Why I hate renting

To all of you who own your homes out there, thank your lucky stars. Now, I realize there are a number of reasons to be happy renting: it's cheap(er), we just call the owner when something breaks and they deal with fixing it (theoretically), we aren't geographically stuck due to a mortgage, etc. But for the past four years since we got married, Benjamin and I have always rented places where we had to share walls/ceiling/floor with our neighbors, and I am starting to really get sick of it. For example, in our apartment in Provo, we lived below a couple with a baby, and she screamed CONSTANTLY, day and night. And it was a howling, grating cry worse than most babies I have heard. And did I mention it was constantly? She was like a year old and still waking up at night, and they would blast her lullaby music in the evenings as if somehow playing it extremely loud would soothe her or something. We thought the baby was bad, but then we moved to Salt Lake into an ancient house that had been haphazardly chopped into apartments. Our bathroom ended up having a now locked but very thin wooden door between it and the neighbor's bedroom. Although the girl that lived in the back apartment was very sweet, it got very old very quickly hearing her escapades with her various male suitors while I was sitting on the toilet, and I am sure she got sick of hearing our affairs with the toilet after eating Mexican food. In that same apartment the next door neighbors would get inebriated on a near weekly basis and sit right outside our bedroom window in their backyard singing drunken rock-band, yelling profanity, or just laughing like idiots, always between the hours of 11pm and 3 am, when normal people are in bed. And most recently, although we moved to a very nice neighborhood, we ended up with the worst neighbors yet in our duplex. Tonight I could hear them screaming and yelling at each other, and when the girl started crying and saying what I thought was possibly, "Help me," I had had enough and went downstairs to tell Benjamin that I was calling the police. When I got back upstairs the commotion had stopped, though, and so I decided not to call. If it happens again, though, I'm calling. But I guess I shouldn't complain. At least the apartments we have lived in haven't had their own drug dealer supplying the tenants, no one has attempted suicide in the building, and there have been no confrontations involving firearms in the parking lot (yes, these things have all happened to people that rent that Benjamin and I know). All I can say I guess is I will REALLY appreciate the day when we have a place of our own.