Tags
Boundaries, Dispute, Fence, Neighbors, Property Line, Solutions
The ongoing saga of our backyard fence has finally, I hope, come to an end.
I’ve been trying to convince my husband for months that since our neighbor moved her fence right up against our fence and I can no longer get my hand between the fences to pull weeds we should move our fence in about a foot to make room for the weed whacker. He’s been resistant to the idea, until I took a nasty fall in my backyard hanging up clothes. I can no longer get down on the ground and get back up without a lot of help. Crawling around on the ground hand weeding is no longer an option.
My husband finally conceded and agreed we could move the fence. I let my difficult neighbor on the back property line know that we would be moving our fence in about a foot. That way we could weed without me hurting myself. She immediately said moving it a foot wouldn’t be enough, it wouldn’t be wide enough for my husband to be able to get between the fences to weed.
I then told her we might move it 18 inches, so that it’s on more even ground. I also explained, so she wouldn’t be upset if she saw it happening, that we were thinking about pinning landscaping fabric between the fences. She objected to that, saying it doesn’t prevent weeds, tatters and becomes an eyesore. I told her we weren’t sure what we were doing yet. She then suggested just taking our fence out altogether and joining onto hers. Absolutely not! Not with how upset she gets about the fence line, her grass, etc. She did tell me that she considers her fence to be on the property line now.
A week ago we finally went out and started the process of moving the fence. I went along and wiggled the posts from side to side, my husband pulled them out and we moved the fence to the outside of the posts, because our neighbor had complained that we had the fence on the inside of the posts and she thought that was illegal. Telling her we had the fence inspected by the codes dept for our city AFTER installing it and it passed never changed her mind about this particular complaint she had.
It only took us a few hours and we had the whole section of fence moved in. We didn’t get it perfectly straight, but we did do a pretty good job. We tightened it, pulling slack out of it. We were able to remove the landscaping blocks we had used to fill gaps at the bottom of the fence. It looks so much nicer.
Hopefully, the drama with the back neighbor over the property line and fences has come to an end.