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Sagebrush posted:Just keep in mind that when you're doing it, you don't have to swallow condoms full of industrial alcohol to smuggle back to your bunk every night. You can still do that, but you don't have to.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:13
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| # ? May 13, 2024 22:37 |
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Does the Russian language even have a word for alcoholism, or is it just easier and faster to have a word that describes people that are not constantly trying to get drunk in the most bizarre and desperate ways? Well my uncle that has jokingly made it his mission to buy, renovate, and flip every house in our town came across a beauty that a relative asked him to look at (he gets asked to look at more homes for potential buyers than the inspector does). Anyway, he shows up to the place and it's your typical cottage for this particular area of the lake. House is built in the side of a hill that steeply slopes down to the lake. In the basement there is an interesting setup which I will attempt to MSPaint based on his descriptions. It seems that there were issues with water coming inside the basement because of the hill and rainwater running against the foundation of the house. There was not enough/sufficient drainage, so it would seep into the basement, sometimes spectacularily from the visible water marks in it. Now this isn't a finished basement, but it's still a serious issue. Here is the "fix" they attempted.  For those of you who are having issues parsing that diagram. The previous owner* (who I'm guessing is Frank Lloyd Wright's hillbilly cousin) constructed a redneck version of Falling Water, so that water that hits the side of the foundation is allowed through it (the foundation walls) into the basement, then flows across the floor (which is slightly sloped) and is directed by the Ghetto Hoover drat (5" high walls of cement) into a larger hole that allows the water to flow out of the basement and erode the hill directly below the house. *current seller takes no responsibility for the state of the basement, but when asked why he didn't fix it, he replied that it works just fine. My uncle's suspicions are that the current seller actually did this.
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Nov 8, 2013 14:41
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Turns out that knowing the property line is actually really important when putting in a driveway. It becomes even more important if you refuse to negotiate with your neighbor over the asking price for the place because you know he wants the lot to link up two lots he already owns so you demand extra. 
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Nov 13, 2013 19:44
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Shifty Pony posted:Turns out that knowing the property line is actually really important when putting in a driveway. It becomes even more important if you refuse to negotiate with your neighbor over the asking price for the place because you know he wants the lot to link up two lots he already owns so you demand extra. Is that the only photo? So the place was for sale, the neighbor made an offer and the seller refused to negotiate and furthermore asked for a higher price? I'm a bit confused on the story. Hilarious photo though.
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Nov 13, 2013 20:17
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Yeah, I'm having trouble parsing the relationships here, but that looks like a fantastic bit of spite going on there.  I'm guessing house on the right wants to buy house on the left because he also owns house two to the left...house on the left won't work with him, so house on the right puts up a spite fence on the actual property line, which happens to be right through house on the left's driveway because they didn't survey? Is that about it?
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Nov 13, 2013 20:18
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My main question is why that driveway appears to be about 3 car-widths wide.
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Nov 13, 2013 20:21
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Papercut posted:My main question is why that driveway appears to be about 3 car-widths wide. Looks like 2 at most to me. The guy thought he had a lot of space for his driveway!
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Nov 13, 2013 20:21
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Bad Munki posted:Yeah, I'm having trouble parsing the relationships here, but that looks like a fantastic bit of spite going on there. Bingo. The house on the left is for sale (currently is a daycare actually), and the owner of the house on the right owns three lots (two on one side of the daycare and one on the other) and would very much like to connect them. During price negotiations the buyer brought up the encroachment issue and that it reduces the property value. Seller refused to budge on price, soooo.... up the fence went over the weekend. Probably severely reduces the value of the property to any third party looking at the place. I know I would be very hesitant to buy a house with that bad of an encroachment problem because it doesn't bode well for the rest of the structure's permitting and build quality. Here's another angle 
Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Nov 13, 2013 |
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Nov 13, 2013 22:03
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.....wow. There's spite and then there's that poo poo. There was some similar nonsense where my grandparents' creek dock was encroaching on the neighbor's property line due to the dock being naturally built perpendicular to the bank of the creek, and so extending a bit off the property line on one side. Eventually they got it worked out because apparently around Charleston there's some special considerations for grandfathered structures when they're on the water.
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Nov 13, 2013 22:06
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Wow indeed! How old were the titles, and when was it last surveyed? It blows my mind that someone would allow the drive to be built on their property in the first place ...if they knew that was the case. (And I'd laugh pretty hard if it turned out the drive was over an easement or something) It's amazing how people can live on a tiny section for 20 years, then if you tell them that the fence is 200mm over the boundary, suddenly they need that extra square meter. (But if the fence is on the other side of the boundary, then it's all "Well, live and let live" )
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Nov 14, 2013 01:55
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If they're in the US then there's also the whole "we've used this for X+ years so it becomes ours!" laws. Not sure who the bigger rear end is but it's funny seeing this kind of spitefulness that doesn't help either party.
