The Homestead...now with slightly less Homestead...

See that line there?

That line to the left of the fence line?

The line defined by that scrub that used to be along the old fence line between our yard and our uphill neighbors' yard?

The line that I enhanced with a little red to show you just where it was?

That's the old edge of the Homestead yard.

See, a few years back, we bought a shed from Buckeye Barns (one of their garden shed designs).  According to West Chester permit rules, we had to put the shed ten feet from our property lines.

We'd applied for a permit but hadn't heard back for a while, so we went ahead and told the builder to begin where we wanted the barn.

Turns out that even though the barn was ten feet inside our fence, it wasn't even entirely on our property.  The fenceline didn't seem to define the property.

We'd bought The Homestead thinking the fence was the property line.  The uphill neighbors bought their homestead thinking the fence was the property line, but neither of us was right.    The fence between our properties was entirely on their property - two feet from the line at the front and twenty-plus feet from the line at the back of the property.

So, we had the barn moved to its current location and waited a couple of years before finally splitting the costs of moving that fence to the property line this past summer.

Check out how much of our yard we lost there.

See those fence rails leaning against the fence back there in the top photo?  They used to be in our yard - or at least inside our fenced yard.  Now they're twenty feet outside of our fence.

There's a little disappointment in losing some of our yard and all, but at least that back end was the swampy, yucky part that is such a huge pain in the backside to mow in the spring because it's a bog all spring long.

There's our storage shed back in the far right.  It's straddling our fence, but it turns out that the back fence isn't on the property line either.  The back fence is like ten feet from the back property line.

Turns out that the fence on the other side (the side that's behind the house in that photo above) isn't on the property line over there either, but at least it's way inside our line and just has woods past it.

Clearly the people who put our fence in were stupid.