JLH Design Blog

The older gentleman that lived next door to me moved to a nursing home last winter and sold his house. I haven’t met the couple that moved in yet, but have seen them around. They’re middle age-ish if they plan to live to 110 years old. I must admit I didn’t give them much of a chance right of the bat because the first thing they did was build a kennel for their large dog in the back yard. This poor thing is relegated to living its days out in 12 X 20 foot chain link cage.

So anyway, back to the story at hand. I live in nice neighborhood that was built in the 60’s and early 70’s. The streets aren’t straight and kind of meander around the base of the hill that the neighborhood occupies. The lots aren’t all perfectly flat or even square for that matter, mine for example is on the hill. From the street it looks like a normal 1 story ranch, but in the back yard it opens up to a 2-story walk out basement with a tons of privacy due to the old growth trees. With all of that being said, the lot lines are clearly delineated by fencing, hedges, utility poles, and off course the official demarcations.

Apparently my new neighbor isn’t quite satisfied with his lot size as he has taken to annexing some of my property through proxy by mowing more and more of my lawn. I’ve seen this before back at my parents house with a strange neighbor so I thought I’d nip it right in the bud this spring. I walked up, introduced myself, yada yada, then as I excused myself casually mentioned that if he insists on mowing my yard to have the courtesy of mowing the entire yard. This lead to a discussion, he didn’t really know the lot lines, etc, we walked around, I showed him the big telephone pole with the lead lot numbers situated right at 4 corners where all the lots came together. We then discussed how the lot line probably radiated to the streets at right angles from that point. So the spring went by….

Apparently he has rethought his position on the matter, and has again began cutting my yard. He still only goes to where the pole denotes the lot separation but now goes out to the street at an angle. I think the real problem is that my house sits back on the lot farther from the lot line than his. So when mowed properly it looks like I have more land as their is more grass next to my house than his. So began our passive aggressive battle.

I started noticing that he would make a point to mow just the stripe between our lots (but in reality on my side) then go and finish the rest of his yard, maybe go in and have drink and finish the spot by my house several hours later. So then I started timing my lawn mowing to coincide with his, as soon as I hear their mower stop, I’m out there with mine, set about 1/2″ shorter to clearly mark out my territory. So he stepped up his mowing habits. We keep this up and we’ll both be mowing daily.

So my son was up to the house for the weekend. We like to work in the yard when we can, so I thought of a project. I’ve got a landscaped area out in the front yard, kind of an island. It’s got some shrubs, rock piles, wood mulch the usual stuff. We extended the border about 3 feet so that its within 1 lawn mower width of the lot line.

Today was his first mowing since this bold move on my part, we’ll have to see how this escalates!

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