Hello View, Bye Bye Silence

Under the category of Beware Of What You Ask For: Since the first day of moving into our lovely Palm Springs house, we have complained about our neighbor’s pine trees blocking our backyard view of the mountains. Hardly a week went by in three years when we didn’t wish out loud that those trees be cut down. We approached the owners during that first year, and they refused to spend the money, because it was their second home and they were only here several weeks out of each year. It was not worth it to them, even though we offered to pay half.

The good news: While we were away on our month-long vacation to South America, someone bought the house behind us and chopped down those trees. We now have an unobstructed view of the mountains.

The bad news: The new owners bought the place for an investment, not a home. They plan to convert it into a high-volume rental property, hoping to rent it three hundred days per year. Rentals tend to attract noise, partiers—usually two or three families crammed into one house, with most everyone spending their time whooping it up by the pool. So we’ll be able to enjoy the magnificent mountain views, but now we need to install a cinderblock wall between the two properties so the renters can’t see into our backyard through the hedge. It was never a problem with the previous owners because they were seldom there.

We just got the estimate—sixty-six hundred dollars.

$6,600 and noisy neighbors three hundred days a year. Those damned old pine trees don’t seem so bad after all…