Image courtesy of Denis Allbertovich

When you move in with someone for the first time, you come face-to-face with a range of issues that never existed until that moment.

What’s the best way to share the wardrobe space? Who gets to have the first shower before work? Which TV station will you watch while eating breakfast?

When I moved in with my partner Sharon a few months back I was well prepared for all of these issues. After all, we’d accumulated more than six-months-worth of house-sitting in our five years together and we came through it all with our relationship intact and, for better or worse, a willingness to do it all again, albeit in a more formal and a permanent capacity.

But while I was prepared for the trials and tribulations of the domestic domicile, I wasn’t prepared for the cast of sitcom-ready characters in the surrounding apartment complex.

In fact, our first dose of neighbourly affection was upon us before we’d even had a chance to ask: ‘Should there really be water running down the walls?’

As we dragged, scraped and manhandled various pieces of furniture through our seemingly-too-narrow front door (why do they always make couches wider than doorways?!), we noticed a shadowy presence monitoring our progress from across the way.

A little old lady stood in her doorway, directly across from ours, staring unashamedly at the pile of furniture strewn haphazardly across our entrance-room-cum-lounge-room-cum-dining-room.

‘Hi! How are you?’, offered the ever-friendly Sharon, keen to make a good impression with our new neighbours.

While most would reply to the above with something akin to: ‘I’m good. How are you?’, our curious neighbour was going to be bound by no such social customs.

Instead she responded with a dozen steps forward, her feet coming to rest at the base of our front step. She thrust her head unceremoniously through our doorway, peering this way and that, just as a prospective tenant might survey an available rental property.

‘We’re just moving in’, Sharon continued, determined to elicit some kind of verbal response from our slightly-too-eager visitor who, by this point, would have been giving herself a tour of the unit had we not formed an impromptu security cordon.

Having apparently satiated her curiosity, our visitor turned on her heels and wandered off, leaving Sharon and I scratching our heads before sighing and resuming the load-in.

It’s easy to look back and laugh at one-off events like these. But when your neighbours appear hell-bent on employing their lack of consideration for others in perpetuity, it’s a little harder to see the funny side.

Every morning, as Sharon and I enjoy the last snatches of pre-dawn sleep, our next-door neighbour leaves his apartment for work.

Now, I’m not a qualified carpenter, nor do I claim to be an expert when it comes to the construction of front-door locks, but last time I checked, closing a door isn’t the most physically challenging task facing the modern human. You simply apply a force great enough so as to return the door to the shut position and the latch to its companion slot.

That particular memo mustn’t have made it to unit 12. Instead, our early-rising neighbour prefers to combine his departure for work with his training regime for the Australian Door-Slamming Championships.

And so, a little after 5am every weekday, Sharon and I wake with a start, all thanks to a terrifying din that assaults more than just the ears. Teeth are clenched and eyes are squinted in nervous anticipation: will today be the day our front door finally rattles off its hinges and our windows shatter? If not, there’s always tomorrow.

But our neighbours probably shouldn’t shoulder all the blame for our sub-standard introduction to life in Melbourne’s gritty inner-north. The ingenious design of our apartment building should take some of the heat as well.

By some stroke of architectural brilliance, the main bedroom in our apartment – and hence our bed – lies directly beneath the toilet in the apartment above us. It’s something the designers obviously weren’t too concerned about but take it from me: there are few things more relaxing than lying in bed after a hard day’s work, listening to the neighbours use their smallest room.

Suffice to say that few details of the purging process are left to the imagination for us lowly downstairs-dwellers.

I’ll leave with you that appetising allusion and the rather trite suggestion that moving in with a loved one can be a challenging experience — but not always for the reasons you might expect.