The Neighbor From Hell

Country Joy Crafts

And Collectible Art

3370 Valarie Ave Simi Valley, CA 93063 (805.522.9808)

The Boring Stuff

But ya gotta read it, because it sets the stage for all the escapades! But you should start with Chapter 1 if you came here first.

Chapter Seven

You know, I have been raging about my neighbor for many many years now and it has come to my attention that you know nothing about him! How insensitive of me................. After all when you have a neighbor like mine, he should be shared with the whole wide world. It is terribly selfish of me to keep him all to myself. I do apologize.

Soooooooooooooo..........Once upon a time, life was peaceful and serene......and then..........and then............ it happened................

on January 17th, 1994 in a far away galaxy in the year of "the quake"...... in Northridge, CA. That baby was the scariest thing I have ever been through. It was 4:30am and a humongous roaring hissing rumbling screeching train noise permeated the air. (Didn't think I knew a big word like that, did ya?) The whole house rose up off the ground in a moaning sound befit of the devil! (Gawd, am I getting melodramatic or what!) The house pitched and heaved and groaned while you could hear glass and furniture, crashing and breaking everywhere. Things that you knew didn't have wings, like TV sets, were flying across rooms like ping pong balls. Walls were moving up and down that were supposed to be anchored to the earth. The force was so great that if you tried to get up to run, you were thrown back down to the floor. Definitely more scary than an "E" ride at Disneyland....for those who remember or know what an "E" ride is.

I thought for sure we were all going to die. Having a Spanish tile roof fall on me and crush me was not exactly a pleasant thought. Ice cream is a pleasant thought. It stopped but it felt like 10,000 life times had gone by. I called for my daughter, who's room was on the opposite end of the house. She was already outside. How she got there, I will never know. Her furniture was laying on the floor blocking the exit to her room. She either jumped over it or it fell afterwards. She doesn't remember.

The DH and I ran down stairs and out the front of the house. It was freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezing out side!!!! All I had on was a big ol' T-shirt. The ground was shaking every couple of minutes like Santa's tummy. Heaving and moaning time after time. All I could think of was how cold out it was and how much I had to pee. I think that is where the pee thing started!

The DH grabbed a flashlight out of the garage and went back into the house. He is very brave. He grabbed some shoes, coats and blankets and came back out. Everyone in the neighborhood was outside............except my neighbor. Everyone was checking on everyone else to see if they needed help of any kind.....except my neighbor. Needless to say everyone was really really really scared................more scared than your worst night mare...............more scared than finding out you barfed wine on a white carpet at your friend's house, and they knew you did it.................oh that's another story!

It was too too scary to go back in, so we sat huddled in the car listening to the radio to find out what had happened. There was nothing but total chaos every where. There were fires and gas line explosions and shaking all around us. There were land slides on the mountain next to us and huge water tanks that store our water, were bursting and washing houses off their foundations. We even saw earthquake lightening, where the energy travels through the fault line and comes erupting out of the ground. See I told you it was really scary! Anyway, a few hours went by and the sun came up but it seemed like forever. Just at this moment, our neighbor comes out of his house with his family, jumps in his car and takes off..... Not to be seen again for days...too bad it wasn't forever.

Now the damage can be seen. My car had been parked in the garage. A huge shelf full of spray paints had fallen and the cans had hit the cement, sending sprays of different colors in all directions. The whole left side of the car had a rainbow of paint covering it in every direction possible. It looked like Jackson Pollock had used it as a canvas. There were dings, dents, and scratches everywhere. A big giant major mess!

The house itself is a two story that is cantilevered. It rose up off the 2 pillars in the front and came back down to land in a different spot. It twisted the whole house. There were huge cracks everywhere!!!!!! The floor had buckled in numerous places, the linoleum was twisted in a diagonal pattern, tiles were cracked, furniture toppled, items in cabinets were all over the floors and broken, and closets emptied. The fireplace had split away from the side of the house and was sitting at a jaunty angle. The very back yard wall had fallen down. The Jacuzzi was broken in various places. Our cars were jumping around like they were weightless. It was one giant big mess..............sort of like it is now, I guess...... but with cracks!

