Welcome to the neighborhood

Last Friday CP arrived at our new house a few minutes before me. He called me and asked if I knew anything about the fallen trees in our backyard. "Huh?"

I walked into the backyard to find this:

The two downed trees.

I decided to call our realtor to find out if she knew of any reason that a tree would have been cut down in our COMPLETELY FENCED IN backyard. She suggested a utility company or maybe the city's public works department. However, there is no utility line anywhere near where the trees stood and the city would have notified us in some way that they were coming in. Not to mention that they would have hauled the trees away.

CP circled around our fence and happened to bump into our side neighbor. She said that she heard a loud crash earlier that day and saw the backyard neighbor's head pop over the fence. She also said that there was a feud between the seller and our backyard neighbor. AWESOME.

Our realtor suggested that we call the police. While I agreed that we SHOULD, CP and I discussed it and decided not to. We didn't want to be those people.

CP decided to head over to talk to the backyard neighbors. The wife answered the door and said that she didn't know anything about it. That they didn't even own a chainsaw. CP thought that was odd because he didn't say anything about a chainsaw....

On Sunday my father-in-law and his brother (my uncle-in-law?) came over with their electric chainsaw to cut the trees into manageable pieces while we figured out what to do with them. While he was cutting, the backyard neighbor came over and admitted that he cut down the tree. My UIL's response? "If it were my house, I would have punched you." My FIL's response, "I would have called the police." Ha ha.

The neighbor gave a myriad of reasons as to why he cut it down- "the seller had been asking me to for a year and I finally got around to it." None of them made sense to my FIL and UIL. The trees were not on his property, nor were they hanging over his property so he had no reason whatsoever to cut them down. The neighbor then told them that he would like to speak to CP at some point.

So far, we haven't made the time to go over to talk to them. We are too busy unpacking, painting, etc. I'm annoyed that the neighbor only wants to speak to CP- what kind of sexist sh*t is that? I have already instructed CP to tell him that I am an attorney (he doesn't need to know that I am inactive and not licensed in the state of CT) and that he is really lucky that we didn't call the police. Coworkers suggested that we make him take away the remnants of his trespass himself. I like that idea. We were going to take the trees down anyway, but we were going to wait until we had some time. Not when we were still moving boxes and furniture into the house.

It's quite an interesting "welcome to the neighborhood" event. And even after we finally speak to the neighbors, we will have to keep our eye on them....

What is your best crazy neighbor story?