Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

There's been a bit of drama in our neighborhood for the past few days. Our situation with our rental house is a bit strange in that we've never met our actual property owner. The couple who built the house (who are now divorced) was a Thai/American couple. So the property is in the Thai name. We deal with the American who lives in the States now. She still has a lot of family here, and she used the rent to help support her parents.

The empty lots are filling up fast in our neighborhood. We still have two empty lots across the street from us, but one house is being built on the backside of one. We have a neighbor on one side of us, and there has been an empty lot on the other side. This empty field is actually four lots.

The lot shown in this picture is still empty; the lot to the right is being built on right now. The strip that runs along the back of these two lots is the lot that's in question. Our wall is on the left.

The new neighbor showed up a few Saturdays ago and said there was a dispute about the property boundaries. They couldn't find all of the boundary markers; based upon their measurements their property extends inside the wall. She asked to come back on the following Monday to measure.

The boundary markers are somewhere in the ground, and they look like this. They're supposed to be numbered although they haven't been able to see the numbers. When she came on Monday I wasn't really excited about them coming in to dig, but she didn't ask to. She did ask for the contact information of the owner, and I went inside to call the brother-in-law of the owner to see what I should do.

When I got back outside, she was crying which made me feel horrible. I apologized for speaking so directly to her, but she is just under a lot of stress. She actually lives in Japan and is trying to prepare her land for building while she's visiting.

I passed her information on to the family. She showed up on Tuesday with some green bananas. I joked that she obviously wasn't planning to harm us--expecting us to live long enough to enjoy the bananas. She had tracked down the owner on the internet, and he's coming to help settle the dispute. They graduated from the same university in the same year so she felt sure he would resolve the issue with her.

She informed me that night that we could have let her in to measure; as renters we can let people in, but we can't sell the property. She's a lawyer and understands these things. I thought that was an interesting thing to say since she didn't ask me about coming in. She had explained that coming in and measuring wouldn't have done anything if the owner wasn't present. Ha!

I'm thankful that this is getting resolved, and I'm thankful the owner is coming. We were needing some papers from him for our visa extension anyway. *Update--we never saw the owner, but we heard from the neighbor's niece that the owner came and paid the new owner the 20-year-old value of the small piece of land that was in question. I'm glad they got it resolved, and I hope we don't need the papers from the owner for our visa extension since we never saw him!