The Neighbor Who Reported My Fence to the Town

I built a new fence along what I had always understood to be the property line, permits and all. My neighbor, a man who had complained about everything from my leaf blower to the colour of my door, decided the fence was the last straw. He reported it to the town, insisting it crossed onto his land, and demanded an official survey to force me to tear the whole thing down.

I was annoyed but not worried. I had my deed, my permit, and I had actually paid attention to the line when I built. He was so certain, so loud about it at the town office, that they scheduled a full professional survey, at his insistence, to settle it once and for all.

The surveyor came out with the real equipment and the original plat maps. It took a day. My fence, it turned out, was exactly where it should be, sitting a comfortable few inches inside my own boundary. His complaint was dismissed.

But the survey does not stop at the fence. It maps everything. And it found something my neighbor very much did not want found: the detached garage he had built years before I ever moved in, the one he was so proud of, extended nearly two feet over the line onto my property.

I had no idea. I had never measured. But now it was on an official town survey, filed, stamped, and public, the very document he had demanded. The town does not ignore its own paperwork. He was the one who received a letter, about his garage, about the encroachment, about his options.

I did not make him tear it down. I let him sign a small easement and buy me a nice dinner. He has not reported anything of mine since, and he complimented the fence, once, through gritted teeth.