That bad, huh?
( I haven’t yet bothered to click it, obvs.)
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Depends on the state laws for situations like this - in some states if a neighbor encroaches on your property by putting up a fence, if that is not corrected and the fence moved in a certain amount of time then that land defaults to the neighbors possession, even if they were wrongly encroaching.
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TIL that if your neighbor is enough of an asshole, you can destroy their stuff, and it is completely understandable, because “muh propertuh”.
Cool.
Even after reading the entire article, I’m still not comfortable with vigilantism. Luckily it’s resolved now, but the right place to resolve disputes is through an unbiased third party not at the end of a sawzall.
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I have a friend whose neighbors built a fence between their houses. She said it was on her property, they disagreed but would not help pay for a survey. She hired a surveyor herself, and it was 3 feet over the line on her property. She pointed this out to them and they told her that the surveyor didn’t know what they were doing (licensed surveyor), and refused to move the fence.
After asking numerous times, she had a friend help her remove the fence by carefully taking it apart, and stacking up all the components neatly on their property, filming the whole process. She then called the sheriff’s office, a deputy came out, saw the survey, saw how carefully they had disassembled the fence, and told her if the neighbors tried to have her arrested for vandalism, he would refuse.
Which is exactly what happened. Then their drunk son called her in a rage (he ultimately calmed down when he realized he might get arrested instead).
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Obviously staged viral Sawzall marketing campaign. /s
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Sawzall, for when nothing else works.
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i live in an old neighborhood, and exact property lines were weird to begin with, and now sometimes are so fuzzy even surveyors can just end up saying “well, all you can do is work it out with your neighbor.” – case in point, the house next to my next door neighbor (on the other side from us) recently had their main water line crack, and it flooded my neighbor’s basement a little – but it turns out that maybe back in the 50s a fence was put up by a previous owner of our neighbor’s house, and it went over the line where the water line was, and nobody knew about it until now. complicating matters was that our neighbor’s mother had planted a tree, now fully grown, back in the 70s, that was now on the wrong side of the property line, too, because it was along that fence. add to this that my neighbor’s (101-year old) mother had just recently died, as well.
ANYWAY, tl;dr, instead of getting lawyers involved, they talked it over and agreed that the owner of the water line would repair the line at their expense, and my neighbor paid to move the fence back 3 feet… EXCEPT where the tree was. now the fence goes around the tree at that spot. everyone is more or less happy. and no lawyers made a dime.
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Most property lines are weird to begin with, primarily b/c, on a fundamental level, they are based on bullshit. Most people, of course, agree w/ the bullshit, but it’s bullshit just the same.
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Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply put up the fence without sawing the garage in half? The fence would make the point pretty clear, and the neighbor would have been prevented from using the garage.
We saw something like this on BB a while back:
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I guess the situation hadn’t quite reached Condition Chainsaw.
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I could maybe understand the frustration in my neighborhood (I have 1/20 of an acre), but look at that aerial photo, they have so much space! 10 ft is nothing! What was saw-man going to do with that space anyhow, plant more grass?
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Sounds like your friend acted very civilly. Yet, I can’t help but think the neighbors sound like exactly the type where you would want a fence up between you and them. Must’ve been pretty awkward seeing each other across the yard!
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Two things seem to make humans even more crazy than sex or money:
Territory and personal status.
Like the chimps we are.
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In these parts (NY state), it takes 20 years exclusive use. If the owner so much as plants a daisy in any one of those 20 years…SOL.
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Yeah, it’s a lot less time in CA. I was a juror in a civil case and the new homeowner tried to lock down an access/easement that had occurred on his property prior to purchase. The funny thing that I remember is that the new owners who were disputing the easement came from NY. They were elderly and this was the third home that they purchased, so they weren’t exactly newbies.
And usually paying taxes. The government may let you screw your neighbor, but it will never let you screw the government.
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Around here, the zoning rules require a considerable setback, so even putting a up a structure too close to the property line would require it to be torn down or moved.
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Libertarians gone wild.
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It’s kind of weird that they built a retaining wall to level out the area where the garage was constructed. Quite a bit of structural work was done in the past on the wrong property. Seems like you’d want to get the property line sorted out before you embarked on such a project.
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