Not our house, the 3-unit apartment building next door has needed painting for Years. It's a combination of wood and stucco. Much of the wood has looked like it needs replacing, but then what do I know about restoration. Last week some guys, which assumed were painters, were there sanding and patching and put primer on the patches, but I don't think they replaced any wood. That was last week. This week it's still not painted, so it's a mess with sections of primer and the old, faded paint. Maybe it will be painted and all clean and sparkling new when I get home this evening.

Added later...

As long as I'm on the subject of the neighbors… A few weeks ago the new tenants had one of those big DirecTV antennas installed on the roof. We noticed it right away, because when we go out on our back porch, it's "right there". When I saw the owners of the building, they didn't know that was getting installed, but that was it.

This morning when I was putting out the trash and recycle bins, I noticed someone had put a scrap piece of wood from the top of the end of "our fence" to that building, over their gate, presumably to fix the problem with their gate. Their gate has been rubbing for years because the gate was mounted wrong and has split a board of the fence, so it sags. The problem with that added stick is that our gate rubs on the fence now. In our wet winters, the wood expands and our gate usually rubs a bit then. With the stick like that, it's going to be stuck, like theirs does.

I popped the stick up this morning so it's just resting there, but it's not a solution as it is. How does that make me feel? It makes me mad that they're providing a kludge for a problem with the mounting of the gate, which messes up the operation of our gate. We paid for the fence. Their gates are attached to the fence. I would like them to not mess with the fence anymore than that.

While I'm on a roll here... This is not the first fence issue we have had. Soon after we had the fence installed, the owner of that building at the time installed a raised platform around the doors back there. The concrete was all cracked up there, so his solution was to cover it up with this deck-like platform, which is 8-9 inches high. It looks much nicer than the broken concrete did. The problem from our side is that is effectively lowers the height of our fence. The fence is taller in the back and steps down along the sides, right about where this platform is. Our reaction was to install wooden lattice on top of the fence across the area of their platform, and then over the years, grow a vine on it.

Yes, it's become a spite fence.

Next time it will be an 8ft fence on the side, instead of 6ft.

Just kidding.