I was grilling burgers on a Saturday when a process server walked into my backyard and handed me a LAWSUIT – my neighbor was suing me for five thousand dollars over a fence I’d built three inches onto his property.
I’m Greg. Forty-four. Divorced, two kids every other weekend, a three-bedroom ranch in Crestwood that I bought with every cent I had after the split.
My neighbor, Dale Puckett, was sixty-one and had lived next door for twenty-some years. We’d been fine until I replaced the rotting fence between our yards last spring.
Fine turned to hostile real fast.
Dale claimed my new fence crossed his property line by three inches. He wanted it torn down, the old line restored, and five grand in damages for “emotional distress and loss of enjoyment.”
Three inches.
I laughed at first. Then I saw the court date and stopped laughing.
My buddy Kevin told me to hire a licensed surveyor before I did anything else. Cost me four hundred bucks. A guy named Tom Whitfield came out on a Tuesday morning with his equipment.
I watched him work for two hours. He kept going back to the same iron pin near the street, then walking the line again.
Then he stopped.
He pulled out the county plat map Dale had attached to his lawsuit and held it next to his own measurements. He did it again. Then a third time.
“Greg,” he said. “Come here.”
My stomach tightened.
Tom pointed at the original survey marker, buried under six inches of dirt near the road. Then he pointed at Dale’s driveway.
“This line,” he said, tapping the plat, “doesn’t match what’s on the ground. Not by three inches.”
I stared at him.
“Dale’s driveway, his garage, and roughly ELEVEN FEET OF HIS HOUSE are on your property. They have been for over twenty years.”
I went completely still.
Tom showed me the numbers. The original developer had filed the plat wrong, and every structure Dale built after that – the garage addition in ’04, the extended driveway in ’09 – pushed further onto my lot.
Dale wasn’t just wrong about the fence.
He’d built his life on my land.
I filed a counterclaim the next morning. Dale’s attorney called mine within forty-eight hours asking to “discuss a resolution.”
I said no.
The court date was last Friday. Dale showed up smiling. His lawyer had a stack of folders. The judge asked if there were any preliminary matters.
My attorney stood up, handed the surveyor’s certified report to the clerk, and said, “Your Honor, we’d like to enter a counterclaim.”
Dale’s lawyer opened the report. He read the first page. Then the second.
He leaned over and whispered something to Dale, and every drop of color drained out of Dale’s face.
The judge looked at both of them over his glasses and said, “Mr. Puckett, I strongly suggest you ask your attorney about something called adverse possession – because right now, you’re about to learn what it DOESN’T cover.”
What Happened After the Judge Spoke
The courtroom got very quiet.
Not dramatic movie quiet. Just that specific dead air you get when everyone in the room is doing math in their heads and the math is coming out ugly.
Dale’s attorney, a guy named Phil Greer who had the posture of someone used to winning small claims disputes, closed the folder slowly. He set it on the table in front of him and didn’t pick it up again.
Dale himself looked like he’d swallowed something sideways. His face had gone from pink to gray in about thirty seconds. He kept turning toward Phil and Phil kept not looking at him.
My attorney, Sandra Cho, stood perfectly still. She’d told me before we walked in not to react to anything, no matter what. “You’re not there to enjoy it,” she said. “You’re there to win.” I tried to honor that. I mostly managed it.
The judge, a heavyset man named Vic Harmon who’d been on the bench since I was in my twenties, gave both sides about ten minutes to confer. He stepped down from the bench and disappeared through a side door. A clerk brought water nobody drank.
Phil Greer pulled Dale into the hallway.
I sat there with Sandra and didn’t say anything. She made notes on a yellow legal pad. I watched the clock on the wall. The second hand was loud.
What Kevin Didn’t Know
Kevin had told me to get a surveyor. Good advice. Kevin is a contractor, not a lawyer, and he’d been through a property line dispute with his own neighbor back in 2019 that cost him eighteen hundred dollars and a lot of goodwill on his street.
What Kevin didn’t know, and what Sandra had explained to me over the phone the night I called her, was what adverse possession actually means.
The short version: if someone openly uses your land for long enough, in some states they can claim legal ownership of it. The bar is high. You have to prove the use was continuous, open, and hostile to the owner’s interest. Most people never clear it.
Dale had been sitting on my property for over twenty years. But here’s the thing. I’d only owned the house for three years. I bought it after the divorce, when the previous owner, a retired postal worker named Frank Dellinger, moved to Arizona to be near his daughter.
Frank had no idea about the encroachment. Nobody had surveyed the line in decades. The fence that rotted out and that I replaced? It had been in the wrong place the whole time. Whoever put it up originally, probably in the nineties, just eyeballed it.
Which meant Dale had been encroaching on Frank’s land for years, and then on my land for three years. And he’d never had permission from anyone.
Sandra said adverse possession claims in our county require twenty-one years of continuous, hostile, open use. Dale had about twenty-three years total. But. The property had changed hands. And there were other complications she was confident about.
“He can try to claim it,” she told me. “He won’t succeed.”
I believed her. I also spent two weeks not sleeping great.
