Friday, May 02, 2008

Invading My Space

A couple weeks ago, I posted about our neighbors finally adding a deck onto the back of their house. I was annoyed because some guy came to measure it all out and brought along his dog, tied him to a tree and left him running all over my back yard wreaking havoc on our household as my own two little dogs spent all day going ballistic. (They slept well that night!;-)) I had called our neighbors to ask if they could have their contractor move the dog to their yard because I was in my pajamas. They never called back, but apparently mentioned it to this man, because when I went out to walk my dogs before work, he was quite rude to me!

Anyway, this man has been back twice this week to finally begin construction on this deck and brought along a human friend (thank goodness!). Now, I'm not opposed to people putting decks on the backs of their houses - I'd love one myself! But, we don't really have back yards, us and our neighbor. Because of the way our houses sit, our backyards are triangles and there really isn't room for a deck. So, you ask, how are they doing this??

Well, for one, I'm highly doubting they have a permit in hand. The guys who "measured" out the deck are working from a piece of notebook paper - for real! I've never seen anything even resembling a property plot map or anything. What can we do? Well, nothing really. They are our neighbors. And really, we had decided just to let it go because there's nothing we can do. Their house sits above ours so their deck now looks a bit like a treehouse to us! Really, with the trees back there, there's plenty of privacy.

Today, however, something happened and now I'm more skeptical about keeping our mouths shut. For some unknown reason, these guys put about a three foot extension onto the back of the deck in the area closest to our property (can't figure out why they didn't do this on the other side of the deck!) and the post for that corner of the deck is at the treeline, which when we bought our house was explained to us as the property line! So, it's quite possible that we now own that corner of their deck! I always wanted a deck, but I'd rather have the whole thing. It's all very awkward, and given that these are neighbors who don't really like to communicate with anyone it puts us in a bizarre predicament.

What do we do?

2 comments:

Kathryn said...

Oh, awkward. I think I would try to approach the neighbors directly first. If they are not cooperative in working it out, you can always ask the town to check it out.

How does one politely bring up the fact that a neighbor has infringed upon your property? I would probably have to start out by saying, 'This is really awkward for me to say, but I think we have a problem...'

deanna said...

I can't do things like that - it always comes across as accusatory - my be the J in me! Tony was going to but he chickened out. He's just going to live with it. I'm ready to move - to the beach! Enough already.