Moving into a new neighborhood is always a gamble.

You can never know ahead of time whether your neighbors are going to be your new best friends, a total nuisance, or somewhere in between.

See how one new homeowner fights neighbor fire with fire — er, flood lights.

Read the post below to learn more.

The Long Game

I bought a house in a nice neighborhood, partly because it didn’t have an HOA.

The real estate agent I used told me, after I signed the contract to purchase, that the seller had told her that the next door neighbor was a pain in the ***.

I found that out the day we moved in.

And that statement is to be taken literally…

We got to the new house about ten minutes before the moving van arrived, and the neighbor was out there trying to talk to me as it was pulling in.

He wanted to tell me the way things worked in the neighborhood.

I told him we could talk about it later, but he stayed there, trying to talk to me as I was directing the movers while they unloaded the truck.

Oh, but that neighbor didn’t stop there.

Eventually, I went into the house, and he was right behind me, but I told him not to come in.

He stood on the edge of his yard watching everything.

Once the truck was unloaded, I stayed inside, and eventually, he returned to his house.

When I came out to move my car so the movers could get out, he cornered me again.

He had all kinds of “rules”.

The rules were pretty strict, too.

He left for work at 5 A.M., and he expected no noise of any kind after 8 P.M.

The previous owners were lax about yard care (in his opinion), and he expected that I would correct that.

My mailbox needed to be moved farther away from his property line.

I put up with half an hour of this, until I finally told him I had to go back inside to start putting things away.

But these new neighbors saw him often…

He was waiting for me or my wife with [any] sort of complaint almost every day.

Listening to him, I was pretty sure that he was coming over before I got home to do an “inspection”.

After a couple weeks of non-stop ********, I had had enough.

My wife and I planned things out.

That’s when they came up with the ultimate plan.

Just before I went to bed, I hit the panic button on the remote to my car.

The alarm went off, and even though I could’ve stopped it with the fob from inside, I walked out and shut it off a couple minutes later.

He was waiting for me after work the next day, and complained to me that the alarm woke him up.

And this wasn’t just happening once…

I did the same thing every two or three nights.

The first couple times, he was waiting for me when I got home from work to complain.

I told him I suspected someone was trying to break into my car, and [I] was going to buy a couple cameras to monitor that side of my house.

His house was close to my driveway, and he told me that surveillance cameras were not allowed, that it would be an invasion of his privacy, and he would take me to court if I were to put up cameras.

That told me he was coming over.

That’s when the true test came.

So, I replaced the outside light fixture on his side of my house with a motion detector.

The guy at Home Depot told me that 300-500 lumens were the recommended brightness.

I could “test” the light with an app on my phone.

After installing it, I bought two flood lights from an online sporting goods store that were made to light a sport field.

But this homeowner amped up their lumens count by a lot.

They were 42,000 lumens each, and when they lit up, it was much brighter than daylight in my yard and on the side of his house.

Bright enough to play baseball and hit a fastball at night.

The alarm on my car stopped going off, but the lights would come on at random times when there was an “intruder”.

When he went out to his car in the morning it became daylight.

He complained at first, but I simply told him that I was securing my property.

Eventually he put up some sort of blackout shutters on his bedroom windows.

Ironically, the neighbor actually began to chill out.

The whining became very infrequent, especially when I, being a good neighbor, changed the timer setting on the lights so that they weren’t lighting up when he left his house.

What does Reddit think?

Were these pranks on par for a nosy neighbor such as this?

Let’s read the comments below to find out.

Some thought the cameras should still go up.

Others recommended dummy security cameras as an option.

Another commenter noted that this neighbor had no authority on if cameras were allowed on the homeowner’s property.

This neighbor sounds like a handful, but it looks like he’s met his match.

I’m sure they have many happy years of battling ahead of him.

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