Neighbors

Our neighbors to the left of us are an older couple who have a motor home and a business setting up food booths at carnivals. When we bought our house and moved in it was right in the middle of fair/carnival season so we didn't get a chance to meet them until several months after we had already been here. They are a friendly couple who have purchased land in TN and are looking to finishing fixing up their house here, sell it, build a new home on their land in TN and retire there.

In the short time we have gotten to know them, the man has filled us in on lots of information about the neighborhood and the houses...which ones were built first, how much certain ones have sold for...how ours (and the great price we paid for it!) has now reduced the property value/appraisal value around here - yes...you read it right - he likes to tell us this every once in awhile when he is lamenting the fact that "he will NOT sell his house for less than $145,000 and it will just sit here empty until the market goes back up!" LOL, poor guy - I feel for him.

To let you know how ridiculously funny this is, our house was listed for $99,000 for almost a year before we found it and the owner had dropped the price twice by the time we offered him $70,000 for it. We went back and forth a few times and finally settled on $77,500 - that is almost 1/2 of what our neighbor wants to sell his house for!! He had looked up all the details on our purchase and everything before we even met him for the first time.

He really is a nice man (even though I think he is living in a dream world) and he has been very helpful to us with his tidbits of information. We have little puddles of water that gather up at the base of driveways around here quite often...when it's not raining - and one day, we asked our neighbor why that keeps happening. He told us there were springs all around the area and he showed us where a couple of them were. Hmmm, that was nice to know - we had no clue.

Last Thursday, I was taking Greg to work because I needed the truck and as we were leaving we drove through a rather large puddle at the end of our driveway. Image via WikipediaGreg commented that the spring was really putting out a lot of water today. We thought nothing else about it.

Friday, I was standing on my back porch talking on the phone and my neighbor comes over and tells me "I think you have a water leak between the water meter and your house which means you are paying for it...and it's coming out of the ground pretty sporty." I got off the phone and sent Greg and IM at work telling him what the neighbor said and asked him if he wanted me to do anything. He came on home and started digging up the ground and sure enough...we had a big leak in our pipe. Greg shut the water off and after a couple of hours and a trip to the hardware store, he had it all fixed and working again.

When our neighbor came out to chat with us while Greg was working on it, I told him that we had noticed it on Thursday but thought it was the springs. He let us know that the springwater runs down his side of the driveway...not ours - which is what this was doing and why he noticed it. I praise God for "nosy" neighbors like this! LOL Because we wouldn't have noticed it until we got our water bill.