What the fuckity fuck! I cannot believe it! If I were you, I’d be over there screaming my head off and waving my arms around like a mad woman, gathering or no! You don’t want me disrupting your little soiree? Try exercising the good manners and good sense that the Sweet Lord gave to a common weasel. The words “trespassing” and “vandalism” would be tossed about. Lawyer? Hell, I’d be calling the police.
It happened yesterday, and, what, since then they’ve been too busy to come talk to you about it? Sweet merciful crap!
It’s already gone to far. A privite contractor has decided to rip up up your property, and you didn’t contract them. Take lots of pictures of the damage, and pictures of any equipment going through your yard in the future. Get the police over there now and have them file a report. Make sure they file the the report, it’s too easy for the contractor to burn you on this deal. Until this is resolved call the police out if they trespass again. They already showed that they don’t give a shit about your property.
Your neighbors owe you replacement of the fence, the lilacs, the lilies and repairing any damage the equipment did to your lawn, jsgoddess. Period. The didn’t even have the right to use your property as an acess point without your express permission, much less leave a swathe of damage.
I’ve overseen two construction projects and better believe the GCs and I kept a hawk eye out for impact on neighbors. We couldn’t always control the noise though we even talked to the neighbors in advance to help mitigate the annoyance. Good neighbors and good contractors don’t just ignore impact on neighbors. A huge flatbed truck delivering steel beams accidently slid sideways off a wet road and slightly into a neighbor’s lawn. The contractors immediately apologized to the neighbor and within two days they levelled and resodded the gouges cut in the lawn by the truck tires.
My next-door neighbors did a rehab of their house and backyard which included a lot scaffolding work for roofing, brick repair and installing a stone patio area. The neighbors apologized for the noise and dust in advance, and the contractors painstakingly hauled everything around their house until I offered to let them use my driveway as a staging area for their cherrypickers, trucks, etc. It was right beside where they needed to work and made the job a zillion times easier but better believe they didn’t just assume it was theirs to use.
Don’t worry about their happy little party. IMO it took a helluva a lot of nerve for them to ignore the damage this long. Demand that your fence be repaired and replacement lilacs, of equal size and maturity, as those torn out as well as replacement of your other plants. The offending parties have insurance, and if they don’t, haul 'em through small claims court.
Will they need to use your property to get the equipment out? You could set something up to block there path. Of course that coulld just cause more problems than it solves.
Why ? it is their property … if they wnt to park a 23’ stakebody truck there, and leave for 3 weeks in Mazatlan, the neighbor is going to have to sick it up and lose a pine tree.
Personally, I wouldn’t have gone back into the house and sniffled, I would have been on the neighbor the instant I saw my property had been damaged. I may be fairly mellow, but you do not fuck with my property - I have had exroomies and total strangers possession-rape me before and it is now one of my hot buttons. People just dont touch my stuff without permission now or they get into a world of shit.
Are they even now hoping you won’t notice when they put up a crappy fence, a couple rootless lilacs and some lilys from K-Mart’s going out of business sale?
If we go buy the lilacs and lilies, what do you suppose our chances of getting reimbursed are compared with them buying?
Dopers will appreciate that I went into the back and tied a swathe of red plastic around the remaining lilac. If one were to approach the lilac, one might notice a card on it that reads, “Don’t run over this fucking lilac.”
I considered putting a spare tomato cage over it, but honestly that wouldn’t help if they take a truck across it. And seriously, you can’t miss the thing. But then, you couldn’t miss the other two, either.
Good Lord. That’s beyond belief. Are they also going to pay to have sod put down where the trucks presumably tore up your lawn? I would document it all photographically, explain that the GC doesn’t have permission to cross again, and tell them exactly what you expect to be done and by what date. If you don’t give them a deadline, they’ll probably just procrastinate and never fix anything. And if they don’t have it fixe dwithin 10 days, call the police.
Not notice?! Gee, get the feeling these idiots might burn your house down in a nasty barbeque incident and just hope you might overlook it?
Maybe I’m just paranoid but they don’t sound like reasonable types who will keep their word on the repairs/replacement, much less do a decent job of it. You’d probably end up with a couple of sickly little twigs from a Wal-Mart ‘almost dead’ sale. I think I’d consider asking my insurance agent about the situation. If nothing else they might be a layer of officialdom between you and the Jerks Next Door.
Why not ask your brother about the permit thing too, jsgoddess? The contractor sounds fly-by-night as hell. Could be they didn’t even have a permit.
I was, too, when I read that. My jaw dropped and I was sitting at the computer making inarticulate whooshing sounds, which Cricket thought were an invitation to put her lovely furry paw in my mouth.
I agree with buying your own replacements and giving them the bill. If they are stupid enough to think you wouldn’t notice a missing section of fence, magically disappearing plants and a new dirt road across your back yard, I wouldn’t put it past them to cut a lilac branch of someone else’s plant (“they’ll never notice”) and stick it in the dirt in your yard.
Check out permits, too. Have you got a large truck or something you can park to block access to reduce the risk of more damage? Maybe plant some tire-puncturing spikes around the surviving lilac.
I’m still in awe of such amazing dumbness. “Oh, we hoped you wouldn’t notice” indeed.