Evening everyone!
We’re in the process of buying a semi-detached house. When the houses were built a few years ago, they each had a hedge around their front garden; at some point recently, the next door neighbour removed her hedge and has her garden open to the street. She also replaced the portion of hedge between the two houses at the front, with a low wooden fence.
We are going to remove the hedge around our garden and replace with a low wooden fence and gate, too – we have a puppy and need to make sure that if she manages to dash past someone at the front door then she can’t run straight out into the street (the hedge is pretty sparse at the bottom and she’d be through it in an instant).
I can’t figure out who owns the fence at the front between the two houses. If it’s us, then we’ll replace that portion to match the rest of the fence we are putting in; if it’s the neighbour, then we need to work around it and make sure we don’t damage it or attach anything to it etc. It seems as though the neighbour at least assumed it was hers when she made the changes, but then our vendors are extremely passive folks and probably wouldn't have questioned it anyway. The new owners might get more upset about it! Unfortunately we can’t ask the neighbour as she put her house up for sale at the same time as we offered on our house, and immediately moved out (I really didn’t think we were such terrible neighbours, but....
). The vendors indicated they ‘didn’t know’ who owned that fence, on the fixtures and fittings list.
I’ve looked at a copy of the deeds – tried to figure out how to attach it here but have eventually given up, sorry. Anyway, I can clearly see from the ‘T’ on the deeds that the fenceline to the front, left, and rear of our plot are our responsibility. But the fenceline between the two houses is marked ‘T’ at both the front and rear but has then been overwritten by an ‘A’ at the rear and a ‘B at the front.
Does anyone know what that means? Who is responsible for the short section of fence at the front between the two houses?