Imagine living in a townhouse where it’s kind of complicated for delivery drivers to find your unit. If you were able to easily solve this problem with some cheap adhesive house numbers, would you do it, or would you leave the problem up to your landlord?

In this story, one renter buys some house numbers, but someone in the neighborhood clearly has a big problem with these numbers being added to a post at the end of the driveway.

Let’s read all about it.

AITA for starting a silent neighborhood battle

I live in a block of townhouses where most are street fronting, but five of them are only accessible by going down a driveway.

The street number of the townhouses accessible only via the driveway is also not visible from the street – the dwellings either side of the driveway display their own street numbers, and visitors are expected to look at each of them and then come to their own conclusion that other dwellings must exist down the driveway.

This was already frustrating for us pre-pandemic, but became even more frustrating once we required contactless deliveries and nobody could work out where our house was.

They took matters into their own hands.

As renters, we had no right to do this, but with the cost being a grand total of $12, we bought some numbers from the local hardware store (closely resembling the numbers used on all other townhouses in the group) and placed them on a communal post at the driveway entrance to indicate more townhouses existed down the driveway.

We received an uber eats delivery that night that made it to our door step without any intervention from ourselves for the first time ever (happy days!)

The numbers didn’t last long.

The next day, the numbers were removed.

As we had stuck them on loosely, and there is a school only a few doors down, we assumed they had fallen off and kids had made off with them, so bought some more and stuck them on with better adhesive.

Again, an online purchase arrived that afternoon with no treks to the end of the driveway required.

But those numbers didn’t last long either.

The next day the numbers had disappeared again, along with a significant chunk of post that they were adhered to.

The post needed to be repaired at great cost to the owner group, which I feel bad about, but the next bit is the interesting bit: after the post was repaired SOMEONE ELSE started putting up house numbers on the post. And whoever has been taking them down, keeps just chiselling bits of post away.

The owner group keeps having to pay for repairs, just for people to keep putting house numbers up again. Tons of passive aggressive anonymous notes in letter boxes have been sent throughout our group.

I feel bad about starting the neighborhood war, and know that technically I had no right to do it – but I don’t feel mine was an ‘AH’ move. I can’t even think why someone keeps defacing property like they keep doing.

I wonder who is removing the numbers. There doesn’t seem to be any good reason to remove them. The numbers actually sound very helpful and even necessary for delivery drivers.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Here’s a similar thought.

Another person wants to know who is bothered by the numbers.

One person has a theory about who is responsible for removing the numbers.

A simple solution isn’t always simple.

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