This made her really angry and she started attacking me. She screamed something along the lines of, “What do you know? You don’t even live here. Why are you butting into other people’s business?” I snapped back at her that she was unnecessarily making this harder than it needed to be and that it wasn’t wrong or unreasonable of me to want some proof.
She then said that if my grandparents didn’t comply, she was going to sue them for decades of illegal occupation. Mind you, my grandparents have been living here since before Karen was probably born. No one has had previous issues with them apparently encroaching land before except her. Clearly, Karen was just trying to take advantage of them.
And yeah, I was incredibly angry. I was seeing how stressed that this entire situation was on my grandparents. They are extremely kind people and saying no to Karen kept making them nervous, especially with how persistent and aggressive she was being. And my grandparents were losing their minds trying to figure out what to do here, but didn’t know how to approach it or where to start.
The biggest thing for them was the idea of losing their garden. Like I said, it is their pride and joy and they put so much effort into that beautiful garden and having Karen destroy it, even only half of it, would have been soul-crushing. I wanted to get Karen off their backs.
I waited a couple of days to see if Karen would actually provide a property survey, but Karen never did. I asked her again, but she once again said that she didn’t have it on her. I was already convinced that she didn’t have it, but now I was sure that she was just bluffing or lying.
I decided to settle it once and for all. I knew that you could get legitimate property surveys, so I looked into it and researched around a bit to find an investigator who specialized in that sort of thing. I reached out to them and asked them if they could look into the boundaries between my grandparents’ house and Karen’s, and about two weeks later, they sent me the result of their property survey.
As I expected, the land Karen was claiming didn’t belong to her at all, but there was one thing that surprised me about that survey. So apparently, Karen has a garage and a driveway, which is pretty standard in all houses in general, but she also has a smaller shed and apparently extended land on the driveway right next to it. However, this apparently encroaches on my grandparents’ property instead.
All the houses in this neighborhood have a little extra space to their right and that additional space was encroaching on that boundary. The investigator did a little research into it and saw that extra additions had been added by the previous owner. I decided to confront Karen with all of this info, and when I saw her again, I asked her once more if she had the property survey she kept claiming she had, and she said yes and handed me a printout.
But it wasn’t a real property survey. It was something printed off a real estate website. I literally saw the logo in the corner. I said that her paper was not legit and was not a reflection of any legal records and then showed her mine. I said that the property she claimed was not hers at all and that her land was actually encroaching on my grandparents.