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Nov 14, 2013 02:41
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Bah! You think a spite fence is a big deal? Try a spite house. Try 9 of them! http://mentalfloss.com/article/49039/9-houses-built-just-spite
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Nov 14, 2013 03:11
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Those are all great. In my opinion, there aren't enough spite houses in the world.
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Nov 14, 2013 03:55
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Indolent Bastard posted:Bah! You think a spite fence is a big deal? Try a spite house. Try 9 of them! I used to walk by the Hollensbury Spite house all the time. It always amused me as it very clearly was different than the other houses nearby. Apparently the guy who built it didn't even bother putting up new brick or plaster for the interior walls; there are still deep long marks from carriage axles in the brickwork visible inside of the house. Jaguars! posted:Wow indeed! How old were the titles, and when was it last surveyed? It blows my mind that someone would allow the drive to be built on their property in the first place ...if they knew that was the case. (And I'd laugh pretty hard if it turned out the drive was over an easement or something) That's East Austin so the original subdividing was probably in the 50s-60s sometime. The driveway looks fairly recent and I wouldn't be surprised if it were not a combination of spite and a touch of "oh poo poo I have to exclude them or I lose this part of my lot!"
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Nov 14, 2013 04:03
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This is funny because we just had a new fence put up where my folks are living these days. We had the lot surveyed and discovered we had about two more feet on one side. The original fence was not built along the survey lines and was never surveyed in the first place. The neighbor that lost that bit of space is of course incensed. When he bought the property, he never had it surveyed, but ain't it some poo poo, right?Shifty Pony posted:That's East Austin so the original subdividing was probably in the 50s-60s sometime. The driveway looks fairly recent and I wouldn't be surprised if it were not a combination of spite and a touch of "oh poo poo I have to exclude them or I lose this part of my lot!" Hello Austin buddy! So this was all in Austin? I showed that picture to me wife and folks with the story about the neighboring properties. It went from "good for him" to "gently caress that guy" when East Austin came up. They figured the guy wants to blow over the four contiguous lots and throw up some more gentrification condos. Rocko Bonaparte fucked around with this message at 08:31 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 08:29
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How in the Sam Holy Hell can someone come to own a property and fail to know its demarcations by that much?!!! I guess it's a rhetorical question, but still, what in the ever loving gently caress? That kind of poo poo is surreal. In areas where you can't figure it out in 5 minutes on the internet you can figure it out from the assessor's office with a phone call. Of course, I used to rent a room from a guy that didn't realize that the eastern- and northern-most 15 feet of his yard were a utility easement until I pointed it out to him on the plat drawing. So I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.
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Nov 14, 2013 10:53
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Farmdizzle posted:How in the Sam Holy Hell can someone come to own a property and fail to know its demarcations by that much?!!! Not every place has very user-friendly records of parcel boundaries. In my area I think they're all text-based descriptions that essentially force you to hire a surveyor to properly decode them.
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Nov 14, 2013 11:09
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Good point. Although if you're going to put a hard surface or a fence that abuts a property line, I think there's kind of an onus on the constructor to know his limitations. And that *assumption* of the property line looks like it's off by like 30 degrees. Like dude just thought N/S or E/W was all good and was way off. Also, where I'm from (WA) the corners of the property usually have a vertical 1/2" re-bar with a plastic cap that can easily be located with a metal detector and/or a shovel. Is this less common elsewhere? edit: I used to do utility construction so I guess I should assume that such a practice would be about as novel as putting power lines in conduit. Which I guess became popular not as long ago as I had once figured. It costs money so... Farmdizzle fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 11:33
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Farmdizzle posted:Also, where I'm from (WA) the corners of the property usually have a vertical 1/2" re-bar with a plastic cap that can easily be located with a metal detector and/or a shovel. Is this less common elsewhere? They are putting in those rebar markers in my area when you order a survey, but they weren't there to begin with. I'm not sure when they started doing that.
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Nov 14, 2013 11:36
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Me either, honestly. It's definitely more common as you go westward and I don't think it's legally required. Doing some research I've found that they can be a bitch to find sometimes. But most of these situations involve acreage. The above photos look like a lot that's less than 100 feet wide or so in a *relatively* recently subdivided plat so whoever laid that driveway (or paid for it) is a loving moron. How do you not even know which loving direction your lot lines are supposed to run? And without said info say "gently caress it" and pour concrete?
