"Good Fences Make Good Neighbors"

Or in our case, Mr. Frost, a good fence brings out the batshit crazy in our neighbor!

On the 19th, I finally put up the fence that I've been meaning to put up for months. There's not much that I'm able to contribute to building this house, so I was ÜBER proud of myself for getting it done & doing it right.

Ta-da!  Fence is up, round #1

It transformed our otherwise blah little yard & made it look somewhat pretty... or at least that we were trying anyway. ;). We had so many people who were parking in the next door lot stop to tell us how nice it looked, or to thank us for fixing this house. Super sweet people who are the epitome of this town. We left for the evening feeling pretty darn good.

Our neighbor, however, did not have the same good feeling.

I had to work the next day, so Matt went to the house alone. Sometime overnight the jerk put up a string indicating that we were over his property line on one corner. Did I mention that said property is a PARKING LOT?!?! (And a poorly maintained one at that). If it were somebody's home, I would be falling all over myself apologizing for my error and would rectify it ASAP. But a parking lot??? Even the space I did use left plenty of grass between the fence & the gravel. So... I don't get it. Why the big deal?

Matt called him in the morning to try to work it out. He started out trying to be as nice as possible about it, even offering to maintain all the grass on the other side & plant flowers, but he was quickly attacked! The guy went crazy!! He started yelling about how we did it on purpose, that he's sick of us walking through the lot (you know, so we can take our kids down the street to the gas station to the only bathroom we can use... silly us), that he was mad we drove through the lot when we moved here to park our construction trailers behind the house (on our property). He said he was sick of our mess & was going to call the city on us for it (as so many residents are overjoyed & complimenting us on how much better it looks already... Mmm kay...), and then he starts questioning our permits... Simmer down dude! Well I don't know exactly how that conversation ended, but I can tell you I did see the later text. "I want that fence removed TODAY or I will remove it for you." Well considering he already dented the fence somehow when he was putting up the ridiculous string we didn't want to take any chances. It just wasn't worth the argument. So that evening Matt took it all down. :(

We probably could have made a huge ordeal out of it. Should have demanded to see a survey, given him the opportunity to destroy our property & go after him if he wanted a fight. But the truth is we just don't have the energy to fight anymore. We have had to fight for so much that has been owed to us and for all the ways we've been wronged over the last couple of years that this one just seemed so trivial. This is not the place where we wanted to ever have to deal with those kinds of problems ever again. Besides, from what I understand, the Chinese restaurant has a ten year lease on that lot, which means this man is going to be our "neighbor" for a very long time. We'd better make nice now.

So even though I wasn't at all happy about it, today I finished putting the fence back up.

Pardon the construction mess.  We built the back room today too!

 
I was getting more & more angry as I kept finding rocks & humongous roots that needed to be hacked so that I could properly place the stakes, a problem I didn't have the first time. I was thoroughly annoyed that instead of my pretty right angle that fit perfectly up to the house I had to put it at this stupid funky angle that left a space of useless grass for no reason at all. Grr!!

The difference of space that all the fuss was about.  Notice the amount of grass there still was, not to mention the general crappiness of the property in question...  Whatever dude.

But it's back up now, and it still looks pretty good. And I now have one very happy puppy who can run & play.

Copper hugging my leg saying "Thanks Mom!" ;)

And if this man even lets "his" grass grow a fraction of an inch too long? Lord help him. ;)