Neighbor repeatedly landscapes new homeowner's front yard before their move-in date in an effort to trick them into thinking it's the neighbor's property: 'He acted like he did us a favor by landscaping it'

It's almost like when you purchase the property, before the “sold” sign goes up, you need to do one last walk around of all of the boundaries and make a note of where everything is in its current place.

We humans are, for the most part, opportunists at heart, and a lot of people won't pass up a chance to take advantage of an opportunity for an ill-gotten gain. This might make me sound like a bit of a pessimist, but once bitten twice shy, and it does well to be prudent and cautious.

And you can't escape from it. You might think that being on more acreage with a comfortable distance between you and your neighbor would put an end to these things. But sometimes it almost makes them worse. More space means more room for ambiguity and opportunity for fences to move and boundary lines to blur.

This homeowner found themselves the victim of such a ploy in a suburban battle with their new neighbor, who had landscaped a part of their yard without their permission in order to create an illusion of a shared lawn. This forced the homeowner to have to conduct a survey and remove the unauthorized landscaping themselves in order to legally protect their boundary. This didn't stop the neighbor, though, who continued to trespass and alter the landscaping, attempting to move his garden inward, again, into the homeowner's property.

I think the wildest part of the entire thing is that if the neighbor had just approached the homeowner first and introduced themselves, and made nice before pitching their idea of landscaping a shared front lawn area, they might have been completely on board with it.