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Nov 14, 2013 12:54
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Farmdizzle posted:Me either, honestly. It's definitely more common as you go westward and I don't think it's legally required. Doing some research I've found that they can be a bitch to find sometimes. But most of these situations involve acreage. You keep assuming this is in a young area of the country, but the fact remains that when you're doing something as expensive as pouring a concrete driveway, it might be a nice idea to know where your property really is.
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Nov 14, 2013 13:02
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Hello Austin buddy! So this was all in Austin? I showed that picture to me wife and folks with the story about the neighboring properties. It went from "good for him" to "gently caress that guy" when East Austin came up. They figured the guy wants to blow over the four contiguous lots and throw up some more gentrification condos. That's a pretty fair bet really. I'm all for densification but the residents of the neighborhood are really getting the short end of the stick. On the general subject of property lines: you would be shocked just how far off people can be and how they don't think it is all that important to get a survey done. My father deals with land management of rural property in SC and that can be an absolute nightmare. Some plots haven't been surveyed for 6+ generations and for some reason landowners seem to get a bit pissy when he has to inform them that the logging company won't touch the timber on the property until a survey is done because they don't want to get reamed by accidentally cutting lumber from an adjoining property. "Oh yeah that is definitely the property line, I walked it with my grandpa!" isn't good enough. And in really really grand scale fuckups, how about messing up which state you are in? "The State newspaper posted:Last fall, officials sent letters to 93 property owners – a mix of homeowners and business owners, more than half now in North Carolina – notifying them that they could be affected by the new survey. Roughly 30 replied with letters of concern. Oops.
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Nov 14, 2013 14:29
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I wouldn't be surprised if they had just paved directly over an existing driveway made of gravel or something similar, one whose boundaries no one was worried about at the time; say 20-30 years ago? Now, surprise!
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Nov 14, 2013 14:55
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Up here in Massachusetts my 120 year old plot is pretty well defined, there are iron pipes driven into the ground with surveyors tape wrapped around them. At least in a corner or two which is something to start from at least. Common markings up here include iron pipes driven into the ground, building walls (one side of my property is defined as "a line parallel to and 12 feet from the side of the cottage at <abutting address>") and square granite posts in the ground. Occasionally old fieldstone walls and/or iron pipes in the middle of fieldstone walls are used as borders as well.
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Nov 14, 2013 14:57
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There is a local spite garage about 15 minutes from where I live. Other guy (bottom right) buys a single lot that has been for sale for a while. He moves in and one of the first things he does is talks to the rear end in a top hat who owns the 4 lots between him and the lake and asks if the property line between them has been surveyed recently. The rear end in a top hat takes him for a walk and says, "the property line is here! (brown dashed line that cuts off one corner of other guy's property). The other guy says that the Realtor told him he had a square property and didn't mention anything about one corner being chopped off. He tells the rear end in a top hat that he is going to have it surveyed just to be sure he stays on his own property. rear end in a top hat tells him it is a waste of money, and not to bother. Other guy does it anyway. Turns out that other guy was right, and the surveyor says he has a square lot. Now in rear end in a top hat's mind, he just lost about 1000 square feet of his six acre property. The next year other guy says that the view of the lake during fall and winter is really nice, and that he wants to cut the trees that are on his property (in red) so he can see the lake year round. rear end in a top hat tells him that he still thinks trees are on his property, and that the other shouldn't touch them or else his lawyer might get involved. Other guy realizes that rear end in a top hat will never listen to reason and cuts the trees on his property so he can see the lake. He enjoys the view for March, April, May, Jun. . . rear end in a top hat starts building a massive fuckoff garage! He actually (this happened years ago, but I heard some more about it this year)went out into the lake on his boat and had his brother place big poles with flags so he could tell exactly where he would have to build, and how tall, to perfectly obstruct the other guy's view of the lake through his little doorway through the trees. The garage is something like 60' long and 20' wide, and nearly 2 stories tall and all it's holding is a lawnmower, a snowmobile, some winter tires, and some gardening supplies. To add insult to injury, rear end in a top hat planted a shitload of 20' tall cedars all along his treeline last year so that in a year or two the view of the lake will be totally obstructed in the winter as well, since the treeline is mostly maples and poplars. Now that's spite!
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Nov 14, 2013 15:49
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Yeah, that's a tough spot for the other guy. Even if the guy didn't build the spite garage... he still probably would have planted new trees on his side of the property line and blocked the view. People DO NOT like it when you cut down what they consider their trees.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:58
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smackfu posted:Yeah, that's a tough spot for the other guy. Even if the guy didn't build the spite garage... he still probably would have planted new trees on his side of the property line and blocked the view. People DO NOT like it when you cut down what they consider their trees. Exactly, hence why I mentioned the loggers my father works with not touching anything until it had been surveyed (and even then they leave buffer zones).
