Have you done the obligatory “Christmas light display drive by” yet? You know, the annual event where you load the kids in the van and take a spin around the neighborhood to view the light displays in other people’s yards? We drove around our neighborhood last night and what struck me more than how much time, effort, and money some people are willing to put into their holiday masterpieces is the inordinate amount of fencing some homeowners have around their properties. Perhaps, the fact that the fences were aglow with twinkling red, green, white, and blue lights, is what made them stand out and made me take notice. All I can say is: Whoa! There are a lot of fences out there.
In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost wrote: “Good fences make good neighbors.” If that’s true then I live in an area with a ton of great people. All kidding aside, according to the American Fence Association, which represents 2,000 fence companies with 85,000 employees, we spend more than $1.6 billion per year on fences. In many cases, fences are inherited from previous homeowners.
Which brings me to my point about fences being tricky propositions. For instance if you buy a house which includes a fence that separates your yard from your neighbor’s whose responsibility is it to care for the fence? And, what if your neighbor put up a fence years ago and now it’s falling apart… on your property? At what point can you intervene?
Or how about this one: my aunt and uncle live in a residential area where you can see four neighbors’ yards from their deck. Each of those yards has a different fence that separates it from the other. My family members inherited their fence from the previous homeowner. A few months ago my uncle decided to patch part of the existing fence because his dog’s fur was getting snagged in it. As he was completing the repairs his neighbor emerged from her house and inquired about his efforts to fix “her” fence. (He eventually found the paperwork that determined the fence was inside his property line). You see… tricky, tricky, tricky.
And, what happens if you have a neighbor who wants to erect a fence, which border your property, but you don’t like the style fence he or she selected? And, what if the placement of your property borders three others—each with a different style of fence? I suppose you just need to keep the lines of communication open—or suck it up and look on the bright side—-you may have three different styles of fencing, but you didn’t have to pay for any of them.
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