Deliberately vague

busybee100

Our new neighbour (Mr. A) is on a mission creep to see how far he can go before we react to his intention to remove and replace our fence in the back garden.

He's already removed our front garden fence because he doesn't like wood. 

The boundary is Mr. A's to maintain. The fences* are on our side of the boundary and were paid for by the previous owner of our property, confirmed by both the son of his previous owner and a neighbour across the road who was good friends with both our previous owners.

We did have a discussion about the fence in the front garden as he is dropping the pavement for parking. He offered to remove our fence and small wall (to replace it with a composite fence) and he would tidy up the gravelled area if we paid for the materials. But as he didn't know what he was doing with the levels I said to just leave it for now and we'll sort it out later once we know what you're going doing. (He'd talked about a small wall and I said we could tie ours in with that). 

We thought all was OK then one day the fence disappeared! I did speak to him to tell him he mustn't do that to the rear garden fence and we would speak to a solicitor to put it in writing, which we did. It descended into an altercation where I had to tell him to stop trying to intimidate me. (He was watching me sort the recycling and standing in his garden looking in to our bedrooms and living room.)

At that point he told me he hadn't gone along the boundary with his fence but has left a 3" inch gap along the boundary which we are not allowed to build over and 3"  along the small wall which fronts the properties. This means we are left with a gash of around 20cm on our side along the boundary which is going to be difficult but not impossible to repair.

Anyway. Things escalated with other neighbours, one throwing rocks at his door and our solicitor having received a letter in reply to his and a copy of one Mr. A had sent directly to us told us we should report him for harrasment.

The police have been very good and phoned back to ascertain how much of a threat Mr. A is. They told us to put up CCTV cameras which I was reluctant to do at first as I felt Mr A always needs to feel he has the upper hand but we have done and now Mr. A has started to go near,  touch, feel, try, let his dog stand against it the fence in the back garden.

Now this feels really petty but at what stage do I ask the police to have a word with him.? They did offer previously but as everything had gone quiet we said we didn't want to antagonise him.

Apparently there is history, he was the same at his previous address. Our previous neighbours son apologised to us before Mr.A moved in and other neighbours talk about him as a "piece of work".

I am finding it difficult to work out what a normal tolerance is. My husband is conflict avoidant and I have been the victim of prolonged systemic abuse for which the the perpetrator was jailed. I really don't want to antagonise him. I think most of it happens when his wife is out but he has forbidden us to speak to anyone in his family.

* The rear garden fence is mostly ours, on our side of the boundary but does join two panels on the patio which the neighbours son put in, on his side. All this was arranged 20ish years ago between friends, we've lived here seven years on good terms with all our neighbours.

Hopefully you can make sense of the above and offer some perspective of how I should handle everything.

TIA

busybee100

Sorry should say the previous neighbours son put the panels in and they are along the boundary.

gwynlas

All you can do is to continue to monitor the situation via direct observation and CCTV you  have already informed police and he was warned by solicitors letter.
Any further damage to fence you can inform police again and ask them to talk to him though they will probably say it is a civil matter however if he is known to them from his previous address they are likely to take it on board.
Other neighbours throwing stones at his door are likely to get themselves in trouble.

WIAWSNB

busybee100 said:

Our new neighbour (Mr. A) is on a mission creep to see how far he can go before we react to his intention to remove and replace our fence in the back garden.
He's already removed our front garden fence because he doesn't like wood.
The boundary is Mr. A's to maintain. The fences* are on our side of the boundary and were paid for by the previous owner of our property, confirmed by both the son of his previous owner and a neighbour across the road who was good friends with both our previous owners.
We did have a discussion about the fence in the front garden as he is dropping the pavement for parking. He offered to remove our fence and small wall (to replace it with a composite fence) and he would tidy up the gravelled area if we paid for the materials. But as he didn't know what he was doing with the levels I said to just leave it for now and we'll sort it out later once we know what you're going doing. (He'd talked about a small wall and I said we could tie ours in with that).
We thought all was OK then one day the fence disappeared! I did speak to him to tell him he mustn't do that to the rear garden fence and we would speak to a solicitor to put it in writing, which we did. It descended into an altercation where I had to tell him to stop trying to intimidate me. (He was watching me sort the recycling and standing in his garden looking in to our bedrooms and living room.)
At that point he told me he hadn't gone along the boundary with his fence but has left a 3" inch gap along the boundary which we are not allowed to build over and 3"  along the small wall which fronts the properties. This means we are left with a gash of around 20cm on our side along the boundary which is going to be difficult but not impossible to repair.
Anyway. Things escalated with other neighbours, one throwing rocks at his door and our solicitor having received a letter in reply to his and a copy of one Mr. A had sent directly to us told us we should report him for harrasment.
The police have been very good and phoned back to ascertain how much of a threat Mr. A is. They told us to put up CCTV cameras which I was reluctant to do at first as I felt Mr A always needs to feel he has the upper hand but we have done and now Mr. A has started to go near,  touch, feel, try, let his dog stand against it the fence in the back garden.
Now this feels really petty but at what stage do I ask the police to have a word with him.? They did offer previously but as everything had gone quiet we said we didn't want to antagonise him.
Apparently there is history, he was the same at his previous address. Our previous neighbours son apologised to us before Mr.A moved in and other neighbours talk about him as a "piece of work".
I am finding it difficult to work out what a normal tolerance is. My husband is conflict avoidant and I have been the victim of prolonged systemic abuse for which the the perpetrator was jailed. I really don't want to antagonise him. I think most of it happens when his wife is out but he has forbidden us to speak to anyone in his family.
* The rear garden fence is mostly ours, on our side of the boundary but does join two panels on the patio which the neighbours son put in, on his side. All this was arranged 20ish years ago between friends, we've lived here seven years on good terms with all our neighbours.
Hopefully you can make sense of the above and offer some perspective of how I should handle everything.
TIA

