Woman says her neighbors kept using the property like it was shared — and the camera footage only made the pattern harder to ignore
A woman on Reddit said a side lot next to her house slowly turned into a running fight with the renters next door after they kept treating the space like it belonged to them too. In a post later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, she explained that her home sits on an L-shaped lot with an extra strip beside the house that she and her husband planned to use for a future garage. She said the trouble started after new renters moved in next door and began mowing several feet into that side lot, even after her husband told them where the property line was and made clear that he would handle their own land himself.
According to her account, the mowing issue never really stopped, but it was only the beginning. She wrote that the neighbors started placing their garbage cans on her property every week, plowing snow from their driveway into her yard, riding snowmobiles across the lot, and letting overflow parking spill onto the same space when they had more cars or visitors than their driveway could hold. She said her husband repeatedly moved the cans back and spoke to them more than once, but the response was basically the same every time: a quick apology followed by the same behavior all over again.
She also said the setup around a shed made the whole situation even stranger. The neighbors had a shed sitting right by the line, and she initially believed they had to cut across her property to get to it unless they walked all the way around their house. But in the update, after weeks of frustration, she said her husband confronted the male renter again and eventually realized there was actually a gate panel in the fence leading straight to the shed. In other words, they had a way to access it from their own side the whole time.
The couple started taking small but more visible steps once they got tired of waiting for the behavior to stop. She wrote that the day after making the original post, they put snow stakes along the driveway edge to stop snow from being pushed into their yard. She also said they reached out for property survey quotes, talked with a longtime neighbor behind them, and got access to an older professional survey that showed the line ran right up to the neighbor’s fence and shed. Measuring against those points, she said they realized the gravel driveway itself appeared to spill a few inches into their yard as well.
The shed question led them to the zoning office, but not to the outcome she hoped for. She said the zoning officer came out, reviewed the issue, and determined that because the area was zoned mixed use, there were no setback rules that would force the shed to move. So while the survey helped confirm where the line was, it did not solve the structure problem. She also said an older neighbor claimed the previous owner had ripped out survey monuments in front of her before, which only made commenters more insistent that the couple document everything carefully.
By the time of the update, though, she said the immediate trespassing issue had at least calmed down. After one final confrontation over the snow stakes, her husband came back inside and told her the neighbors would not be coming onto their property anymore. In the comments, she added that she already had a camera pointed at the side lot and had “tons of footage” of them, which gave the whole story a familiar Reddit shape: a property dispute that started with small boundary pushes and only got resolved after repeated documentation, repeated warnings, and one very stubborn refusal to keep pretending the line did not matter.
Original Reddit post: r/BestofRedditorUpdates thread
