Imagine having a next-door neighbor that you really don’t like. They did some things that cost you money, and it was hard to accept.

Would you eventually forgive and forget, or would you hold a grudge forever?

In this story, one man was in this situation, and when the neighbor eventually listed his house for sale, he decided it was time to get revenge.

Keep reading for all the details.

Make my dad pay 500$ to repair our house because you messed up? He’ll make you lose 17,000$!

This happened 5 years ago, when I was still in college.

So, we live in a secluded area in the suburb of the city, where a big company owns a large property and sell/rent lots of land with pre-built houses.

You can either renovate your houses, or break it to the ground and rebuild your own – which is what most people have chosen.

The problems started when the neighbors bought the house next door.

At the street we are currently living on, we were the first to move in, and build our house. It was rural at first, but quickly got crowded after that.

The house next to us has some trouble in selling since it was numbered 13. Anyway, it eventually got sold and the neighbor decided that they would break it down and rebuild it – no big deal, we did the same.

But their green net (what we call the dust blocking net) was in a bad shape and had many holes that dust kept flying all over our house.

Mom could never hung our clothes under the Sun on weekdays, because they were working; and our walls were tainted with grey cement dust.

It gets worse.

Dad made many complaint but none of it was heeded, and the manager was such a jerk that they told us to make peace with the neighbor.

But the one that got in his nerve was when they drill holes to install outlet at the brick wall between both house in our backyard.

I didn’t know how they did it, but they made our side of the wall cracked.

Dad once again complaint, and demanded they to pay for it, but again, bad manager, bad neighbor. We had to pay over 500$ to patch it up and had all the wall cleaned.

Dad was mad but didn’t know what to do.

The neighbors eventually decided to sell.

About 2 year later, the neighbor was having financial problem, and wanted to sell the house – they had other properties, but decided to not live with my tempered mom who constantly gave them glare and mock everyday.

It was at that time that dad saw his chances coming.

The revenge

My dad was 67 at the time, and had been retired for 7 years. For the first five-years after retirement, he worked for the company that sold us our house as a part-timer consultant, so he knew some people in the department of construction.

But wait until you hear about OP’s dad’s real career…

BUT BEFORE THAT, he was the CEO of a construction consultant company that I was going to work for – I wanted to follow his steps (we designed buildings, evaluated designs, and supervised the constructors for our clients).

He spent his lifetime bringing it up from a small room with 80 people to the scale of 300 employees, which was pretty big in our industry, given all 300 of them are engineers with college/MSc/Doctor degree, not high-school graduated worker on the site.

Through his connection, he got his hand on everything about the design and construction of neighbor’s house (every design and report had to be evaluated by the construction department of the company).

He knew his old company would help him out.

He then paid a visit to his old company, and gave the drawings of architect, MEP (Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing), to the COOs in charged of those respective fields, and the on-site report to the COO in charged of construction supervisor department.

He asked them to find flaws in those documents.

I didn’t know if they did it themselves or shoved it to the grunts, but since it was my dad asking for a favor, they must’ve taken it seriously.

As for the structural design (beam, column, re-bar), the master himself nitpicked that.

Here are some examples of what they noticed.

Here I post some of the things he talked about while doing that so all the civil engineer bros reading this will know that I’m not spreading nonsense.

– The maximum amount of re-bar in the basement column was 2.7% (0.2% greater than the ministerial recommendation in our country. Not a big deal. The 2.5% was there so when the column fails, concrete and steel breaks together. At 2.7% concrete breaks but steel remains, but the column is still bad. So it’s a waste of steel. And there is one in a trillion chances that the heat exuded when concrete hardens would buckle the re-bar and cause the column to crack).

– The rebar they used at the the second floor’s column was fi 18 (meaning its diameter was 18mm) and it was tied to a fi 12 upstairs, another violation of recommendation, because the fi difference should only be no greater than 4 to make sure that re-bar at the lower and upper floor works similar to one long re-bar. Again, not a big deal.

– My favorite: these jerks would never learn that you’re never supposed to put a beam right on top where they wanted to place their bed because it made the ceiling looked lower than it actually is. (not a big deal, too)

Wait, there’s more.

But the killers here was at the on-site report – as he predicted – there was report of workers stepping on the rebar as they worked. Something that happened all the time, and we engineers couldn’t do anything about it except for cursing their names in our sleep.

AND there was a 9mm differential settlement at the foundation (Our building CODE said it must be no greater than 8 – it’s not a recommendation, you HAVE to follow it!).

Normally, toward a house sheltering 4 people of that small scale, we can just just gloss over all those flaws with a cup of beer.

But the customer didn’t know that. They only knew that the house’s broken so many recommendation and codes.

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The revenge continues…

Through his connections, again, dad got to know the saleswoman appointed to that house.

Every time a client came to see our neighbor house, the saleswoman would then take them to coffee and introduced my dad as an acquaintance of her who’s expert on the field, and dad began to present everything he found out about the house.

The house was already hard to sell (No. 13, remember?), and his advice, backed up with his own reputation in the industry, only made things worse.

But they couldn’t scare off buyers forever.

In the end, the house still got sold, because the saleswoman didn’t want to taint her record with an unsalable house, but the neighbor had to dropped the price so low, that it costed them 17,000$ compared to the amount they had spent on it (which should be equal nearly 25,000$ when they sold it, due to inflation – according to my sister).

The night dad found out about that, he took us all out to eat.

My mom and big sis didn’t know what happened and kept asking me: ‘What’s wrong to dad?’

Moral lesson: think twice before you mess with someone who make a living out of designing your place.

It’s interesting that OP knows this story, but his mom and sister had no idea what was going on.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This person doesn’t like OP’s dad.

Another person thinks the contractor was the problem not the neighbor.

This person doesn’t like the dad either.

Everyone seems to think the dad was the villain of the story.

It seems that the dad was mad at the wrong person. At least the neighbors finally sold, and they can all live happily ever after by never having to see each other again.