A MAN has been blocked from entering his lakefront property after his neighbour put up a fence around his home with “no notice”.
Sarfaraz Ali owns a stunning cottage on Lake Erie, Ontario, but there’s now a huge problem – he can no longer get to it.
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The private road in Dunnville that leads to Ali’s seasonal home and two other cottages is now inaccessible, amid an ongoing row with his neighbour.
His property is now surrounded and almost totally blocked off by a fence that he claims was put up in February without warning.
The neighbour’s defence? It’s his property.
Oscar VanderHeide, who owns the land the cottagers use to access their homes, said: “I’m not blocking the road. There’s no road. That’s my property.”
The fence-builder told local Canadian newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, that he built the fence to avoid being liable if anyone staying at the lakeside homes were to be injured on his land.
VanderHeide owns the land that surrounds the three houses – the beach in front and the land behind. The cottagers only own the land their property sits on and their small gardens.
Now, the homeowners are cut off from their properties without the road they used for years to access them.
At Ali’s three-bedroom home, there is only a small gap in the fence that he can slither through after crossing neighbours lawns and on the other side the fence is inches from his porch.
The Dunville county residents’s once-beautiful view of the lake has been partially obscured.
And without a road, the only means of reaching the house is by boat.
“There is no way we can have access to our home at all,” Ali told The Spectator.
He claimed that he was not contacted by his neighbour before the fence was erected, and only knew about it because he saw the installation on his security camera.
“All of a sudden it happened. We had no notice, nothing. If there’s any issue, they should give some notice and we can negotiate or something.”
However, VanderHeide defended his fence by arguing that Ali began renting his cottage out as an Airbnb, which has been “horrible”.
He complained of drunk, rude teenagers speeding down the road, throwing rubbish and disturbing the peace with their “crazy” antics.
The rental listed Ali’s cottage as having access to a shared beach, however VanderHeide explained that he owns the beach, but had freely let the cottage owners use it.
“He’s never asked if he could use my beach or advertise my beach, and I just let it go. I’ve been as nice as I can be as a neighbour. But there’s always a limit,” he said.
Ali claims he was forced to use Airbnb as a means to pay off the mortgage on the cottage, which he and his wife bought in 2021.
The county council cannot help with dispute as its a civil matter between landowners, and so it seems the two neighbours are destined to grumble on, just a fence apart.
It comes as a woman exposed her new neighbours for building a 12ft fence to get away from her.
The astounded lady took to TikTok to show-off the newly-built giant barricade that she reckons is “illegal”.
Elsewhere, a man got some tall revenge on his neighbour who called animal control on his barking dogs.
Kyle Kurt, from South Carolina, US, responded to the complaints by building a 15ft “atrocious” fence to keep his distance amid the row.
