Respect in Common Areas

When you live in a body corporate your actions will invariably impact on others and your quality of life can be varied by the action or inaction of your neighbours.

When I get home and my neighbour has a guest parked in front of my home I park in the street instead of my usual park. Yes this is frustrating but it is a minor inconvenience in my life, they are great neighbours, friendly people who have made the property great to live in for years and these sort of inconveniences only happen a couple of times a year. Strata living is great with neighbourly communication and a ‘live and let live’ attitude.

I have another neighbour who isn’t great to have alongside, is uncommunicative and has a classic car which is smelly, loud and leaks oil in the driveway. To combat this his ingenious solution was to use cardboard boxes placed strategically to soak up the oil spill.

Having reached the end of financial year in what has been a hectic year to date I took my family overseas this month only for Adelaide to have some wild and windy weather and I was stunned on my return to find my carpark, front garden and the common driveway area covered in dinner plate sized pieces of soggy cardboard!

My disappointment was largely due to the obvious nature of the issue so my neighbour couldn’t possibly miss seeing the state of the property when going outside his front door but has chosen to ignore it and allow the cardboard to keep breaking up and littering the property.

Without a relationship with the neighbour where I could knock on the door and discuss the matter politely I felt that I needed to have the body corporate manager write a letter to the property manager for that unit to suggest that this breach in Articles needs to be addressed to prevent further recurrance which is sad but unfortunately occurs in unit groups when respect of the common areas and your neighbours is not among a residents’ thinking.

image - a week after picking up strewn cardboard it was breaking up again