Before you put up a fence, it’s a good idea to talk to your next door neighbors. While the saying goes that fences make good neighbors, it doesn’t really work that way if the neighbors disagree about where the property line is!

In today’s story, next door neighbors agree to get a property survey to find out where the property line is. It really works in one neighbor’s favor, but the other neighbor makes the problem even worse.

Let’s read the whole story.

Bet you’re sorry now!

Many years ago, after decades of saving, my husband and I were doing well enough to finally build our dream home.

After we moved in, we still had to have our yard leveled and sodded and arranged it early the next spring.

That night, I was out watering the backyard sod when I saw my neighbours wife, Chris, using a measuring tape between our homes.

There was a potential problem.

I asked her if everything was okay.

And she said that we had sodded a section of their yard.

I told her we had followed the sticks that the builder had left.

She said the builders must have screwed up and rudely insisted that we had stolen part of their yard.

Turns out the property line wasn’t where either of them thought it was.

Not wanting to have an ongoing beef with her and her husband, Keith, we agreed to have our property re-surveyed.

When we did, we got one hell of a surprise.

The actual property line wasn’t halfway between our two houses as we believed, it was about a foot and a half away from the side of their house.

They owned a construction company and had built their house too close to the property line. This was an insane mistake for a professional!

They really were trying to be good neighbors.

Still wanting to be good neighbours, we offered to split the cost and labour of a “good neighbour” fence using one of the 4 accepted fence styles allowed.

My husband kept asking Keith when he wanted to start but he always had one excuse after another.

Then Keith rudely told Dan to stop bothering him.

Dan was furious.

Dan got to work.

He bought all the materials and built the fence himself.

He had been planning to put the fence halfway between our houses but our neighbour was so rude that Dan built the fence just inside our property line making the neighbours house look terrible.

The neighbours husband came over mad as hell.

But Dan reminded him that HE and his wife wanted a new property survey and HE had put off the fence for months.

It was a really great fence.

Our fence was magnificent, because Dan was a carpenter and I’m a great painter.

The neighbours husband built a fence next to ours but it was ugly, badly built and not one of the approved designs.

He was forced to tear it down later.

It’s weird that a contractor wouldn’t know where the property line was and would build a really bad fence. He sounds like he’s really bad at his job if he makes such huge mistakes when it comes to his own home!

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

They might be able to get more revenge on their neighbors.

Here’s another vote for checking the setback requirements.

Why two fences?

Here’s another story about annoying next door neighbors.

Some people really have a lot of nerve!

Consider yourself lucky if you get along with your neighbors.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.