Neighbor Wars·
TREE DOWN, DRIVEWAY DRAMA
Two neighbors clash over a fence project that ends with a tree trunk severed, leaving the homeowner to weigh loss, liability, and whether anyone will face consequences.
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A neighbor's fence project in New Jersey ended with a tree cut nearly to the ground, and the homeowner behind the tree is now staring at the damage and wondering whether the whole thing has been ruined.
The post, shared a few days after it happened, opens with an instruction: look at the slideshow first. Pictures 2 through 6, the writer says, zoom in "from distance to provide you a good look at the following scenario." The scene is a property line between two homes, where a new neighbor has started putting up a fence.
That fence, apparently, came with a problem: the trunk of the writer's tree overhangs the neighbor's driveway. To make the fence flush with the rest, the workers cut part of that trunk back. The neighbor says the workers were told to "box out" the tree, preserving it while working around it. But the writer says the story on the ground didn't match that explanation.
In the first photo, the worker seemed to say his boss had told him to cut it. Then the boss said he had not.
By the next day, the situation had gotten worse. After the writer returned home from work, the rest of the tree had been cut flush to the ground.
Now the question is whether the tree is still compromised. The writer says the neighbors had already wanted the trees removed because of alleged "sap" falling on their cars, something the writer flatly says is false. The tree is the writer's, and if it falls, the writer says, "it is my problem because it is my tree." But the neighbors cut into it without consent.
The writer is not looking to call a lawyer just yet. What is boiling up instead is anger: if the tree has to come down now, the neighbors may end up getting exactly what they wanted all along, with no consequences.
That is the knot at the center of the post: a fence, a driveway, a tree trunk cut back for clearance, then the remaining tree chopped down the next day. Somewhere in the middle are two different explanations about who ordered what, and a homeowner left trying to figure out whether a tree on their property was just damaged, or effectively taken apart one piece at a time.