Yea- i was just looking at bat box building instructions on line (my husband is pretty handy, luckily. so am I for that matter, I suppose). One thing to be careful of is that they need to fit a bunch of specifications, or otherwise the bats might not move in and you'll get frustrated
http://www.batcon.org/bhra/index.html has links to bat house instructions, and explains their commercial bat house certification program (which I haven't read- I'm building mine).
criteria for sucessful bat houses
As for the neighbors, well... I don't much think they like me much anyway. I get the distinct impression that we are the weird young yuppie couple that is - gasp- interracial
We have one of those reel-push lawn mowers, and aren't too concerned with the lawn. In fact, I refuse to water it
no brownie points there. And we installed a solar panel on our roof for our attic vent fan- I think thats even against the neighborhood association rules, but oh well. We do know some of them, and the one I do know well is pretty cool- I think I could reason with her about the benefit of bats. She's good like that- pretty down to earth and reasonable.
I'd like to find a group of bat house owners in the central texas area to see how it worked for them. Or start one if none exists. It'd be interesting to see how everyones results compared.