Maybe you could leave a polite note on the bookcase?

I agree with @saucefiend.

Put a note on the bookcase explaining that clearly you both want your stuff to be accessible, and that it would be much easier to find a way to do that together rather than one after the other. So if they could contact you you'd love to be able to figure out the solution together.

You might even make a new friend :)

Of course, it could be a poltergeist.

If you leave a note, then please sign it so the bookcase owner can respond. Anonymous notes seem creepy and hostile. My policy is to find some other way to communicate if I wouldn't be willing to sign a note.

We recently had to deal with smokers in the stairwell. They're not supposed to smoke in communal areas. I kind of went on the warpath and went door to door to ask whether they were smokers. I think I know who has been smoking in the hallway, but I talked to management about the problem and I think they fixed it for me because I haven't noticed a smoke smell the last few days.

Good list, Jennifer! Agree with the posters above--a nice, signed note might do the trick.

I so wish there was a polite way to ask the person who neighbors me in our apt's parking lot to actually park correctly. I have a pretty big car, and the spaces are tight as it is, which makes it tough to get in and out--but this person always parks on the diagonal and *never* pulls all the way into the spot. Once we ended up pulling in at the same time, and I tried to make eye contact/smile, but she rushed out of her car while I was still in mine and hurried away to the front door without so much as a glance my way. It kind of stung! But leaving a note on a car seems a bit more aggressive than a note about a storage space. Any thoughts?

Craigslist the bookcase in the 'Free' category? ('Buyer responsible for pick-up. Item in basement but just go on in, the front door of the building is propped open, and someone who's leaving it cleaner than she found it will likely hold the elevator for you.')

I suggest leaving a note on the bookcase with a way to contact you. Or if you have a community group/email list try to find the person that way. I find that having face to face, or voice to voice, communication helps a lot in communal living.

I've had pretty good success with speaking to the person directly with the exception of my new downstairs neighbor/couple. The wife is hell bent on challenging me on EVERYTHING unfortunately.

Jennifer ... Just remember that "karma's a bitch" works both ways. ;)

Anyone have suggestions for very nice neighbor who has loud sex with his girlfriend at 8 a.m.? The problem is, it's his girlfriend that's loud, not him. We politely mentioned something to him about it, but it doesn't seem like he conveyed our sentiments to her. Awkward!

@omnombiscuits: Sounds to me like your neighbor may have hurried away because she knows she's inconveniencing you and doesn't want to be confronted about it. The only way to actually get the attention of someone like that is to catch her attention and clearly, succinctly, state what you want. It may not be polite, and she might not respond nicely, but sometimes you have to be direct with people to get what you want from them.

No. 3 would be great for our downstairs neighbors to see. They think we're just these awful people that stomp around our apartment and cause them migraines (no really, that's what they told the landlord). so we got a noise complaint on our door and they continued to pound on their ceiling with a broom to get us to walk more softly (for instance, 2pm on a sunday, 6pm on a thursday).
i tried to take No. 3 into consideration for a VERY LONG TIME, but i finally had enough and went down there to give them a piece of my mind.
since confronting them (though it wasn't pretty and i did most of the yelling), they have YET to pound on their ceiling at us, and we feel more comfortable simply living our lives in our apartment.

sometimes you have to confront people to get it all out there and you can all get past it.

@april We've had neighbors like that when we lived in family housing while I finished my degree. I have a toddler and he was playing in our apt and she actually called campus police to report a child playing loudly! We then had her coming up to our apt numerous times complaining about us walking around in our apt after 7pm. We aren't even heavy walkers. She complained when my son fell out of bed. I just chalked it up to the fact that she's probably never lived in an apt building before. We've lived on the second floor for a long time. We didn't get complaints from previous neighbors and we don't get complaints from our current downstairs neighbor even though my son is bigger and louder now.

i'm not sure how yelling at them resolved anything. just because they haven't complained doesn't mean they aren't still bothered. i'm a first floor tenant and the noise just travels down as through a megaphone. i know when he drops a coin on the floor that he has no idea how loud it is in my place. likewise that his every footstep is loudly creaking over my head and kinda echoing. BUT dropping weights on his floor? he had to know that was disruptive to the person below. i waited 3.5 years before protesting. 3.5 years of weekly aggravation. at present, i'm at wits end over a chair he has been dragging back and forth daily for the past five months. a friend of mine thought it was thunder. every morning at 6:30am (i get up at 8), every evening and any time in between.

a shouting match will not resolve this. him standing in my apartment while i drag his chair, bed and whatever he has on casters back and forth is the only way for him to gain some appreciation of how much his life intrudes on mine. he might at least finally put down the rugs that are mandated in the lease. (i can even hear his blender and the turn of his shower knobs. so don't get me started on the 7am sunday opera music.)

not to make @aprilheartsaaron a proxy for my neighbor. i know people aren't always stomping around, but it really does sound like it, and it really is disruptive and stressful.

as for #2: i disagree on principal. i pay for the use of the machines and they are first come/first served. so i can use as many as i need, just like in a laundromat. any time i have been generous, i have also wound up with a busted washer or dryer, spending far more time than the other person getting my clothes done. always.