A disturbed individual.

I'm pleased the police are taking it seriously, and also that you have made it provably clear to your neighbour - - via your solicitor,that he mustn't touch your fence. If he now does, you can have him for 'trespass with criminal property damage' - and insist the police do act.

"The boundary is Mr. A's to maintain. The fences* are on our side of the boundary and were paid for by the previous owner of our property, confirmed by both the son of his previous owner and a neighbour across the road who was good friends with both our previous owners." To clarify the situation here, I presume you mean that the Title Deeds indicate that this 'boundary' is your neighbour's to maintain? With 'normal' neighbours, this would mean that the physical fence would therefore be positioned on their side of the (invisible) boundary line. For a 'shared' or 'party' responsibility, the fence would usually straddle the boundary line, and for 'your' responsibility, you'd have the fence just on your side of the boundary. 

In this case, however, you mention that most of this rear garden fence was actually last replaced by the previous owner of your property, and was also positioned on your side of the boundary line? Cool - that makes the fence 100% yours in all respects; you own the physical fence, and the land it sits on. Your neighbour must not touch this fence without your express permission. He shouldn't even paint his side, or attach anything to it.

Where this fence joins the two 'patio' panels the neighbour's son put in, does it 'dogleg' to skip to the other side of the boundary line? Ie, is it obvious what has happened there? Ie, you can clearly see "This garden fence is ours, and then it steps over the boundary and that bit is theirs"? If they remove their bit - which they are allowed to - then you can continue your fence up to the house, keeping it on your side of the line.

Anyway, if he damages your fence, call the police, and get ready to sue the guy for its replacement - you will win. Until he does this, tho', I'd not worry about it, and not engage with him at all over it - no discussion. If he damages the fence, it'll be with provable knowledge that he knew in advance that what he was doing was wrong.

I don't fully understand what's happening at the front. Has that resolved itself for the moment?

And then there's his presumably intentionally intimidating and harassing behaviour. What to do about that is entirely up to you - you can choose to ignore it until it progresses, at which point you report him to the police or the LA's anti-social behaviour department (whoever is dealing with it), and insist they act to force him to cease and desist, and adopt a zero-tolerance approach, or you can act now once you've collected enough evidence that his behaviour is clearly unusual, and intentional. Coming out and staring at you when you are carrying out normal everyday tasks is not normal behaviour.

Where do you see him from? Could you plant some Griselinia or similar along the boundary where he can be seen, for example?

Record - write down - every incident, dated and timed. Keep some CCTV clips too.

ButterCheese

I would suggest taking detailed pictures if you haven't already.  CCTV can capture some but not all of the detail.  Also worth finding out exactly where the boundary is and marking that on a photo (again, if you haven't done so already).  I would not rely soley on CCTV, just in case something goes wrong with the memeory card or backup or something.

I would also keep detailed notes of anything that goes on, with times and dates.  Keep it in a notebook just in case.  Just avoid taking pictures of the neighbour directly.