We lived in the Van from Hell for a week because we had no electricity, no water, and it was still shaking a lot and just too darn scary to go back inside. You could tell who was rich in the neighborhood. The really rich people brought in their mobile homes to live in. The semi rich set up tents in their yards. The down trodden, like us, lived in the Van from Hell........who already had a reputation, but now was definitely on it's way to unimaginable stardom.

Sooooooooooooooo, the scariest thing about an earthquake is that you don't know when one is going to happen. The second scariest thing is, it's like having eaten something really disgusting, maybe like raw cockroaches or something, and then having it repeat itself on you overrrrrrrrrr and overrrrrrrrrrrrr and overrrrrrrrrrrrr. The aftershocks can last for years, and believe me they did. And the third scariest thing is listening to me screammmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Okayyyyy, now.............aren't you glad you don't live here???? But hey, I say, it's no worse than having your house chewed up and spit out in the size of little tooth picks and then blown over a 5 square mile area.

So the total damage was this: the house had $140,000 in structural damage, the DH's work place was damaged in Chatsworth which was even closer to the epicenter (like a few miles away.......we were at about 6 to 8 miles away) , my daughter went to California State University at Northridge where the college was devastated because it sat on top of the epicenter, and she worked at Northridge Mall, a block away ....which was no more. The machinery that I used for my business at the time laid or is that lain.........who cares!........... in ruins outside, so I was out of business for a while. Could it get any worse?!!!! You betch ya............cause I have a neighbor who is as compassionate as a wet noodle. Depending on how your house sat, direction and all, and how it was built, meant more or less what kind of damage you would or would not have. He has a one story, so the load on his roof was different than ours thus his damage was minimal, where as ours was not.

They have a system put out by FEMA in disaster areas which is color coded. Like Guaranimals, sorta. Green means you get an OK, and can move back in, Yellow means you have damage, but your home is savable, Red means get out and run for your life............or better known as your house just kissed the big one........say good bye. Everyone in the neighborhood got green except for a few houses who got yellow. We were yellow. In a way that was good, because that meant we got our houses fixed right away so they could be saved without sustaining any more damage happening to them. My neighbor got green.

So after several weeks of rounding up structural engineers, grants, builders, architects, inspectors, insurance policies, FEMA and the magic wizard in the sky, we got them to start on our house. This is where the problem that has been a continuing Hatfields and McCoy saga starts. Ta Dummmmmmmmmmm, drum role here, can you hear it building? This is the beginning of the end.

The first thing to do was to knock down the fireplace. Since it was leaning towards my neighbor, who is also down hill from us, we thought that was a smart thing to do. And very nice of us also. Any after shock could send it tumbling. If I had known what I do now, I would have let that sucker fall! But they took it down.

Everyone in the neighbor hood watched as they tore down this two story brick fire place. It was the high light of the day.

Then our contractor went to order all the cement blocks to fix the shared walled between US and THEM. The wall was broken at the base and very very wobbly. The structural engineer that we had to hire said we could save the wall if we built pilasters up on each side, every 10 feet to stabilize it. So in one day, our neighbor gave the "go ahead" and the "stop now or I will have your head" orders, six different times. The contractor was sooooooooooo tired of the incompetence of our neighbor to make a decision, that he gave up. The contractor had even dug some of the holes for the foundation of the pilasters between our neighbor's fits of insanity.

Later on I find out the contractor had broken one of the neighbors sprinkler lines, and was willing to fix it, but our neighbor would not let him back on the property to do so. From that time on, it became our fault personally!

To make a very long story short, here is the cartoon version of the following years.

We rented a cargo bin that looks like a box car on a train and is just as big. We put it on the side of the house up next to the hillside. We had to empty the whole garage out into it. Now if you have ever seen our garage, you would know that was a feat unto itself. My DH builds and races sports cars so the stuff in there filled up that whole box car! They then jack hammered out the triple car garage we have, plus the driveway. This was due to the front of the house sliding on the hill that we live on.