#5: smiling is not my demeanor. people just have to get over it. i smile at people i know, sometimes, but not at strangers. one of my neighbors smiles constantly and says the most obnoxious things while doing it. my smiles ain't cheap. if you get one, you'll know you earned it.

I had a neighbor who couldn't stand the sound of the plumbing at night. In a high-rise, someone's nearly always using the water, so that meant she was going crazy all the time, pounding my wall at 2 a.m. (she seemed to think I was responsible), banging cabinet doors, and screaming swear words. I reported her to the management, and soon afterward, she disappeared without paying the rent.

Is the bookshelf empty? Why the heck would they need access to it, that's what I want to know.

omnombiscuits, I had the same challenge at my place. I left a nice note on their car, signed, explaining I was having trouble parking and getting in/out of my own car. I got a very apologetic note back. They hadn't realized they were intruding on my space and it hasn't happened since. Hope this works for you!

@ Lady J: you sound like a fascinating, difficult woman in a novella. seriously. I want to write you into a book. but really...probably your neighbor isn't re-arranging his furniture every a.m. He's probably just walking around. If this bothers you terribly, like it did a roommate of mine in college, adopt our strategy: get an apartment on the top floor.

@omnombiscuits: I had this problem with the lady who parks next to me in our condo complex. since she's to my right, I just started parking closer and closer and closer to the line, so it got harder and harder and harder for her to open the door to her car. I figured this would make her realize that she was being a jerk and parking sloppy, and that that also sucks when other people do it. it sort of worked - she started leaving me more space. problem is, when I met her in person (and she turned out to be really nice), I kind of felt like a huge jerk.

@omoriala - May I suggest earplugs, going to work early or better yet, beating them at their own game? ;-)

and Lady J, you sound like a pill. any one who types all those paragraphs to gripe about stuff on a blog has issues!

@mitcheaven - my neighbor moves his furniture every single morning and evening. we live in studios and his bed is right above mine and clearly it is convertible. in fact, he made so much noise tonight that i thought maybe he saw my comment and took it personally. i've lived below him eight years. i know what's going on.

@tdubb2008 - i contributed to the conversation. we all have a point of view.

I have a similar problem to the original post - my neighbours store their bikes in the entrance hall. At first there was just one, but now there are 3. This makes it impossible to navigate the hallway with bags of groceries without knocking over at least one bike. It drives me bonkers! They should either store bikes in their apartments, or outside in the yard or garage areas. When I knock one over, I don't pick it up - I'm secretly hoping they'll get the message. I haven't left a note though - so far I've struggled in silence.

storing bikes in an entrance hall or any other communal hallway is a huge fire code vilation, you should be able to get that stopped pretty easily.

I live next to a "Lady J"-type. it's unfortunate, but my neighbor really disrupts my life to the point where I am only home (in an apt that I own) to sleep. I spend as much time out of the house as humanly possible. She actually came over and yelled at me last week for empty-ing my dishwasher too loudly.

I had an upstairs neighbor who came home very late at night and ... vacuumed or so I thought -- after a while I noticed he was just turning the vaccuum on and leaving it in one spot (while he fought with girlfriend or whoever was up there with him. ) I never could ask him to stop doing it because he seemed kind of mean and I was a little afraid of how he might respond. I knew then I'd never buy another co-op or condo.

LadyJ: your neighbor makes his own choices certainly, but you aren't positioning yourself very well if your main complaints are all the things he does to make noise. You only participated in making your own life less enjoyable. You need to complain about what is really the problem: he does have rugs down as required in his lease. That is what you should complain about, and not let up until its taken care of. Complaining about upstairs neighbor noise is tricky, often people are doing regular things in a normal way and can't help the construction of the building that makes it sound otherwise. If you make your objections about something objective and factual, rather than something that could be subjective, you may find you get better results with both you neighbor and landlord.

But, I do feel for you. I've lived upstairs and downstairs, in buildings new and old, with neighbors I knew and those who were unfriendly strangers to the end. And it's hard when you're the one whose living situation is the short end of the stick.

RE the blogger's problem: when you move the bookcase behind your bike, are you putting it against or near a wall? Or in a place that's had leaks in the past (if you even know the recent history of your building's basement)? You're attributing motives to this other person without obvious reason to do so. Maybe they don't think their "bookcase should be stored in a spot that makes it difficult to access [your] bike". Perhaps they wonder why a bike owner is purposely moving their bookcase in order to ruin it in the damp basement. They've stored their bookcase away, not thrown it out.

Probably you are each focused on getting the best conditions for your own property without thinking enough of the other person's property needs. If you live in a big building you need to leave a note on the person's bookcase, if you live somewhere with a small number of tenants you could be more proactive and knock on a few doors to ask if the bookcase belongs to those persons or if they know who's it is. Anyway, are you sure the contested square footage is the bike area? I noticed you put it in quotes. Maybe you're parking your bike in the shelving storage area.

It's always best to try to figure how the situation might appear to the person on the other side.