Building a new home requires a lot of planning to ensure that everything works the way it should.

What would you do if you had new neighbors building a house where their sewage pipes had to connect to yours, even though there wasn’t enough of an angle to work properly?

That is what happened to the homeowners in this story, so when things started backing up and had to be redone, they made their neighbors pay for a huge property upgrade.

Don’t Sue! We’ll let ya come onto our property to fix your sewer line!

The house I grew up in was built on the side of a hill.

Great views, but the geography posed some challenges for the city utilities, sewage in particular.

Their solution was to put all the houses on the hill in what was called a “shared line.”

That’s a good solution I guess.

Essentially, one big pipe ran through all of our back yards, just below the houses’ basements.

Effluent would flow out from the houses, into the shared pipe, and then down the hill to the city sewer line by the bottom-most house.

When we moved in, we were at the highest point that it was possible to build on and still be part of that shared sewer line.

But a few years later, someone bought a lot just over the crest of the hill and linked up with ours- without being part of the planned community that had an HOA that took care of the sewer line (among other things).

And in fact, they did so without the HOA’s approval.

And so for the next two decades, my family would be the subject of near-constant harassment over the state of the sewer.

This was a very predictable problem.

Their end of the line was lower than ours by just enough that it would stop flowing and clog, often backing up into their basement bathroom and shower.

They’d accuse us of “diverting” our effluent to their line (because I guess we were some kind of plumbing wizards).

Now the reason nobody built a house on that part of the hill during the original development was that the soil was unstable.

Something hydrology related.

Sure enough, over the years, that house would occasionally separate from the hill and slide down a couple of inches.

But our neighbors had connections in the code enforcement agency, so the place never got condemned like it should be.

They just had to shore it up and re-connect all the utilities.

The thing is, the further down the house moved, the steeper the negative incline was from their sewer connection to our junction box, making the clogs and backups even worse.

At one point, it got so bad that their sewer barely flowed.

Some days, it got completely clogged.

Somehow, this was OUR fault.

Why would they think they are responsible?

They spent the next year calling us every time they tried to flush a toilet and waste came out in their downstairs shower.

They called a plumber, who said they had to re-do their part of the shared line.

And to do it, they’d have to bust through our two-story masonry wall so they could get a backhoe onto our property and dig out the line.

Of course, we had issues with this.

We said no, you will NOT come onto our property and tear it up with a big piece of construction equipment.

Hire human laborers or something.

But instead, they hired lawyers who started slinging paper around.

According to them, we were in violation of state law that specifically gave an implied easement granting a homeowner access through another’s property to maintain their own.

So we hired lawyers of our own, who said that we basically had a choice: we could win the case- but pay a ton of money- or just let it happen. Either way, we’d be screwed.

But they pointed out one important fact: that 20 year old masonry wall wasn’t in the greatest of shape anyway, so…

That is a very expensive job.

A few months later, we presented them with a bill for $75,000 for the rebuilding of the wall, installation of a new set of stairs, replacement of the entire wrought-iron fence that had separated the two properties, re-sodding, replacement of ornamental plants and shrubs, and some minor repairs to OUR sewer (which they had borked up while re-laying their pipes).

I’m not a general contractor, but my guess is that they could have hired pick-and-shovel labor to dig out that pipe and replace it with a new one for a fraction of that price.

But no. They had to have a giant caterpillar tread machine do it.

They balked.

But then we handed them a zerox copy of the letter that their lawyers had sent us with “pursuant to paragraph blah blah of the common code of blah blah blah” citing the NEXT paragraph which stated that the person USING the easement was 100% responsible for any damage that might be caused.

They will get their money eventually.

They still balked, but my parents put a lien on their property that stayed there to the day they tried to sell, at which point they HAD to pay up or the purchasers’ creditors wouldn’t underwrite a mortgage.

I think they had to pay interest too, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

If they would have bee nice and reasonable about this, they could have avoided a huge bill.

Let’s see what the people in the comments had to say about this story.

Here is a simple way to avoid the problem.

This person has a better solution.

Yeah, heavy equipment is sometimes the only way.

The HOA really should have stepped in.

Yes, the law can help. Sometimes.

This was a terrible engineering setup from the beginning.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.