People Fill Us In On Their Uproarious Revenge Stories

“This played out some 3-4 years ago when my parents-in-law bought a new car.

Because my father-in-law (FIL) wanted to protect his investment a little better and have it protected against the elements just a bit better, he decided he wanted a carport built over on his driveway. Added bonus, he was always able to get in dry. It rains quite a lot where we’re from.

As one does when wanting to build an addition to your house/property, he applied for a permit. I don’t know if this is how it goes everywhere, but here they request lands in the local paper and in the city office for neighbors to look into and are able to object to this if they have a valid reason.

You guessed it, one neighbor did object to this. The reason? It’s blocking sunlight to his house. Worth mentioning that the only sunlight it could possibly block was that of the teeny tiny window in his front door. Through that window was his hallway of about 3 square meters, and it is where they hang their coats, and their staircase to the 2nd floor is there.

Then there’s a door to his living room that is always, obviously closed. Petty as can be.

Thankfully, the city council found this to be petty too and granted the permit to my FIL, so not long after we start to build, and in 2-3 day’s time, a very nice carport was built.

For the sake of the neighbors, FIL even had this sort of skylight inserted, so some sun came through. He tried to do the neighborly thing, so he still had his sunlight. Everybody is happy. Well, not so much.

The first thing that happens is when a friend of FIL is installing a gutter pipe to it, and he puts in 2 screws to fasten it against a wall.

This is the neighbor’s wall, you see, that is a brick wall of his garage. He goes berserk to my FIL’s friend how he could do this and that it is a crime committed to his property, and he will get the proper authority alerted to this, yada, yada, yada.

The offer to take them out and fill them up again with some plaster or whatever is too little too late. The guy does it anyway and finds another way to fix the gutter in place.

Second thing, a day later, my kids were playing there with a few friends, and they come in a bit frightened because Mr. Neighbor is on his side of the driveway looking angry with a measuring tape and a large poster (property plans).

They brush it off as just another crazy act of him (he was known for some crazy antics in the street anyway) and think nothing of it. That is until a week or 2 later, a letter arrives from some city authority that an audit is taking place in a few days because the carport we built exceeded a whopping 2.5 cm onto the neighbor’s property/ground.

Yes, he actually objected to this and fronted the money to have this audited. The audit takes place, and turns out, the jerk was right, and as petty as the auditor found it, there was nothing he could do but order my FIL to take the thing down and start again.

(Simply putting the pillars a little more back onto their own ground wouldn’t do it because the roof of it fell a little over the pillars to the outside making it 1 cm extra exceeding property lines).

Now I have never seen my FIL angry, ever, and I know the man for a good 16 years now.

So he called around to my brothers-in-law to tell them what happened and if they could help take it down; it had to be within an X amount of time too or else he had to pay Y amount of money for every day it was up after.

One BIL came over right away to check it all out and starts searching for the property plans online and has my FIL search for all the paperwork he has that came with the house which as it so happens included enlarged property plans because when they bought the house, we had also extended a piece of the house to have a larger kitchen.

(Now I have to note here that my BIL is an engineer in infrastructure as his job, but he knows a lot in other areas as well and also has a very keen eye.)

He starts measuring for himself with some special equipment he uses in his job too.

I don’t know what it is all called or what it does exactly, but at first, it must conclude the jerk next door, and the auditor was right. No real surprise. But then he notices something when he opened up the gates adjacent to the carport which is the entrance to their backyard and starts laughing.

He then asks me to go all the way to the back of the yard and hold some yellow block thingy (that catches a laser beam) as far as I could to the very right through the bushes. I push it through some thick bushes/plants (my FIL will kill me for not knowing, but I don’t know what all that green was), but then it reached bricks, the townhouse of mean neighbor.

He calibrates the thing, and it beeps and again started laughing. “Well, (FIL’s name), we’re not taking anything down.”

Turns out, the townhouse of lovely Mr. Neighbor, his very beloved townhouse I might add, exceeded property lines into my FIL’s side. Not by 2,5cm, no, a whopping +18cm to be exact.

You wouldn’t see it because there are all these bushes/plants/trees in front of it, but it is definitely exceeding it big time.

Now, it wasn’t a simple case as in telling neighbor it did and trade keeping the carport for keeping the townhouse because, first, they had to check if they had grounds to do so.

Don’t know how it works exactly, but first, they had to find out if there had been a prior written/notarized agreement between former owners of both houses that the townhouse was built on that ground with permission, and when that wasn’t the case, they had to find out if somehow over the years it had become perfectly legal for it being there.

(The law here can be weird about that.) But they did ask the auditor if the carport could stay up for at least as long as it took to find that all out and he agreed. Of course, it ended up that it wasn’t in any way legal or a prior agreement, nothing.

So then it became the standoff we hoped for. I’ve never seen anyone so bitter by agreeing to something, but the carport still stands and so does the townhouse.

For unrelated very sad reasons (which I won’t disclose, but we ended up feeling very sorry for them), they moved 3 years later and now have the nicest of neighbors with a kid mine plays with to this day.

While talking to BIL about this, he told me that the neighbor after all of this had tried to claim a certain amount from the friend/contractor that had placed the gutters and drilled two holes in the wall of his garage. The ones he had plastered after the screaming match of it being illegal. He claimed that water was now seeping through them effectively being a leakage.

The contractor friend even tried to be friendly, still, offering he’d take a look and if true repair it immediately. Neighbor refused. Shocker!

Also learned they (neighbors) had moved to an apartment complex. I feel for his current neighbors.”