Karen Neighbor complains about adjoining fence, Homeowner removes it meaning she can no longer let her hyperactive dog outside: 'The look on her face was priceless!'

Author image for Brad Dickson
Brad Dickson • Managing Editor
Jun 7, 2024 10:00 AM EDT

It's always terrible when a new neighbor moves in who disrupts the peaceable existence that you had enjoyed for so long before. Whereas once you had enjoyed your steaming cup of morning coffee out on the front porch on cold sunny winter mornings, watching your breath ascend towards the endless blue sky as the world wakes up around you, now you're introduced to their loud cars, barking dogs, and screaming conversation that punctuate an otherwise carefree life. Worse, whereas once there was cooperation and community there is now hostility and needless aggression.

That's how it was for this Homeowner when a new neighbor "Anne" moved in next door and began demanding that he remove the fence that he and the previous owner of the property had built together on a "handshake" agreement. Rather than mucking about with the legal hassle that her threats presented, the Homeowner just went ahead and removed the fence entirely, prompting the now confused and now placative neighbor to approach him and ask him when he planned on building a new one. The thing was, he wasn't planning on reinstating the fence at all, meaning that Karen's out-of-control "outside" dog was now unhappily confined to the confines of her house. 

The resolution for the story can be seen below in screenshots of the original story that was shared with this online community. Readers shared their thoughts and stories of their own in the comments that followed.