Finally, I think your husband also needs to step up.  We can all say that we are "conflict avoidant".  But we also all have to do our bit to support our family and fight things like this together.  Leaving it all to you is not fair and I would also say cowardly

busybee100

WIAWSNB said:

busybee100 said:

Our new neighbour (Mr. A) is on a mission creep to see how far he can go before we react to his intention to remove and replace our fence in the back garden.
He's already removed our front garden fence because he doesn't like wood.
The boundary is Mr. A's to maintain. The fences* are on our side of the boundary and were paid for by the previous owner of our property, confirmed by both the son of his previous owner and a neighbour across the road who was good friends with both our previous owners.
We did have a discussion about the fence in the front garden as he is dropping the pavement for parking. He offered to remove our fence and small wall (to replace it with a composite fence) and he would tidy up the gravelled area if we paid for the materials. But as he didn't know what he was doing with the levels I said to just leave it for now and we'll sort it out later once we know what you're going doing. (He'd talked about a small wall and I said we could tie ours in with that).
We thought all was OK then one day the fence disappeared! I did speak to him to tell him he mustn't do that to the rear garden fence and we would speak to a solicitor to put it in writing, which we did. It descended into an altercation where I had to tell him to stop trying to intimidate me. (He was watching me sort the recycling and standing in his garden looking in to our bedrooms and living room.)
At that point he told me he hadn't gone along the boundary with his fence but has left a 3" inch gap along the boundary which we are not allowed to build over and 3"  along the small wall which fronts the properties. This means we are left with a gash of around 20cm on our side along the boundary which is going to be difficult but not impossible to repair.
Anyway. Things escalated with other neighbours, one throwing rocks at his door and our solicitor having received a letter in reply to his and a copy of one Mr. A had sent directly to us told us we should report him for harrasment.
The police have been very good and phoned back to ascertain how much of a threat Mr. A is. They told us to put up CCTV cameras which I was reluctant to do at first as I felt Mr A always needs to feel he has the upper hand but we have done and now Mr. A has started to go near,  touch, feel, try, let his dog stand against it the fence in the back garden.
Now this feels really petty but at what stage do I ask the police to have a word with him.? They did offer previously but as everything had gone quiet we said we didn't want to antagonise him.
Apparently there is history, he was the same at his previous address. Our previous neighbours son apologised to us before Mr.A moved in and other neighbours talk about him as a "piece of work".
I am finding it difficult to work out what a normal tolerance is. My husband is conflict avoidant and I have been the victim of prolonged systemic abuse for which the the perpetrator was jailed. I really don't want to antagonise him. I think most of it happens when his wife is out but he has forbidden us to speak to anyone in his family.
* The rear garden fence is mostly ours, on our side of the boundary but does join two panels on the patio which the neighbours son put in, on his side. All this was arranged 20ish years ago between friends, we've lived here seven years on good terms with all our neighbours.
Hopefully you can make sense of the above and offer some perspective of how I should handle everything.
TIA

A disturbed individual.

I'm pleased the police are taking it seriously, and also that you have made it provably clear to your neighbour - - via your solicitor,that he mustn't touch your fence. If he now does, you can have him for 'trespass with criminal property damage' - and insist the police do act.

"The boundary is Mr. A's to maintain. The fences* are on our side of the boundary and were paid for by the previous owner of our property, confirmed by both the son of his previous owner and a neighbour across the road who was good friends with both our previous owners." To clarify the situation here, I presume you mean that the Title Deeds indicate that this 'boundary' is your neighbour's to maintain? With 'normal' neighbours, this would mean that the physical fence would therefore be positioned on their side of the (invisible) boundary line. For a 'shared' or 'party' responsibility, the fence would usually straddle the boundary line, and for 'your' responsibility, you'd have the fence just on your side of the boundary. 

In this case, however, you mention that most of this rear garden fence was actually last replaced by the previous owner of your property, and was also positioned on your side of the boundary line? Cool - that makes the fence 100% yours in all respects; you own the physical fence, and the land it sits on. Your neighbour must not touch this fence without your express permission. He shouldn't even paint his side, or attach anything to it.

Where this fence joins the two 'patio' panels the neighbour's son put in, does it 'dogleg' to skip to the other side of the boundary line? Ie, is it obvious what has happened there? Ie, you can clearly see "This garden fence is ours, and then it steps over the boundary and that bit is theirs"? If they remove their bit - which they are allowed to - then you can continue your fence up to the house, keeping it on your side of the line.

Anyway, if he damages your fence, call the police, and get ready to sue the guy for its replacement - you will win. Until he does this, tho', I'd not worry about it, and not engage with him at all over it - no discussion. If he damages the fence, it'll be with provable knowledge that he knew in advance that what he was doing was wrong.

I don't fully understand what's happening at the front. Has that resolved itself for the moment?

And then there's his presumably intentionally intimidating and harassing behaviour. What to do about that is entirely up to you - you can choose to ignore it until it progresses, at which point you report him to the police or the LA's anti-social behaviour department (whoever is dealing with it), and insist they act to force him to cease and desist, and adopt a zero-tolerance approach, or you can act now once you've collected enough evidence that his behaviour is clearly unusual, and intentional. Coming out and staring at you when you are carrying out normal everyday tasks is not normal behaviour.

