When you live in a neighborhood, you want to be courteous and try to get along with everyone as much as you can.

What would you do if you wanted to replace a privacy fence so you asked your neighbor if they would split the cost, and they said no, but then once you paid for it, they started decorating the side that faced their house?

That is what happened to the first time homeowner in this story, and she was not happy about it.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for building a Fence on my property and not allowing my neighbor to hang stuff on it or paint it?

I bought a house with a big yard several months ago.

It is my very first house and the most expensive thing I have ever owned.

Prior to this I have only ever lived in apartments and the dynamic between neighbors seems really different, which is another reason I am asking.

Home ownership requires a lot of planning.

When I moved here there was a very old rotten wooden fence on the property separation line between me and my new neighbors property.

I wanted to replace it from the start, however I decided to focus on the house first, you know the usual stuff, fixing up what needed “fixing upping”, Painting, Flooring, moving in the furniture and so on before focusing on the yard.

Now, the guy who owned my house before was an old man and because of his age the yard had not seen much work done for what I assume were several years, so it has been a lot of work fixing up the yard.

About a month ago I finally got some time to replace the fence.

I went over to the neighbors house, talked about replacing the fence and if he was going to split the cost with me but he would have nothing of it.

Nothing wrong with that, it isn’t his fence.

He said the fence was fine and he has no issue with no fence so if I want to remove it I should go ahead but he was not giving me a dime to replace it.

It’s worth adding that the previous fence was completely on my property and purchased completely by the previous owner, the neighbor has no claim on it.

While I was a bit weirded out by his response I decided to just finance the fence myself and install it myself, being quite a few bucks and a lot of hard work lighter I am now the proud owner of a nice, tall, wooden fence.

I need to point out just to make this clear, I paid for it entirely, I put it up by myself, I removed the old fence on my own and the fence is entirely on my side of the property line.

The neighbor wanted to make his side look nice.

I came home from work a few days ago to find my fence on the neighbors side entirely filled with plant pots, the border also filled in with all sorts of plants and he had painted it.

I went over to my neighbor and demanded he take all of it down alongside demanding he’d get his sand grinder and take the paint of off my fence as well, after all you don’t want to pay for it, you don’t get to paint it or hang stuff on it, or for that matter plant stuff in my yard (As I said the fence is entirely on my property, so the border of his yard where he planted stuff is also mine).

The drama keeps escalating.

He laughed at me and essentially told me to go away.

Well I went back there, tossed all his crap off off my fence, pulled all of his plants out and tossed them in his yard and painted the side towards his fence an obnoxious bright yellow.

I have since had him raging at my door, his kids came over to yell at me as they had worked for hours on it and well, here we are.

I am wondering whether I am wrong as I might have gone too far.

AITA?

Yes, she is wrong. Unless she built the fence like 5 feet onto her property, he should be able to use it in a reasonable way, which he was. She is crazy.

Let’s see if the people in the comments on Reddit agree.

This person says she acted like a lunatic, and I agree.

The relationship with her neighbor is ruined forever.

This person loved the yellow paint.

Maybe she is legally right, but she handled it wrong.

This person thinks the neighbor is at fault.

This is the very definition of shooting yourself in the foot.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.