They say good fences make good neighbors.

Does it follow, then, that bad neighbors literally MAKE bad fences?

I’ll leave that to the logicians amongst you while you read ahead on this tale of neighbors crossing the (property) line.

One neighbor builds a fence, but the fence creates a huge problem for the next door neighbor. Even after the fence problem is resolved, there’s another, arguably even bigger problem.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for having our neighbor move their fence off our property

A neighbor hired a contractor to build a wood privacy fence.

I came home after the posts were set and immediately suspected the fence posts were on my property.

We live in brand new homes and so I asked her to meet me outside with her survey.

I had already staked out the property line, and it was clear to see the posts were on my property.

But survey says…

Before I could say a word, she said ‘you can’t tell where to put a fence with a survey’ which astounded me and left me shaking my head.

After a few minutes of trying to explain that a survey is absolutely the way to determine where your fence should be, she threw her hands up and said ‘my contractor has my survey’ and walked back in the house.

And then she just carried on.

The next week, the contractor continued to finish the fence without moving anything.

We emailed her and called her and she ghosted us.

I paid $900 to have a surveyor do a site visit and write a report that clearly showed the fence was on our property.

We sent that to her from our lawyer and she finally responded ‘there must be some mistake’.

Only after more legal threats did she get her contractor back to move it off our property.

Fences aren’t the only thing she’s posting.

Meanwhile she trash talked us to everyone she could and labeled us bullies etc and has half our new neighborhood believing her.

She won’t talk to us, which is actually fine by us, but it really [angers us] knowing she has created this negative impression about us.

And why does this matter?

I should mention that our lots are pretty small and we had a very large backyard project done this summer and the fence was taking up valuable real estate that we needed to fit our plunge pool in.

We tried to deal with this in a polite neighborly way and she forced us to bring in our lawyer. So, AITA?

The neighbor is clearly the problem here. She wouldn’t listen and got mad when she was forced to move the fence.

Let’s see what the comments have to say on Reddit:

Don’t take up so much space.

These things are expensive.

You tried to be nice.

Unfortunately, she has the other neighbors on her side.

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.