As much as we might like to get along great with all of our neighbors, sometimes that’s not how the cookie crumbles.

It can be easy to let frustration get the best of you, even when a simple conversation might solve the problem.

After choosing water over words to handle his annoying neighbors, one renter finds his partner and his roommate turned against him.

Read on for the full story.

AITA for turning on the sprinklers to get my neighbors away from my lawn?

We live in a court with a large front lawn that’s held back by a retaining wall.

The retaining wall fronts the sidewalk, so its about 40-feet away from our front door and about 5-feet from the street/court.

There’s a few neighbors that keep hanging around.

Today our neighbors and some of their friends/workers (about 3 dudes) were sitting on front end of our retaining wall, something they’ve done a handful of times recently.

That area is shaded around the noon time so I assume that’s why.

So this homeowner decides to do something about it, to the horror of his partner.

I don’t usually water my lawn in the afternoon, but I turned the sprinklers on, got them a little wet, they quickly got up, looked confused and left.

Now my partner is mad at me because she doesn’t feel its a big deal and it wasn’t the “nice” thing to do.

Surely there was a step he missed before blasting them with a sprinkler.

She thinks I should have asked them nicely to move first if I felt they’ve been hanging around there too often.

However, at this point I don’t feel like asking nicely because they’ve always been inconsiderate.

But the homeowner feels he’s justified. He states his case.

Here are some examples:

• Parking several cars in the court and causing us to drive around them to get to our driveway. We asked them to stop and they did mostly stop blocking our driveway. However, they still have events every week where all their friends/family park their cars in our court. So we still have to drive around them to access our driveway.
• They were using a small portion of our drive way to drive into their backyard and it was leaving tire tracks on the corners. I didn’t like that so I put cinder blocks there. They started to move the cinder blocks out of the way to use our driveway. I let them know it was okay so long as they put the cinder blocks back. They would always forget to put the blocks back even though I’d remind them constantly. Eventually I replaced them with heavy planters, now they cant use our driveway at all.
• They’ve been working on a shed adjacent to our shared fence. Either them or their workers threw some trash over the fence. Not sure but we never brought it up to them.

Sometimes they shift/move our garbage cans and don’t fix them.

According to my partner and other roommate, I’ve voiced things to them very “rudely” in the past, so now my partner or our other roommate voices my issues to them.

Neither his partner or roommate see eye-to-eye with him on these issues.

For context, neither my partner or our other roommate have felt that these issues were a big deal.

My partner is un-confrontational and believes in keeping the peace so she feels that I was very rude.

My issue is I don’t feel the need to be considerate when they clearly haven’t been considerate to us. I don’t feel the need to deal with them in a civil manner anymore.

So reddit, AITA?

That’s one way to handle a neighborly dispute.

Reddit chimes in with their opinions.

It’s clear this sprinkler-happy homeowner needs to work on better managing conflict.

Not much sympathy from this redditor.

His neighbor’s actions really aren’t that big of a deal.

This situation says more about the homeowner’s character than the neighbors’.

All the water in the world can’t wash away the bad blood between these neighbors.

This guy definitely escalated when he could have done the opposite.

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.