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  • 01
    "Well, Anne, I'm not going to be rebuilding the fence. I don't want any legal trouble and the best way to stay out of trouble is to not build near your property."
    via Nick Fewings
  • 02
    New neighbor didn't like my old fence so I took it down. M About 5 or 6 years ago I built a fence in my back yard. I talked to my neighbors and we decided on a good place to build the fence. We knew an approximate property line based on some survey pins, but were both too cheap to pay for a surveyor. We shook hands and I built the fence. It was a great deal for my neighbors, I paid for everything, built the fence, and all they had to do was give me a thumbs up when it was done.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 03
    Then, a year later, they sold their house. That meant I got a new neighbor, more specifically, I got Anne! Anne was from the big city, Anne was a realtor, Anne had flipped 8 houses in 12 years, Anne loved this new house and planned on staying for a long time, and Anne had a dog. Razzy was a German Shepherd mix that spent most of the day outside while Anne went to work. Razzy was aggressive towards children, animals, insects, and any plants that waved in the breeze. Razzy also, as Anne once told
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 04
    About 6 months after Anne moved in I saw a surveyor walking around in my neighborhood and he was paying special attention to my back yard. The next day Anne showed up at my front door with a stack of papers and asked me if I was going to pay her for the 9 inches that my fence was encroaching onto her property. I explained the handshake deal with the last neighbors, but she was having no part of it! She wanted
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 05
    the fence moved or she wanted money, no discussions. She had spoken to her lawyer friend and was perfectly happy to take me to court over the fence. She told me "I don't know how you guys do it out here in the sticks, but where I come from we follow the rules!" So, I got rid of the fence. The next day I unscrewed the horizontal rails from the brackets, stacked the fence panels up against my garage, and pulled up the fence posts with my work van.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 06
    About a week later Anne shows up at my front door again. She wants to know when I'm going to be building a new fence. Turns out, without my portion of the fence she has not been able to let Razzy out unattended for fear that he will run away, attack something, or get hit by a car. She also told me she can't keep him in the house all day while she's at work anymore. Her furniture and carpet are all but ruined.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 07
    I told her "Well, Anne, I'm not going to be rebuilding the fence. I don't want any legal trouble and the best way to stay out of trouble is to not build near your property." The look on her face was priceless!!! I thought she was going to cry! (She probably did when she got back home.) She tried to protest, saying that she really needed the fence back and she would even help pay for the new one. She told me how much she loved the style and aesthetic of the old one, it was just the location that
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 08
    She never got a fence. She made half-hearted attempts to put up some bamboo fencing, but Razzy tore through that stuff like wet newspaper. Eventually, I sold my place and moved away. I took the old fence panels with me and I still look at them everyday when I let my dog out in the morning. TLDR: New neighbor with dog didn't like where the old neighbor and I built a fence. She threatened legal trouble, so I completely removed the fence. Dog destroys her house. I keep the fence.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 09
    Known-Associate8... . 2d ago - I had something similar bought a house, then a few years later one of my fence- sharing neighbours knocked down her garage and decided to build a dwelling in its place - her first approach to us was to ask if they could buy a few metres of our land to give that dwelling a decent back yard. We refused as it would make our back garden an odd shape, and also it would make it hard to subdivide our plot later on.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 10
    So then she approached us saying that the fence was a couple of feet into her yard, and she would like it moved. We said sure, lets get a surveyor to fix the property line and we can move the fence into a better position - the fence did have a dog leg in it to go around an old tree (long since removed), so if we could bring it back to a straight run then great.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 11
    Surveyor came out and put down their official stakes setting the line. The entire fence, end to end, was already about 2-3 metres into our property. She ended up losing a lot of land for the entire length of the fence, and we ended up gaining a decent chunk.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 12
    We now have a huge vegetable garden down that entire length of fence, with no loss to our usable back garden because of this entire debacle.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 13
    hiyabankranger • 2d ago When we were looking for a house we got accosted by an old lady who was the neighbor of a house we were looking at. "THEY PUT UP THIS FENCE AND ITS TOO CLOSE TO MY HOUSE. IF YOU BUY IT I'LL MAKE YOU TAKE IT DOWN."
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 14
    She wouldn't shut up about the fence and we literally couldn't have cared less, but by her entire nature I was sure that if we did buy the place it would be a nightmare neighbor that we'd be feuding with until she had a heart attack. So our realtor pulled the disclosures, and we're the kind of nosy people who know how to use legal searches and the story we assembled from reading them was this:
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 15
    Old lady was annoyed about a fruit tree in the yard of the house now for sale some years prior. Didn't like that it dropped rotten fruit in her yard. There was a short chain link fence and the tree was right on the edge next to the fence. She hacked off all the limbs on her side of the fence. This killed the tree. The owners of the house sued the old lady to replace the tree.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 16
    Old lady as part of her defense of the lawsuit said it was her tree anyway because the fence was hers and it was on her side of the property line. Since the tree was so close to it that it had to be hers. Owners of the house for sale hired a surveyor to counter her claims.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 17
    Now, previously their understanding was that they had a "zero lot" on that side. That the house was literally on the property line. That's because that's what the old lady probably told them when they moved in. They'd never bothered to check. The surveyor informed them that it was actually a zero lot but on HER side. They had three feet of land that she had been using as a garden beside their house.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 18
    So they won the lawsuit, old lady paid the state assessed value of the tree, and then boom in their permits for the property they paid for a nice fence that cost almost exactly what they got for the tree. It was placed the minimum distance allowed by law from her house, which was 18 inches. She was ready to fight that fight all over again to get 22 inches of yard back.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 19
    gHHqdm5a4UySn... • 2d ago I always try to approach neighbors in kindness because you have to live next to each other and see each other all the time. Absolutely idiotic to open with threatening legal action.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 20
    RealUltimatePapo • 2d ago "Move your fence or I'll sue you!" "You got it, ma'am!" "...oh, I am so stupid" Genius should have used the money she was gonna sue you with, and either built a new fence, or trained her dog to not destroy everything in existence
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 21
    Heynowbebe . 2d ago Not as dramatic, but we also wanted to do a handshake agreement based on old posts for the fence line as we didn't want to pay for a surveyor. Neighbour insisted because he was certain he would gain some of our land (he thought his house was too close to the edge so he should have more). Reluctantly we did the survey, turns out the posts were wrong and we gained metres into his already smaller yard.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 22
    freakkydique 2d ago Many years ago, an ex gf family had property alongside a river, it's an ancient property with a house that's 400+ years old, yes built in 1600s. The land was always inhabited by the family and passed down over generations. At one point the house was moved, and there is a huge swath of land.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 23
    Originally the land was given to the noble patriarch of the family 400 years ago and it was written on some parchment papers. Very few drawings existed of it, some were done by the rural municipality hundred years or so ago. A neighbour was complaining that my ex's family wasn't maintaining the 150ft of grassy land in between the two houses. But they didn't know where the property line was.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 24
    Anyways, a land surveyor came and it turns out, half of the neighbours house is built on their lands. I didn't stay in that relationship long enough to know how that story ended.
    via Kid_Endmore
  • 25
    UniqueIndividual3... • 2d ago I did something similar. The wooden fence between our properties had one broken. post. It leaned a little, but not that much. He filed with the county to demand I repair it. So I removed it. We both had pools. Mine was enclosed with a chain linked fence, his had no fence. So I reported him for having a pool without a fence. He offered to pay for half of a new fence, I told him to *&%&. He had to pay for the new fence.
    via Kid_Endmore

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neighbors neighborhood homeowner homeownership neighborhood-drama neighborhood-stories karens in the wild Bad Neighbor karen story karen neighbor
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