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Nov 14, 2013 16:25
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smackfu posted:Yeah, that's a tough spot for the other guy. Even if the guy didn't build the spite garage... he still probably would have planted new trees on his side of the property line and blocked the view. People DO NOT like it when you cut down what they consider their trees. The best part is that he couldn't even really see the trees that were cut down due to the angle to his house and the fact there were still trees there. From his place it would have still looked like an uninterrupted line of trees going across his property there, and he in no way could see the other guy's house from his property.
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Nov 14, 2013 18:47
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Assuming people wanted to go crazy and lawyer up, wouldn't the smaller lot owner have some legal recourse for such an obvious attempt to devalue his property?
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Nov 14, 2013 18:49
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Bad Munki posted:Assuming people wanted to go crazy and lawyer up, wouldn't the smaller lot owner have some legal recourse for such an obvious attempt to devalue his property? Only if there are local regulations governing lake views, building heights, etc (which do exist in a lot of lake communities). There's certainly no general legal protection he could fall back on.
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Nov 14, 2013 19:07
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Otherwise everyone who had a house built behind them would have some damages to claim.
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Nov 14, 2013 22:26
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There's a bit of a difference between losing your view of an empty lot in a residential neighborhood and losing your view of a lake on a lake lot, wouldn't you say? Especially when one loss is due to reasonable, normal use, and the other is due to intentional, abnormal obstruction. I'm not saying that that means there WOULD be recourse, just that it doesn't really make sense to straight up equate the two.
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Nov 14, 2013 22:29
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If it was an actual lake lot, he would probably have some recourse. But his property doesn't abut the lake so he doesn't really have grounds to whine. That's the kind of situation where the psycho arguing about property lines probably should have been a giant red flag, much as it sucks.
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Nov 14, 2013 22:32
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I imagine part of it would depend on the topology, too. I think of Lake of the Ozarks and a lot of it is super steep cliffs leading down to the water, which ends up resulting in lots that would probably be considered lake lots even though they don't actually touch the lake. It's like stadium seating, where your ground floor is like 20 feet above your lower neighbor's 2-story peak.
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Nov 14, 2013 22:38
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Slightly related is what happened with former MLB first baseman John Olerud and his neighbor. http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2019640791_olerud09m.html tl;dr He got the city to order his neighbor to cut down two trees because they partially blocked his view of Lake Washington, partly because it supposedly would raise his property value by $225,000 - up from $4 million. Notably this is the next city over from Medina, who replaced their land use department's IT infrastructure with a linux-based system - because their old system couldn't handle the permitting workload from the construction of Bill Gates' mansion.
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Nov 15, 2013 01:47
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Here in Canada the vast majority of housing issues are municipal, so considering the municipality it's in, there is a 99% chance that there is nothing in the books to cover such a situation.
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Nov 15, 2013 03:56
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Here about 45 minutes west of Cleveland, there's lots of cheap land with good views of the lake. Pretty nice place to live, wouldn't you say? The inventor of the drop ceiling must have thought so too, and built his mansion right on the lake. Oh, he also built a 40-foot high berm around the whole property to block the view of everybody living south of him. Prick.
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Nov 18, 2013 12:54
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smackfu posted:Yeah, that's a tough spot for the other guy. Even if the guy didn't build the spite garage... he still probably would have planted new trees on his side of the property line and blocked the view. People DO NOT like it when you cut down what they consider their trees. Or any tree, for that matter. When I was a kid, we moved to a new house. It was a fixer-upper with a pretty good carpenter ant infestation. So my dad hires some guys to cut down some trees that overhang the house, as the trees tend to drop ants onto your house, as well as leaves, needles, and branches. A neighbor from about 5 houses down the street literally comes running over and starts Loraxing all over the place. Some people are really concerned about trees.
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Nov 18, 2013 16:00
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Hey, I love trees as much as anyone, but trees close to a house are loving bad. Fucks up your pipes, fucks up your foundation, drops all that poo poo and sap on your roof. Some trees are just ASSHOLES that I would treeicide any I find on my property. Silver Maples for one. Now, we have a 100+(ish) gum tree here that I wouldn't think of cutting down. If that bastard can survive that long, earned a little respect.
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Nov 18, 2013 16:23
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| # ? May 13, 2024 22:37 |
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Well this is a whole new level guys http://gawker.com/rich-man-buys-house-next-to-ex-wife-erects-giant-middl-1465406839 e: also my dad updated the A/C in the tiny Alexandria spite house. He said he could touch both walls at the same time and it was currently owned by a business dude who stays there while in town.
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Nov 18, 2013 18:02
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