Neighbor Wars·
THE FENCE BOUNDARY
A tense boundary dispute between neighbors escalates from plant trimming to a formal survey that will determine who truly owns the fence and the space it occupies.
Would you pay for the survey or let it go?
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The fence was about to come down when the surveyor's tape measure settled the question: it sat three feet inside the narrator's property.
Four years after moving into the house, the narrator had already spent months in a tug-of-war with a neighbor named Linda over a shared fence and the plants along it. The trouble started when the lock on the gate was cut off. Linda came into the yard and cut down vines growing on the mutual fence as if she had every right to do it.
The narrator told her that wasn't going to happen again, replaced the lock, and hoped that would be the end of it.
It wasn't.
After that, Linda kept cutting whatever she could reach over the fence, then moved on to anything in the front yard and even the alley. Each trim seemed to push the line a little farther, until Linda went a step beyond gardening and into ownership. She claimed the fence belonged to her and said she was going to tear it down.
That sent the narrator to a lawyer and then to a surveyor. The bill came to $1000, but the result was clear: the fence was on the narrator's property, not Linda's. The fence did not belong to her at all.
Linda, meanwhile, told the neighborhood a different story. According to the narrator, she cried to everyone around and made the narrator look like the bad guy.
Then came the next test of the boundary.
A neighbor on the other side of the alley started an addition to his home. To get his contractor's equipment through, the contractor tore out bushes growing outside the fence in the alley. The explanation was straightforward enough: it was so he could maneuver his equipment back there.
But the survey had already been done. It showed the fence was set back three feet, and the bushes the contractor removed were actually on the narrator's property.
This time, the neighbor did not argue. He said he would reimburse the narrator. He admitted he made a mistake.
For the narrator, the survey that had settled one fight ended up settling another too. The fence, the vines, the bushes, all of it had looked up for grabs until the property line was finally put on paper.