Last night I watched a couple episodes of “World’s Worst Neighbor”, and while I have to admit that they were worse than Mr. B. Riggs who was my neighbor for ten years, they weren’t worse by much.
The neighbor in his place now is a far different sort, he’s a rather stupid fellow who thinks he’s a clever con artist. He does have a definite work ethic, to his credit, stays busy around his place doing repairs and steadily adding more and more doodads and trinkets to adorn his home and grounds, literally to a fault, with the little windmills, dry birdbaths, wind chimes, things that light up at night and so forth.
It’s the con artist part that makes me avoid him. It’s okay to gaudy up your home in hopes of gaining attention, some of us have that need, it’s what you do once you have someone’s attention that matters. This is the same person who tried to just walk into my home uninvited and painted my cedar fence white that’s entirely on my property and faces his, without asking. Among a variety of lesser intrusive and disrespectful offenses.
Yesterday afternoon, on driving back from the short trip to the post office, he came walking up wanting to show me something in his back yard that “might concern me”, and what it is, is where the people who did the rehab on his home in the aftermath of Mr. Riggs ownership, had jack-hammered away about 16 feet length of the retaining wall that held back the earthen 4 foot high cliff created when his parcel was made level on our sloping hillside by bulldozing the earth away where our property lines meet.
The rest of that 50 year old retaining wall is in bad shape as it is, but still has perhaps 15 or 20 years to go before it collapses, as did the portion that was removed. Now here’s the thing: Two things, actually. The first is that where the wall was removed is a newly replaced 50 foot tall power pole, sunk 7 feet into the earth, the cliff is only 3 feet away from it, is 4 feet high and is eroding now, endangering the stability of that power pole.
The other thing is that this retaining wall, built on our mutual property line, is there because the developer created that cliff to level the lower parcel, and by law the owner of the lower parcel is fully liable for the maintenance of that wall because it was created for the improvement of his property, not mine.
So back to John the new neighbor showing me how he’s attempting to deal with the erosion by cementing 4 by 4 wood posts in the ground to brace up a couple sheets of 1/2 inch cheap chipboard, and he’s filling the 4 foot deep gap between them and the cliff with dirt, leaving about a foot width of walkway alongside his garage.
I pointed out the folly of this feeble construction and told him he needed to build a real wall with concrete blocks and rebar and that’s when the con finally appeared. “Aren’t you concerned? What do you think? Do you think this will work? Doing this is expensive, those concrete blocks are expensive, I don’t have the money, what would you do about this” and so on.
Wishing him Good Luck on his project, I went home. This is all a good thing, really. Don’t get me wrong, this is no problem for me, just the opposite, it’s More Entertainment. There’s a lot of liability here, and none of it is mine. Now I’ll be watching closely when our winter rains come, to see how his chipboard holds up. One phone call to the power company will have an agent out here inspecting the mess if things start looking bad and the pole is endangered, the power company will fix the problem and hang a big fat lien on his property title and I’ll have a nice new section of retaining wall.