Good fences make good neighbors, we hope

As part of the renovation project, Wagner recommended that we pay for a survey of the property to settle where the property lines were once and for all.

So we did. And what we discovered, much to our surprise, is that the property line along the back of the yard actually ran 46" beyond the fence. (And the surveyor discovered the pins from a past survey buried exactly where he expected them to be, so we know that our measurements are correct.) Forty-six inches is a lot! And we were concerned by this, for a couple of reasons. First, our vague understanding of real estate law is that if you let a neighbor encroach on your property long enough, he de facto owns it. Second, our renovation was going to use up a lot of the back yard for the new garage, so we needed all the inches of lawn we were entitled to.

So Jonathan decided we should move the fence back 40 inches to reflect more correctly the actual property lines. This would no doubt prove unsettling to our neighbors, who would presumably be dismayed to discover that a nearly four foot ribbon of what they thought was their back yard was actually our back yard. And the news would no doubt be even more unsettling because that particular stretch of their (really our) back yard contained a neatly groomed flower garden and a big chunk of a garden shed.

Uh-oh.

We haven't dealt with the problem just quite yet, and neither of us is looking forward to telling the neighbors that they're going to have to move the shed and lose a chunk of their flower garden. (Erm, I really hope they haven't stumbled across this blog...)

Since we're both chicken, we're going to make Wagner tell them. There's gotta be some fringe benefit to hiring a contractor, right? ;-)