Where do you see him from? Could you plant some Griselinia or similar along the boundary where he can be seen, for example?

Record - write down - every incident, dated and timed. Keep some CCTV clips too.

Firstly thank you for your long and detailed reply, replying to you has really helped me sort my thoughts.

Yes the title deeds say the boundary is Mr As and both fences were bought by the previous owner of our house and stand on our land other than where the rear garden fence slopes towards the 'patio' panels and fixes to Mr As side of the post holding up the panels. He had already stripped the uprights off two sections of our picket fence, I suspect in an effort to weaken them, before we spoke to our solicitor and there has been no more damage since. His letter to our solicitor suggested we pay half towards his new composite fence that he would replace the wooden fence with. And that as the wooden fence had been there many years and it was his boundary to maintain he could now legally claim the fence as the boundary. 

Can we sue him for a replacement? Our solicitor told us it would likely cost 10s of thousands and there was no guarantee we would even get costs back.

The front garden has been left as I dont know what to do given the gap Mr A has left. The solicitor said if we go to court he thinks a judge would say it was a party wall and it would be ok for us to rebuild it. As it stands there is a trench about 40cm deep where about 20cm deep is the rough edge of our land.

Our solicitor suggested we apply for a determined boundaries resolution. We have had the initial survey (£400+vat) and drawings done and a site visit has been arranged for next week. I am in two minds about going through with the site visit as it will be £1200+vat and I dont even know if it will help unless we go for a determined boundary application which will be more again.


Although I do feel he has taken a particular disliking to me, he tries to intimidate anyone who doesn't adhere to what he believes is correct. If anyone tries to explain he conflates and misunderstands then shouts at them until they walk away. His letters take the same form, jumbled, nasty, contradictory and lies. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to print them out and frame them for everyone to read. I need to remember he's deliberately trying to goad me and kepp gathering evidence.

Thank you again.

busybee100

gwynlas said:

All you can do is to continue to monitor the situation via direct observation and CCTV you  have already informed police and he was warned by solicitors letter.
Any further damage to fence you can inform police again and ask them to talk to him though they will probably say it is a civil matter however if he is known to them from his previous address they are likely to take it on board.
Other neighbours throwing stones at his door are likely to get themselves in trouble.

Thank you. I think I need to take a step back. He reminds me so much of the controlling man who abused me it is difficult.

busybee100

ButterCheese said:

I would suggest taking detailed pictures if you haven't already.  CCTV can capture some but not all of the detail.  Also worth finding out exactly where the boundary is and marking that on a photo (again, if you haven't done so already).  I would not rely soley on CCTV, just in case something goes wrong with the memeory card or backup or something.

I would also keep detailed notes of anything that goes on, with times and dates.  Keep it in a notebook just in case.  Just avoid taking pictures of the neighbour directly.

Finally, I think your husband also needs to step up.  We can all say that we are "conflict avoidant".  But we also all have to do our bit to support our family and fight things like this together.  Leaving it all to you is not fair and I would also say cowardly

I will keep going. More of the same. Ideally I would have a constant stream on the cloud I could download if necessary at some future date. At the moment I'm getting alerts everytime Mr A comes near the fence.

I do understand what you say about my husband stepping up but to be honest if he was the sort of man that could I probably wouldn't be with him. Not that that hasn't brought its own problems where he hasn't protected us several times during our thirty odd years together. Mostly though he has a lovely way of being harmless, he's easy going and well regarded.

Thank you for thinking of me.

TheJP

busybee100 said:

Sorry should say the previous neighbours son put the panels in and they are along the boundary.

Is the neighbours son, Mr A's son? Did he put in the fence panels along the boundary that is in dispute?

If he did then they own the fence and can take them down if they wish, a boundary does not have to have a separation to class it/satisfy it as a boundary unless something is specifically outlined in the deeds of both properties.

busybee100

TheJP said:

busybee100 said:

Sorry should say the previous neighbours son put the panels in and they are along the boundary.

Is the neighbours son, Mr A's son? Did he put in the fence panels along the boundary that is in dispute?

If he did then they own the fence and can take them down if they wish, a boundary does not have to have a separation to class it/satisfy it as a boundary unless something is specifically outlined in the deeds of both properties.

Hi JP

No not Mr. A's son. The previous owner of Mr A's house, her son. The son who apologised for selling to Mr A.

And I'm not contesting the panels are Mr As. I just dont want Mr A taking a strip of land off my property in the guise of replacing a fence.

sheenas

Are you are suggesting mr a might remove the fence and then put a new fence further onto your land? I have seen this done and the council who owned the adjoining land made them move in 2cm further back, so it was in the correct place.