Don’t Smoke So Close To Me

Oh, you guys. This is such a first world problem, I can’t believe I’m even bringing it up here. But it’s been bugging me, and sometimes just getting things out there can be very cleansing, so I’m just going to vent.

We live in a rather large apartment complex. For the most part, it’s a pretty good community to live in. All of our appliances work, we have good water pressure, the walls are solid enough that we can’t hear our neighbors. Management is usually quick to respond to issues. The grounds are kept up, they’re clean and for the most part, it’s a nice, quiet community to live in.

Except.

We live on the second (top) floor of our building. Our neighbors downstairs are quiet and fine and I’m sure very lovely people except for one thing. They smoke. They don’t smoke inside (which is fantastic, and I really appreciate the reduced fire risk). They smoke on their front porch.

The thing is – their front porch is directly under our front porch, which is right off our living room. Which means the smoke travels right up through the slats in the floor of our patio, and drifts into our apartment. In the winter you could just barely smell it. But now that the weather is nicer, we would like to open the door to the patio to get some fresh air circulating.

But the people downstairs? Smoke ALL THE TIME.

Early morning, before dinner, after dinner, late evening, overnight. There is someone on the porch at 6 in the evening, and someone on the porch at 2 in the morning (I know, because the smoke wakes me up from a deep sleep).

As you can imagine, Mr. Martini and I are not smokers. So we’re not used to the smell of cigarette smoke in our apartment, and we don’t like it. Worse than that, the smoke seems to be a trigger for my asthma, which is annoying and unpleasant. (This is another reason I’m so, so glad for the “no smoking in restaurants” rules. I know many folks find this invasive, but I’m a huge, huge fan.)

We’ve resigned ourselves to closing the patio door when we hear the neighbors screen door open below us. There’s not much else we can do, since they pay rent the same way we do, and the property doesn’t have rules against smoking. We’re just going to keep the windows closed and run the (beloved) central air and suck it up and be grown ups. And look for a new apartment when our lease is up.

It’s just frustrating that this one aspect of our living arrangement is such a stinker. Literally and figuratively.