The Garage
Here’s what I kept coming back to.
The garage.
Dale’s garage was built in 2004. He’d added it onto the side of his house, a two-car structure with a metal door and one of those motion-sensor lights that used to catch me walking my dog at eleven at night. I’d always thought it sat close to the line. Never thought much of it.
According to Tom Whitfield’s survey, the garage sits almost entirely on my lot. Not partially. Almost entirely. The western wall of it is four inches inside Dale’s actual property. The rest of it, including the slab, is mine.
The driveway extension he poured in 2009 is mine. The retaining wall he put in at some point in the last decade, the low concrete one with the decorative cap stones, is mine.
When Sandra laid it all out, the number she kept coming back to was roughly $47,000. That’s her estimate of what it would cost Dale to remediate the encroachments, meaning tear down what was on my land and restore the ground to its original state.
I didn’t ask for that. I want to be clear about that. That number came from Sandra as a way of explaining the leverage, not as a demand I’d made.
What I actually wanted was simple. I wanted him to drop the lawsuit. I wanted my legal fees covered. And I wanted a recorded easement agreement that acknowledged the current state of things and established that neither party would build anything further without a licensed survey.
That’s it. I wasn’t trying to take Dale’s garage.
The Hallway
Phil Greer came back into the courtroom without Dale.
He spoke to Sandra for about four minutes in a low voice near the window. I sat at the table and looked at the wood grain and tried to hear nothing, which I mostly failed at.
The words I caught were “willing to discuss,” “expedited,” and “mutual dismissal.”
Sandra came back and sat next to me. She wrote something on the legal pad and slid it toward me.
They want to settle. He’ll drop the original suit. He wants us to waive legal fees and sign a mutual release.
I wrote underneath it: No on waiving fees.
She nodded and went back.
Two more minutes. Phil went back to the hallway. Came back. Talked to Sandra again. I heard “reduced” and “half.”
Sandra wrote: He’ll pay half your legal fees. Drop the suit. Mutual release. No easement agreement.
I wrote: I want the easement.
She wrote back: That’s the sticking point. He doesn’t want anything recorded that acknowledges the encroachment.
I understood why. If it was recorded, it would show up in any future title search. If Dale ever sold his house, any buyer’s attorney would find it. It would complicate everything.
Which was exactly why I wanted it.
What Dale Did Next
Dale came back into the courtroom.
He sat down next to Phil and looked at me for the first time since the whole thing started. Not angry. Not the way he’d looked at me over the fence for the past eight months, that particular expression he had where his chin went up and he’d turn away before you could make eye contact.
He just looked tired.
He was sixty-one years old and he’d built that garage himself. I knew that because when I moved in, Frank Dellinger had mentioned it. “Dale put that up himself,” Frank had said, proud of it almost, the way neighbors get proud of each other’s work. “Took him a whole summer.”
I thought about that.
I also thought about the process server walking into my backyard on a Saturday when I had burgers on the grill and my daughter was sitting on the porch step eating a popsicle.
Judge Harmon came back in.
He looked at Phil. Phil stood and said his client was prepared to settle.
Sandra stood and said we had a proposed agreement ready.
It took another forty minutes to work out the language. Dale agreed to drop the original suit with prejudice, meaning he can’t refile it. He agreed to pay $2,200 of my legal fees, which came out to about sixty percent of what I’d spent. And he agreed to sign an acknowledgment, not recorded, not public, just a notarized private document between the two of us, that stated the current structures on his property encroach onto my lot and that no further construction would occur within fifteen feet of the property line without a licensed survey first.
Not everything I wanted. Most of it.
After
We walked out of the courthouse at 2:40 in the afternoon. Sandra shook my hand on the steps and said I’d done well. I thanked her and meant it.
Dale and Phil came out about three minutes later. Phil went to his car. Dale stood on the steps for a second, not looking at me, keys in his hand.
I thought about saying something. I don’t know what. Something normal. Something that acknowledged we still had to live thirty feet from each other.
He walked to his car without turning around.
I drove home. Picked up the kids at four. Made pasta for dinner because I’d never finished those burgers on Saturday and somehow I still didn’t want them.
My daughter asked why I was quiet.
I told her I’d had a long week at work. She accepted that and went back to her food.
My son, who is twelve and misses nothing, looked at me across the table and said, “Did you win?”
I told him it wasn’t exactly like that.
He thought about it and said, “But did you?”
The pasta was a little overcooked. The kitchen light buzzed the way it always does. Outside the window, Dale’s garage sat right where it had always sat.
“Yeah,” I said. “I did.”
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If you know someone who’s ever had a neighbor problem that got out of hand, send this their way. They’ll get it.
If you’re looking for more wild stories about neighborly disputes, you won’t want to miss “My Neighbor Never Let Me Inside. After She Died, I Found My Name Painted Above Her Bed.” or “She Stole 3 Feet Of My Yard For Her Pool. I Let Her Finish It.” And for another tale of a reclusive neighbor, check out “My Neighbor Never Let Me Inside Her Apartment. She Died Before I Could Ask Why.”
