I recently purchased a home that sits a short distance off of a main street full of motorcycle bars, restaurants and clubs, and approximately twenty-five feet of my fence line is shared with a restaurant that is situated on this busy street. Sometime before I purchased the home, the restaurant resurfaced their parking lot and dumped a large mound of dirt, trash and other debris against this section of the privacy fence. The elevation of the restaurant parking lot sits approximately two feet higher than my backyard, so as this pile took the repeated pounding of our torrential spring rains, it shifted onto this privacy fence and eventually knocked it almost all the way down in our backyard. We initially didn't see it as a problem since we were planning on changing the landscaping in the backyard and thought we would just fix the fence ourselves, but upon moving in we quickly found that living with this dilapidated fence was an impossibility. The noise from the main street and flood lights from the restaurant parking lot made it impossible to sleep at night, to say nothing of the exposure it gave to the entire back portion of our yard and home. We finally decided to fix the fence regardless of our landscaping time line. We didn't feel like we should have to shoulder the entire cost of the repairs since it wasn't our fault the fence was damaged, and tried to approach the owner of the restaurant to split the fees. He blamed the ruined fence on AT&T (he claimed that they had knocked it down when they were replacing phone lines), and said that he wouldn't pay to replace it. We found this unacceptable since our neighbor confirmed that it wasn't AT&T who had ruined the fence, and decided to report the situation to the city. They came out and inspected the fence, then issued an order to the restaurant to replace the fence line. They said it was a code violation to not have that space repaired correctly, regardless of who ruined it in the first place, and that if the owner of the restaurant felt he should be reimbursed by AT&T, he would have to contact them. Several weeks later a new section of fencing was put up on the property line by the restaurant. This was going into winter, so we didn't have an opportunity to examine the job until several months later, when the snow and rain finally cleared off. To our shock, we found that they had installed the fence in such a shoddy manner that there were gaps under the fence line (six inches to a foot a half) from where the rain/snow had eroded the soil away. In addition, when they poured the concrete footing for the fence, they didn't use a mold and large pockets of concrete spilled over into our yard and on top of the existing damaged fence. We didn't know what to do. If we left it as it was, the fence would just eventually fall down as more and more soil was washed out, but we weren't able to build a new fence because of all of the soil, trash, concrete and old fencing that was now securely lodged under this mess. The only solution we could find to prevent the continued damage of our property was to affix boards to the bottom of this fence so that the soil would stay in place until we could find a permanent solution.
That's where it went from bad to worse.
I came home from work to find a letter from the lawyer of the restaurant owner, stating that we were trespassing on the restaurant's fence by applying these boards and that we had ten days to remove them from the fence or legal action would be taken. It said that we were more than welcome to build our own fence on our property at our expense, but it could not interfere with his fence. The boards were installed carefully and no damage beyond nail holes were made to the fence line. If anything it's helping them as well as it is keeping larger amounts of dirt from washing out from under their parking lot. On top of that, the only way we can currently build a fence is if we come out about a foot and a half from this property line, which would cede about 40 feet of land to his property. I'm at my wits end and have no idea what my rights are! I don't feel it's right to have to cede my land to him simply because he couldn't hire better contractors, but I'm afraid of legal action if I don't take the boards down. Is there anything that I can do?
That's where it went from bad to worse.
I came home from work to find a letter from the lawyer of the restaurant owner, stating that we were trespassing on the restaurant's fence by applying these boards and that we had ten days to remove them from the fence or legal action would be taken. It said that we were more than welcome to build our own fence on our property at our expense, but it could not interfere with his fence. The boards were installed carefully and no damage beyond nail holes were made to the fence line. If anything it's helping them as well as it is keeping larger amounts of dirt from washing out from under their parking lot. On top of that, the only way we can currently build a fence is if we come out about a foot and a half from this property line, which would cede about 40 feet of land to his property. I'm at my wits end and have no idea what my rights are! I don't feel it's right to have to cede my land to him simply because he couldn't hire better contractors, but I'm afraid of legal action if I don't take the boards down. Is there anything that I can do?
