Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

The builder of our new condo stopped by today with a worried look on his face. I answered the bell and stepped outside to chat in the bright afternoon sun. He hemmed and hawed and finally came to the point.
The builder of our new condo stopped by today with a worried look on his face. I answered the bell and stepped outside to chat in the bright afternoon sun. He hemmed and hawed and finally came to the point.

The bird feeders we have outside our patio are distasteful to a neighbor. She is concerned that there will be bird droppings everywhere, although I read ‘everywhere’ to mean around her condo. I agreed to remove one feeder altogether and to relocate the other two as far away from her property as possible. This seemed like a reasonable compromise to me. It did to the builder too. At least for now.

Then he said there’s a fight looming between the condo owners who love birds and bird feeders and the condo owners who want to take the bylaws literally. Those bylaws currently state that no feeders are allowed. At the same time, feeders have been unofficially sanctioned for the past three years – long before we showed up with ours – so the by-laws have been overlooked for the same time period. When this is the case, it’s hard to backtrack and make everyone fall in line.

I remember a similar controversy when we lived in a Chicago condo, only it was between the dog owners and the non-dog owners over what elevators dogs should be allowed to ride in. I shook my head then; I shake it now.

I don’t have an answer to how people of opposing views get along in a condo development. We all read the same condo documents; we all had the opportunity to understand what we were getting into. So if I need to remove my unofficially sanctioned feeders, I will. It’s not worth fighting over.

The bird feeders we have outside our patio are distasteful to a neighbor. She is concerned that there will be bird droppings everywhere, although I read ‘everywhere’ to mean around her condo. I agreed to remove one feeder altogether and to relocate the other two as far away from her property as possible. This seemed like a reasonable compromise to me. It did to the builder too. At least for now.

Then he said there’s a fight looming between the condo owners who love birds and bird feeders and the condo owners who want to take the bylaws literally. Those bylaws currently state that no feeders are allowed. At the same time, feeders have been unofficially sanctioned for the past three years – long before we showed up with ours – so the by-laws have been overlooked for the same time period. When this is the case, it’s hard to backtrack and make everyone fall in line.

I remember a similar controversy when we lived in a Chicago condo, only it was between the dog owners and the non-dog owners over what elevators dogs should be allowed to ride in. I shook my head then; I shake it now.

I don’t have an answer to how people of opposing views get along in a condo development. We all read the same condo documents; we all had the opportunity to understand what we were getting into. So if I need to remove my unofficially sanctioned feeders, I will. It’s not worth fighting over.