Any legal expert will tell you: Never sign anything in a hurry. That’s just what this local funeral home did when they shoved some documents about a new fence in the homeowner’s face.

Little did the funeral home know that their actions would ignite a five-year-long battle of petty revenge and city ordinance enforcement that would prove a costly lesson for them.

Read on for the whole story!

Build me an expensive fence.

One night I had a knock at my door from the funeral home owners down the street.

They told me that they had just bought the property between us and were going to demolish the house to build a parking lot.

They said that they wanted to build a nice vinyl fence between us and that they would pay for everything.

All they needed from me was to sign an agreement saying that it was ok for them to build the fence.

This agreement was 3 pages long!

I told them that I would be happy to take the agreement and read/sign it tomorrow because it was already 9pm.

Then the funeral home owners started acting suspiciously.

They told me that they couldn’t leave the document with me and that I had to sign it right now.

I responded that I don’t ever sign legal documents without reading them completely and that I don’t have time right now to read it, then suggested that they mail me a copy.

After this, they got very pushy and told me that I have to sign it and I have to do it right now!

At this point I told them to get off my property and slammed my door shut.

The homeowner begins to wonder what’s really in this agreement.

I did some research and city code required them to build a very specific type of fence because we had two different zonings of property next to each other.

A bit later, they built a foam-core concrete fence that was 8-feet tall. It looked good, and to an untrained eye it looked to meet the requirements of the city ordinance.

At this time I also received a letter from their lawyer about the old wooden fence that they also left standing was on their side of the property line and that if I tore it down, repaired it, or did anything else to it that they would take legal action against me.

This wasn’t going to fly.

Cue the petty revenge…

I found a city ordinance that outlaws a “fence within a fence”. It basically says that there is only one fence allowed per property line.

I took that to the city planning commission and they forced my neighbor to remove the wooden fence.

The homeowner wasn’t going to make things easy for them.

I refused to allow him or his workers onto my property. This meant that they had to go over the 8-foot concrete fence to remove the old wood fence.

After that was completed, I went back to the planning commission to demand that the correct fence be built.

City ordinance stipulated an 8-foot tall solid masonry fence and explicitly forbid the use of foam core fencing in this situation.

The commission sided with me and made him tear out his brand new fence.

The owners complied with the commission, but cut corners.

After that, he put up a temporary chain link (free standing) fence between our properties. The wind kept blowing it down so I asked him to take care of it so that my chickens didn’t get out of my yard.

He told me to figure it out myself (enter: malicious compliance)… so I welded his rented fence pieces together.

They were no longer portable, but they stopped blowing down.

The homeowner figures they need a little motivation to get started on the fence…

They were also taking a long time to get the permanent fence in, so I ordered a Borat-style neon green speedo. (You should google it to really understand.)

I then wore that during the nights in the summer while I sat at my fire-pit.

The guests of funerals could clearly see all of me lit up in the twilight. I like to think that this helped motivate them to put in an opaque fence.

But not without further obstacles.

When he finally put in the correct fence, his workers trampled about 30 feet of my rose bushes and killed them, so I had the planning commission order him to pay me damages for the roses.

The workers also broke some of my sprinklers and I was able to force him to repair those too.

To top this all off, he stained his side of the new fence and left mine with only stain splatters and stain drips.

Since I was batting 1,000, I went back to the city ordinances and found one the prohibited this exact situation.

You can guess what happens next.

Back to the commission I went.

After more fighting, he had to pay to stain my side of the fence too.

It took 5 and a half years of petty revenge, but now I have a beautiful tall fence to keep my yard quiet and safe. It added a lot of value to my property too!

Hey Mr. and Mrs. Funeral Home: Sign that!

After five and a half years, these funeral home owners probably just wish they had been more forthcoming from the start.

Redditors took to the comments.

Karma sure came for the funeral home owners.

Petty revenge is best served over the source of several years.

This redditor suspects their manipulation tactics are well honed.

The juxtaposition is humorous to this redditor.

The funeral home owners were counting on someone naïve to fall for their little trick, but they got just the opposite.

This homeowner sure knows their way around a city ordinance.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.