Sharing space with neighbors is easy until they start taking advantage.

So, what would you do if your neighbors were constantly overfilling your trash bins and leaving you unable to throw your own trash away? Would you confront them directly? Or would you simply put a lock on the bins to prevent confrontation?

In the following story, one woman deals with this situation and reaches her breaking point. Here’s what she did.

WIBTA if I put a lock on my bins?

I’m 24F from the UK, and I’ve recently moved back home to live with my mentally unwell mother, 45F.

Since moving back I have been making her home more livable and functional since she has let it go down hill since I left 5/6 years ago for uni, which means im throwing alot of stuff away.

During the time away, we got new downstairs neighbours (we live in an apartment of 6 flats) who consist of a man and woman, roughly about late 20s-early 30s, and their child.

The neighbors are constantly overstepping boundaries.

Initially, I had no issue with them, but my mother realised they had some of our garden furniture in their part of the shared garden (they did not ask to use any of it). My mother asked to get it back (a chair and our BBQ).

They were fine with giving the chair back, but insisted the BBQ was their own. Which we both doubted since they look the same and ours is nowhere to be found. It was winter anyway, and we just said forget it and left it at that.

Recently, I have been noticing they have been using our bins (we all have our own green and blue bin at the front of the apartment with our house numbers on it apart from theirs which has no number), and have been putting normal house hold waste in our blue bins (recycling only) as well as our green (general household waste).

What’s worse is that they put trash in the wrong bin.

I wouldn’t care about the green bin being used if it were the night before trash collection, but it never is, and they overfill our bin while leaving theirs just filled to the brim, which is honestly just rude.

Our trash only gets collected once every two weeks, and it means I have to put my trash in other bins the night before collection because both of mine are overfilled with trash that isn’t even all mine.

Not to mention the recycling bin men won’t accept our blue bin (obviously) as it is filled with trash they’ve put in it.

At this point, she’s over it.

They also leave random trashed old furniture outside that’s been there for weeks and dont even put it out the front when its bin day for the men to even try to take.

Honestly, I’ve had enough of it. Our bin is always being overfilled and having furniture trash spread around it, which makes it look like it’s our mess, and I don’t want the rest of the apartment assuming we are making it look like that.

So I’ve ordered some rope padlocks for the bins, and I’m going to drill holes into them to make sure they can’t put anything in our trash anymore. We will be the only ones with padlocked bins in the apartment, so idk if people will think it’s rude to lock our bins or not. I’m just sick of not being able to use them properly.

AITA?

Eek! People like that are so hard to live next to.

Let’s see how the fine folks over at Reddit would handle it.

For this reader, the locks are just a Band-Aid.

As this comment points out, the Council may not be happy about the drilling.

Here’s a suggestion.

This reader thinks she needs to just lock the bins and live her life.

That’s her best option, because it seems like these entitled people wouldn’t change even if they were asked.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.