Then we had to empty the box car with the garage stuff and refill it with house stuff. This was so they could fix what they had to inside the house. So we had two beds in the house, a couch and a TV set. That was it for a year and a half. We had no carpeting, no drapes, no walls and rooms in various stages of disarray continually. We had no bath rooms for a while and no kitchen at one time. We had some pretty strangeeeeeeeeeeee people in our house at all hours of the day!

One day I came home to find out the hearths on the fire places were three feet tall. They looked like BBQ's instead and had to be ripped out. Another time I came home to find out that a guy had fallen through the kitchen ceiling from working on the floor upstairs....a new skylight inside the house! The big hole he left was right at the entrance of the master bed room! Then I came home once to find the plaster/wall board guy blasted on something. He pulled this quite frequently. I had to have the contractor fire him. Another time, we have lots of these.........., the guy outside doing the stucco on the house had to pee.........of course..........and the bathroom down stairs was not there! So he had to use one of the ones upstairs, but the guys were putting the new carpet in and he had CRUD all over his 100 hole lace up boots. So I made him take them off and he was really ticked off at me. Hey, I said, use the bushes, but he frowned on that. Another time, my neighbor's wife is outside yelling at the wall builders to stop building the new retaining wall in front of "our" house.........remember that slide thing going on. And quite a few times I went outside just to catch the cops from towing away one or two vehicles of ours, because my neighbor had a brain crack and "thought" they were abandoned there! Yeah right! And the biggest thing was, and this was really scary...........we had to have a free way crew come in, jack up the second story, and knock out the broken pillars that were holding up the front of the house. (The ones that came back down in a different spot.) I was sure the whole thing was just going to slide on downnnnnnnnnnnn the street. They ended up putting in steel I-Beams that went under ground and connected to make a U shape, to help stabilize and hold up the front. So this just gives you a little teeny inkling of what was going on day after day after day. This doesn't include delays, or missing parts, or worker bees not showing up. Nor does it cover the many many times my neighbor was calling the city or the cops because he didn't like the rubble.

And all this time he had NEVER asked us how we are doing or what is happening nor had any sort of compassion what so ever. All he could do is call the cops over and over, the cable company over and over, the city over and over and the EPA......... over and over. All he could do is complain. The city started ignoring him after a while. I guess he didn't have a hobby or anything better to do. I guess he also had no conception what so ever on what a pain in the ass he was being or what a selfish SOB he was.

Now one night when the fireplace on the other side of the house was being built, there were scary noises out side.......there was a hugggggggggggggeeeee whole there where it was going in. (One time some animal sneaked in and took a dump in our front living room when it was still opened up. That was pleasant!) Anyway I heard these noises outside. Heck I could hear the whole neighborhood with the size of that hole! I look out and there are 4 guys spray painting the box car bin. Holy cow, now we have graffiti all over the place too and it's on this bin that we are just renting. The next morning I have to call the graffiteeeeeeeeeeeeeee squad and they come out and paint it out. Now remember this because it comes up again.

In the mean time we keep asking the neighbor about fixing the wall. Every after shock that is happening, makes it a little bit weaker. Pretty soon after months of this and his other petty shenanigans, we get irritated. We keep asking him and getting no reply what so ever. Now he is becoming the neighbor from hell.

So one day we see a cop car pull up in front of his house and he comes running out. He is spittin' mad. Being nosey, we of course go outside to see what all the hub bub is about. Someone spray painted on the little wall between his house and ours. Hmmm, wonder who? Remember those guys with the box car bin? So he wants to make a report, but guess what? The little wall out front is not his. It's ours!!!!! And he wants it fixed because the paint is on his side!!!! LOL LOL LOL ahhhhh yes, whoever said revenge is sweet knew what they were talking about. We tell the police that the little wall is ours. He says, do you want to make a report. We go..........nope. My neighbor goes ballistic!!!!! He has this little vein in his forehead that puffs up like an anaconda snake and it starts pounding. It is definitively a site to see. Anddddd we get pretty good at making it happen as time goes on. He should have fixed the big wall when he had the chance!!!

On To Chapter Eight

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