I’m hoping someone has gone through a similar situation and can provide advice.
Essentially, I want to demolish and rebuild my garage due to existing structural issues. My neighbour’s garage encroaches onto my garage and is using my southern wall as a party wall. My neighbour is refusing to discuss design, costs, issues and is ignoring the encroachment. His view is that I need to pay for everything and can’t impact his garage in any way which I don’t think is fair. Keen to hear thoughts on legalities and rights, ownership and equitable cost split etc.
Below is a summary of the situation:
What do you think?
Essentially, I want to demolish and rebuild my garage due to existing structural issues. My neighbour’s garage encroaches onto my garage and is using my southern wall as a party wall. My neighbour is refusing to discuss design, costs, issues and is ignoring the encroachment. His view is that I need to pay for everything and can’t impact his garage in any way which I don’t think is fair. Keen to hear thoughts on legalities and rights, ownership and equitable cost split etc.
Below is a summary of the situation:
- Survey shows the southern wall (party wall) is on my land, also logically makes sense due to time of construction, materials used etc (also shows the fence is 300mm within my land along the boundary)
- Neighbours roof encroaches the southern wall and relies on it for their northern wall
- No legal easement, nothing on either title, no references to an agreement on any of the original plans when the garages were built (more than 50 years old)
- Both bought each property with garages already there
- My northern wall has structural issues that need addressing
- Neighbours garage has decaying concrete, roof is partially rusting, joists are rotten, northern joist is bolted to my southern wall and the neighbour doesn’t want to do any work to resolve these issues. Any work that I do has much greater risk of something going wrong because of this
- I need to demolish at least some of my garage to resolve my structural issues and would be prudent to demolish the whole garage given it’s an old brick garage. Trying to retain what is there is only a temporary fix, will be a poor structural and aesthetic outcome and the issue of the encroachment remains (basically it's a lipstick on a pig solution)
- Neighbour has room to build a wall inside his garage to hold up his roof (have suggested this so it becomes two independent garages)
- Neighbour is ignoring encroachment, cost discussion (have not suggest cost split details but to hold a discussion to what is fair), will not meet face to face etc
What do you think?
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