Help Us Protect Our Home and Garden

TL;DR - my wife and I have a neighbor that is harassing us because she feels our “yard is a wreck” and we are “destroying” our house and making her look bad. At this point she has been warned by authorities but continues to harass and escalate non-issues, so we need to take legal action.

My wife and I bought our house in 2023 and are attempting to build a garden and restore the home. It was flipped multiple times incorrectly, there are a lot of hidden issues, the house is 130 years old and it’s taking a while to fix them; in the meantime we’ve installed garden beds, a shed, and a greenhouse in our backyard and have started installing a perennial and veggie garden. We are hobbyist ecologists so of course having a yard that benefits wildlife is very important to us, and when we bought the house we warned the neighbors that we would be putting a large garden in since the yard was big, blank and empty - perfect for installing a new garden - and that gardens take a lot of time to start up initially.

Since at least August 2024, one neighbor of ours has been consistently complaining about the work we have been doing. First she complained to town council; then she filed a citizens complaint about our property; now she is trying to encroach property lines and prevent us from doing much needed maintenance work to our basement. She has called us “f*cking pigs” to our faces and, according to the town staff, much worse in private. She has video taped and taken detailed pictures of our house and yard to show people publicly and has trespassed on our property to do so. When town council told her they are not going to make us “clean up the house” because we aren’t in violation of anything, she went nuclear on the council and started to go around complaining that they “aren’t doing their jobs” and are “targeting her.” She has reported several officials trying to get her to leave us alone for harassment to attempt to get them in trouble instead.

She has called the codes officer about “rotting vegetables” (birdhouse gourds), “piles of trash” (our garbage waiting for the company to come take it on garbage day), and “rubbish around the house” (our recycling bins waiting for recycling day). She has complained about our stick built shed, our greenhouse that codes states we are allowed to have, a deer skull I display on the front porch, us killing the crab grass to replant with native ground cover, and much more.

As of April 2025 she’s been warned by town staff and police to leave us alone. She has sent us threatening letters after that warning and on April 22, decided to call the police on the contractor completing work on our basement window wells. This is because he asked if we could remove the downspout that comes from her property onto mine and replace later, so we can do work to our basement that is constantly flooding; we need to dig 3 feet deep to the bottom of my current basement window wells to replace them with new so we brought in some small equipment. She called the police and claimed we were trespassing and destroying her house. To be clear, even without a surveyor, her downspout exits a foot onto our property and needs to be removed from our sidewalk - especially so we can work on replacing damaged sections. She is refusing to do so, and instead our sidewalk is becoming a hazard since she refuses to work with us on it.

At this point we have a booked a surveyor and gotten appointments scheduled with many lawyers; our deed clearly states the property line and she is trying to contest it by harassing us, town zoning officials, and town police. She continues to go further and further above local officials to get her way. This neighbor is out of line when all we want to do is restore a place to live and install a garden we can be proud of.

While we can afford to book these in the current time, the longer this goes on the broker we are going to become… and this house kind of has us broke to begin with. We aren’t looking to recoup all costs, and if this goes to court she will be asked to pay our legal fees - but we would be very appreciative if we could get the support of a few hundred dollars to get this process started. We just had an emergency surgery bill for a foster cat that ate our savings, and since buying this house we have had to replace every single appliance it came with as they died on us one by one. We have enough for a retaining fee for our surveyor and at current time that is about it.

We want to thank everyone in advance for the support. If this continues we’re afraid that our safety will be at risk. We’re kind if desperate to get to ball rolling, because every chance we have to get one step ahead of her is another chance to keep ourselves and our family safe as well. We can’t trust her to respect us or local authorities, so she needs to learn to respect the lawyers and the courts.