He Chopped Down Her 80-Year-Old Oak Tree for a Better Sunset View—Then Returned from Vacation to Find His Custom Concrete Driveway Removed to the Subgrade
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Imagine living next to a neighbor who asks for a favor. He wants you to trim the branches of a tree since some of the branches are on his side of the property line.
Would you agree to trim the branches, let him trim them, or refuse entirely?
In this story, one family was in this situation, and the dad gave the neighbor the okay to have the branches professionally trimmed. He even said he’d pay for it.
However, that’s not what the neighbor did at all. Instead, his actions made the family so angry that the dad was out for revenge.
Let’s read all about it.
Destroy our tree? We’ll destroy your driveway.
Full disclosure: this happened almost five years ago, so my memory of this is a little fuzzy at times. However, the major player here confirmed that it’s “accurate enough to get the story across,” so I’m going with it.
Background
By North American standards, our house is old. It is really old. It’s older than the town; hell it’s older than Confederation.
The house was originally built by a merchant from the area like 200 years ago. It’s old.
Now, about the property line…
With its age comes a very big property line, and apart from a couple adjustments here and there to account for infrastructure and housing development, it’s basically unchanged from a hundred years ago.
It rarely ever comes up here, but in any dispute relating to property lines, the official town plan takes precedent; and our property line crosses over into our neighbours’ property.
This will be important later.
Meet the neighbor.
And now for the two major players in this tale: Our awful neighbour, who we will call… Lumpy.
He’s just the worst; he ran an illegal chop-shop in his backyard, and seemed to be deathly afraid of trees.
He also always took a two-week long vacation in summer, and it was always at the end of July – this part is also important later.
Then there’s OP’s dad.
The other one is my dad.
At the time he was in Government Oversight, but before that he was in the Department of Justice, and his major responsibilities included training Crown attorneys. This included the Attorneys General.
In the pecking order, Dad was actually pretty low, but the Crown knew and respected him, and they were keenly aware that Dad knew the law inside and out; if there was anything even remotely resembling a legal dispute, Dad was almost always in the right with his argument.
Now we begin our tale:
The property line was very clearly defined.
The Slight
The line between our yard and Lumpy’s was pretty clear: our side was grass, protestant lilies, shrubs, and trees; his was a gravel driveway.
Before the incident, there was a large Manitoba maple tree growing there. It was very old, but grew in such a way that it blocked just enough sunlight to have a pleasant level of light going through the window.
We had no intentions of ever removing it – maybe trim it a little if it got too close to the windows.
Uh-oh!
However – some lower branches were sagging onto Lumpy’s driveway, so he asked if he could cut down some of the lower branches so that his car wouldn’t get damaged when he drove in and out.
It was a fair enough request, and he did ask permission first, so we told him to get a landscaper and a quote, because we sure as hell weren’t going to let Lumpy do it, and were okay paying for that.
A couple days later we were all on a day trip somewhere, and when we got back, Lumpy comes over and tells us not to worry about the landscaper because he “took care of it.”
Red flags were waving at that statement.
Yikes! This is not okay.
So we went and checked the tree – jerk cut the entire tree down.
Then, to add insult to injury, he painted the stump with some sort of weird grey stuff. Don’t know what it was, but it had to have been toxic as heck, because nothing ever grew on that stump again – not even fungi.
So we’re understandably ticked off, but unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about it because there’s no proof.
So now we’ve got a stump that was once a beautiful tree, a smug neighbour, and seemingly no course of action to take.
What’s his dad up to?
Dad didn’t accept that scenario, and he had a plan.
The Plan
As I said earlier, Dad knew the law inside and out – so he began to plan things out.
He made a few phone calls to the town’s civil architect, a couple inspectors, the local landscaper Lumpy was going to get that quote from, and a contractor.
He visited city hall and got a copy of the official town plan – which, remember, is the final word on property lines. He had everything arranged, and now he began to wait.
They waited for Lumpy to go on vacation.
The Revenge
Like clockwork, Lumpy went on vacation, and the plan was enacted.
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Over the course of two weeks, we expanded. We rebuilt our fence to new dimensions; re-arranged the shrubs; dug up the gravel driveway and put fresh dirt and grass over it; and planted a weeping willow in a spot where, as it grew, would always hang, and shed, into Lumpy’s yard.
With the expanded fence and shrubbery, Lumpy’s driveway was a small strip of pavement, maybe half a metre wide, the fence placed an old, dying maple and a hawthorn on our side, but because of how the two trees grew, most of it was on Lumpy’s side.
Lumpy was probably more upset about this than OP’s family was about the tree.
The key point is that the placement of the trunk dictates whose property it’s on, so it’s our tree that he can’t touch, no matter how annoying or destructive it is.
With the new dimensions, the chop-shop he was running was now on our side of the fence – but because it was illegal, it was just scrap metal as far as the law was concerned. So we sold it to a local scrap yard.
By the time Lumpy came back, our yard had expanded almost three metres into “his” yard, and waiting for him was Dad, the civil architect, and a lawyer with a stack of documents outlining, in full detail, that what they did was 100% legal, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
Wow. Two can definitely play that game!
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
Someone from the UK weighs in.
A woodworker shares his thoughts.
This person likes the revenge.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who shuts down her neighbor’s construction project after her property gets damaged.
Another person is surprised at the ending.
Lumpy definitely shouldn’t have done that! He didn’t have permission to cut down the tree, only to get a quote to have some branches trimmed.
I love the revenge. That was definitely well deserved.
These neighbors aren’t messing around!
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