A parent has been hailed a hero for their “terrific” petty revenge on a neighbour who made them replace their entire fence.
Posting on social media earlier this year, a homeowner told how they had employed a contractor who had accidentally broken the law by installing a fence that bit out a chunk of their neighbour’s land.
The neighbour proceeded to “make a fuss” of what they claimed was an innocent, minor mistake and forced the matter to court, where they found the fence did, in fact, break the law.
But the parent discovered their neighbour, who “always yelled about the law and his rights” had made a significant infraction of their own.
They proceeded on a campaign that sought to make their “petty” neighbour “replace his whole fence”.
Posting on Reddit, the anonymous poster explained that their “heinous” neighbour was keeping a dog they had trained to bark whenever their three small children went outside to play.
The dog was included on a list of “dangerous breeds”, requiring him to install a two-metre-high fence around their home, supported by a concrete base.
But they didn’t have one, so the parent said that, in revenge for the fence court row, they would report them to the police.
They wrote: “His fence should be 2m high, with a concrete base, around all of his property. Turns out the current one is 1m40, with no base. Guess what complaint I’m going to file with the police?”
Their plan was welcomed by other Reddit users, one of whom called it “terrific”, and another said they loved their “dedication to pettiness”.
Others called on the original poster to “get him” and hoped the neighbour would have to shoulder a “costly fix”.
They were not left disappointed as, in a follow-up post, they said their surveyor discovered the original complaining was stealing more land from them than the 4cm they had accidentally stolen in the first place.
They wrote: “In a very happy (for us) twist, they were actually ‘stealing’ more land from us than we were from them, just on the other stretch of our shared limit.
“Their fence was off by 2° over 17 metres, meaning overall they took over our property by 5.1 square meters. And the back of their shed is too close to the line of the new survey according to zoning regulation.”
They added: “We are laughing. It’s hysterical for us that they went to all the trouble of making us pay for a survey over 0.4 square metres but are going to end up losing part of theirs, maybe have to tear their shed (not sure yet if we’re going to be magnanimous on this point and not report them on that), and of course, the dog-proof fencing all around their property.”
