I've lived in my house for almost 9 years now. When we moved in, we considered getting a fence around the back yard so that the kids could run free. Our oldest son has autism and likes to wander, so a fence would allow him to run around, but not run away. We got some estimates, but in the end could not afford it. All of our money had gone to the house, closing costs, down payment, etc...
At one point our neighbors directly to the north fenced in their back yard. I don't remember exactly when this was. They have since moved and a new couple moved in.
Flash forward to April of this year. We adopted a dog from the local shelter and decided to fence in the back yard. We're in a better place financially then we were back then. I talked to the woman that lives next door and told her we were looking at getting a fence and she said that we could hook into hers. She said it would make no sense to have a gap between two fences. I had a couple of people come to give estimates and they both asked for the exact boundaries of the property. My wife got a report from a website that shows an aerial view of the property with the property lines superimposed. The neighbor's fence is clearly on our side of the property line. The other side of their fence is clearly inside their own property line. According to the printout, their back property line is 37' 6". I dug out the paperwork from when we bought our house and found a picture of the property lines. It matches the printout. I measured their fence at the rear of the property and found the fence to be 40' 6", so it's at least 3 feet inside of our property line, but more like 6 feet when you take into account that it is a few feet inside the line on the other side.
I always believed that the property lines ran perpendicular to the street and parallel to the sides of the house. Our neighbors on both sides probably thought the same, based on lawn mowing, landscaping, etc... Below is a crude MS Paint of the property:
I figure the first step is to get some sort of a survey to make sure where the lines are. The picture on the website that my wife downloaded has a "not legal" disclaimer on it.
Also, I assume a trip to a lawyer's office would be in order. I'm afraid I'm going to use my entire fence budget to pay for lawyers, surveys, etc... and not have anything left for the fence.
Last, but not least, I don't want to piss off the neighbors unnecessarily. They did not build the fence, the precious owners did.
Has anyone else had a situation like this come up for them? I tried Google to look for answers and didn't come up with anything useful.
I've hunted all over for markers so that I can find the property boundary myself, but I only had luck finding 1.