Three FEET?!! I exclaimed at the guy.

He grinned, nodding, knowing what that meant. Knowing that now yes it was going to be worth it, yes my having called his company was worth it, and he had just justified their $3000 fee. And how.

We replaced the fence some years ago and the neighbor’s redwood and roots were in the way, so the fence company went offside of it a bit and told us and them that and we didn’t love it but at that point it’s not like you can tell them to take their lumber back and go home.

All these years we thought the difference was at most a foot at the front and we just shrugged it off. What if it were even less. Why bother. I almost didn’t call the surveyor, and in fact put it off for weeks till the coming sale of that house made a deadline I couldn’t resist: one way or another, at long last we had to know.

I’d thought that side of the yard felt a little closed in after that installation because of the missing trees that had had to be cleared out because they’d grown into the old fence and were pushing it down.

No. It was because they’d moved that line far closer to us than they’d needed to and then angled it so that even at the back of the yard it was still off by a foot taken away from us. There was no need for that.

One could cite squatter’s rights laws. Except it wasn’t ignored and permission for it to remain that way was never granted. The late owners knew about it (even if not to that degree), discussed it with us, and always intended to do right by us and split the cost on fixing it once the redwood was gone, but by then they both had cancer and there were more important things to deal with and it’s really easy to not spend lots of money over potentially not much.

I was blown off when I tried to get surveyor quotes by three companies who told me, On one side of one house? Pffft, we don’t do small jobs.

I don’t know if it was that I name-dropped the realtor who’d recommended them but these guys came right out. And they were absolutely wonderful people. And man were they worth every penny.

My sour cherry and pomegranate are about to get a lot more sunshine and the mango won’t mind, either.

The kicker is that the neighbors added an ADU for caretakers, which they ended up very much using and was a good thing–but if that fence had been where it was supposed to have been, it probably would have been too close for that ADU to have gotten approval.

So I’m actually mostly glad we didn’t get this fixed sooner.

Now to find the right fencing company. I’ve been looking up a bunch but you know? I bet that realtor’s got some real good names.