‘I don't really know what to do next’: Neighbor installs gate mechanism on homeowner's fence without their permission, hostilely dismisses their property line concerns, and refuses to come to a joint solution

Author image for Lana DeGaetano
Lana DeGaetano • "Show me to me please."
Jul 5, 2025 7:00 AM EDT

Ah, the weather is warmer, the sun is brighter, and the grass is greener. Summer is here—you know what that means! It's right about that time for property line battles and entitled neighbors who think they can make changes in your yard (with and without your permission!)

For veteran homeowners, this story is probably not news to you. Entitled people exist in every corner of the earth, hoping to mooch off of another nonconfrontational neighbor who hasn't the first clue about calling someone out on their behavior. It stinks, obviously, because nobody should feel the need to defend a fence they built in their backyard, but that's what this world has come to.

In this next story, a drawn-out feud between a homeowning couple and their neighbors proves itself to be more exhausting than one could imagine. The neighbors are completely unreceptive to the homeowner's pleas to remove a gate they had attached to a fence they don't own. Instead, these neighbors make the homeowners feel like the crazy ones for asking them to stop breaking the property boundary. Scroll below to read the story in its entirety.

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  • JM
    via Wolfgang Rottmann for Unsplash

  • "Neighbor installed a gate on my fence on my property."

    A few years ago our next door neighbor butchered a heritage tree that was in their yard and cut it back so severely it drastically changed the temperature in our house, k ed our shade plants
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  • and pretty much eliminated the privacy between our yards. (My new view was of my neighbor's underwear drying on a line rather than the pretty tree.) The trim dropped branches all over our yard and knocked down some of our own plants too.
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  • I had a text exchange with the guy and while I understand the tree is his property and I have no say- I would have appreciated a heads up it was happening. "A little communication goes a long way," is literally what I texted. He ed and stopped speaking was p to us.
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  • A few months later he asked my husband if he could roll a giant water tank (I'd guess 6 feet tall? Maybe 10 foot diameter?) across the roof of our rotting patio to get
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  • it into his backyard. My husband tried to work with him but ultimately said no, because there was no way the patio could support the weight of the tank (we've since replaced the roof.)
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  • Shortly thereafter, I was having a m arriage, super upset, just back from the doctors and changing clothes and looked out my side window only to be eye to eye with my neighbor who was
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  • rolling a giant water tank across my lawn and on top of my freshly planted garden and on top of our dainty sprinkler system, which breaks if you so much as sneeze
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  • at it. I screamed " (and probably some other curse words- probably that's messed up or effed up-) and my husband went outside and asked him to stop and get off our lawn.
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  • Couple years pass. Things are quiet. We ignore each other. We get pregnant after a long infertility journey and are having a baby shower at our house in the
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  • evening. We invite them over, make nice, things seem ok. They drop off a lasagne when baby is born. Progress! We chat occasionally over the fence but
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  • it's still awkward- albeit better. He has a paternalistic and misogynistic way of communicating that rubs me the wrong way but I always ignore it to keep the peace.
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  • Our fruit trees overproduced this year and the straining branches were leaning into their yard. My husband asked to go and pick the fruit and clear it out. Neighbor says ok. We gift them lots of fruit. All good!
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  • Today my husband is outside and does a double take- the fence between our houses is a foot into our property line and the neighbor apparently built a gate
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  • (that enters into his backyard) on our fence post and attached it to our fence. It's a heavy six foot tall wood gate with lots of screws and heavy hardware drilled into the fence on our side.
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  • I'm a little startled. The fence in this section is in very poor shape and probably couldn't support that gate for long. It's a heavy wood gate. The post he attached it to is probably 30+ years old. Maybe 50 years old. It's OLD. It's also on our property.
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  • I shoo my husband outside to talk to the neighbor and my husband says hey the fence isn't super steady and did you realize that's on our property? The neighbor was dismissive and walked away.
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  • So we go out together and I try really hard to be polite- "hey how's it going? I heard you were doing some improvements on our property!" (Awkward laugh.)
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  • He said are you seriously coming to talk to me about this right now? I said yes I think we need to talk about it because it's on our side of the property. We'd just
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  • appreciate it if you'd check in with us first or ask so we can work together on these things. We don't want the fence to get damaged or fall down prematurely.
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  • He starts yelling at me. He starts yelling at me about the tree he cut 3 years ago saying he did that to protect our children (??? Isn't that my job to protect my kids?
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  • Why are you worried about my kids but not actually saying anything to us about it?) Then he yells at us about he let my husband in his backyard to pick
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  • peaches (we asked, we didn't just go over there, and we worked around his schedule and he supervised.) He's super ride, escalating the conversation,
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  • doesn't apologize, yells, is super paternalistic, acts like we are dumb kids he's helping out. (We are 40s, he's probably 50s.) He is so misogynistic and acts insulted that I as a woman dare speak to him- he knows better than everyone about everything apparently.
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  • I try to say I would just appreciate a heads up and while I'm saying this he walks away from me and slams the gate in my face. I was just so stunned so I just called his name and said hey we need to talk about this and I could hear
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  • him muttering as he sprinted away. We were sort of bewildered at that behavior so I knocked on the door to try and talk to his partner because it didn't seem like a good idea to leave it like that.
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  • She came out and eventually he came back in the yard but completely ignored us and would not speak with me. I told his partner I just wanted to chat about the gate and make sure we
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  • were on the same page. She also looked really ped at first and said something like "so are you saying you have a problem with this?" With this tone like we were ridiculous and insane, etc.
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  • Cheezburger Image 10524540416
    via Nathan Anderson For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • I told her the fence is on our property, the fence is not in good shape and we really need to discuss stuff like this before they're putting stuff on our property or causing damage to our property. We showed her the
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  • property line and just asked that they come knock on the door and say what they want to do and we have a 5 minute conversation about the best way to go about it. I told her if they had asked we probably would have been fine
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  • with it but it's super problematic if we just come home and there's new stuff on our property without our knowledge or permission. If they can't talk with us about it then I don't know that I'm comfortable with the gate being
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  • there because it seems like it's going to cause problems going forward (if we aren't speaking and then the fence falls down as a result of the alterations, for example.)
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  • She nodded and I just emphasized we needed to collaborate or work together and give each other a heads up. That's where we left it. The neighbor (her partner, who owns the house, she doesn't) would not speak to me, look at me or come over during this conversation.
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  • I don't really know what to do next. We live in a great neighborhood and love everyone on our block and have great relationships with everyone. Except him. If he's going to refuse to speak to me or work with us then I really don't want that gate on our fence. I watched
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  • him slam it at least 3 times during this conversation and if he's ab ive to it like that he's going to knock down our post and the other section of fence on our side yard. (Not the fence between us.) What do I do here? Goal A would be great friendly relationship but that door seems closed. PS: So sorry for length. I needed to vent.
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neighbors neighborhood fence neighborhood-drama bad neighbors neighborhood-stories reddit story terrible neighbors entitled property reddit thread Bad Neighbor r-entitled Reddit entitled people neighbor
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