker and you could feel it through our house.
I’m so glad I don’t live there anymore. I’m getting upset just remembering what it was like.
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Ugh. My neighbor (they just moved away a few months ago) also had an old diesel truck that he drove to and from work. It was loud, and he’d have to let it run for half an hour some mornings to get it properly warmed up. Who needs an alarm clock, right?
Growing up in the city, I mowed a neighbor’s lawn with her little push mower like that. It was a fun little tool -reminded me of cartoons. I have to have a ride-on mower, though. I spent about 1.5-2 hours yesterday mowing, and I didn’t even bother bagging it (otherwise, it would have taken 3+ hours), and half my front yard just got seeded/is waiting for seed so it didn’t need mowing. Another hour with the edging (that got cut short from a lack of batteries) and I didn’t have time to get the gas push mower out to tackle the fenced in area around my pool. DH was doing the seeding, so I got to have all the fun. 
I totally get the neighbor with the power washer, lol. When I get around to power washing the back patio, that’ll probably take half a day and I’ll love every minute of it. That is one of the most satisfying chores. Sometimes I watch videos of other people power washing because it’s just so soothing watching the dirt vanish.
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I’m totally in favor of replacing grass lawns with pollinator & vegetable gardens combined. Maybe a grass walkway if you must.
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Our front walk is a grass pathway. We are also converting our lawn to a clover mix. The back lawn around the veggie garden has converted itself to grass and clover, more clover every year. Plus creeping thyme. We love it.
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Um…my husband does this…with multiple cars… 
BUT…we have an electric power washer that is not super loud. And our neighbors on one side frequently do the same. They take VERY good care of their Teslas. It took me a few months to recognize the weird space-ship-y sound I was hearing every morning was their car running! 
We actually love our neighborhood because it is busy and bustling. Something is always going on somewhere. It’s nice to see neighbors having parties on the weekends, people always out walking, kids riding bikes, and the occasional dirt bike driving down the street (yes, in Jersey). I wouldn’t be able to survive in one of those manufactured communities where you can’t step off the sidewalk without a neighbor snitching on you. To each his own, I guess!
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We found the quiet of our neighborhood eerie at first. Especially during the day when everyone else is at work…I am very used to city sounds…my great-grandma’s house was about 30 feet from a railroad. I can hear trains at night, but they are some distance away…they take me back in time so I like the sound.
The loudest thing we have is our generator…we have to test tun and maintain it before hurricane season…it is so loud!! I guess because my husband plays drums, I am pretty good at tuning out most noises. I can sleep through anything.
Our landlord is going to rebuild the backyard deck and repaint the house. I hope it means he is just maintaining the property and not getting it ready to sell…that would be a nightmare…we have one more year on our lease…if he does renew, I am going to see if he will do a 5 year lease.
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I suppose most of our lawn is what HOAs would consider weeds. Dandelions, clover, violets, etc. Our local farm store didn’t have clover seed, so we’ve got a grass mix going down right now, and heirloom white clover on the way.
I wish I had the energy to re-plant my garden…maybe in a different season of life. 
I’d love to expand our old orchard, plant some young apple trees and walnuts. Oh well, some years it’s just enough to keep up with yard, pool, and field so the mosquito population doesn’t have a place to thrive. About 7-8 acres of our property isn’t heavily wooded, so it’s a lot of work in the warmer months. The field isn’t too bad - it’s just long, native grasses that get cut once or twice a year… But, that means getting out the big tractor and the brush hog.
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I like living in a lively area, that’s why we’re in the innercity, although it’s a relatively quiet residential area. It helps that we’re in a low-traffic neighbourhood, built in the pre-car era. Kids play outside here and can get quite loud, we can hear the train and the highway in the distance. But there are two neighbours that annoy me a lot: the ones that are always shouting and fighting and calling each other names (because it affects my mood) and the neighbour who’s an amateur DJ and likes to pretend his living room is a club, on a weeknight. We’re in old terraced houses and the noise is so bad it’s like they’re right next to my bed. None of my neighbours own powerwashers, but we do have a leafblowing elderly couple. It’s quite funny, he blows them in her direction, she then vacuums them up with a vacuum cleaner!!! They have to do it nearly every day in autumn because we have a few big old trees on our street.
We only have a little yard behind our house and previously that was about 50% vegetables and 50% grass. Not sure what we’ll do now, but we do like a walkable area. We’re not specifically fans of grass or mowing, but we want to be able to put our drying racks somewhere, and our chairs, and we want visiting kids to be able to play on it without damaging it.
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We use every inch of our yard right now, but I do have dreams of a backyard like @marionberries. Someday when the swing set and trampoline are gone maybe…
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Weeds are about all that will grow in the sandy soil. Our last home was in a very wooded area…people thought our yard work must be easy…nature will take over if you don’t keep up, so it was lots of work! We also had to use a riding mower and a brush hog…plus, maintain a deer fence…way too much work…we have a landscaping crew that does all the work now…we sold all of our yard stuff before we moved. I do have a pair of hand clippers but the only thing I plant are my baskets and pots with flowers.
Old garden…lots of work
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Oh, but beautiful!!
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The garden and the house!
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