Is This Person a Jerk for How They Handled a Yard Dispute With His Neighbor? Here’s What People Said.

If you’ve ever owned a house (or even rented one), you probably know that some neighbors can be…difficult.

And today we have a story from a homeowner who wants to know if they acted like a jerk when they removed tree roots from their yard…from a neighbor’s tree.

Take a look at what happened.

AITA For removing tree roots from my yard?

“My family and I moved into a new home this spring.

We had previously lived in apartments and we now have our first yard for our kids to play in. The neighborhood we moved into has a lot of mature trees, and this being the first time I’ve had to do my own yard work, there has been a learning curve.

One of my neighbor’s yard is separated from ours by a chain link fence. There is a large tree just on their side of the fence. Some roots from the tree spread into my yard and some of them are growing on the surface of the ground. They are visible and are above the ground quite a bit. About a month ago, my kids were running around and playing and my daughter tripped on one of the roots, fell, and ended up breaking her wrist trying to catch herself.

Of course, this was very upsetting to my wife and I and she pretty much told me to do something about the roots so this didn’t happen again. So, I bought some tools and started tearing the roots up as best I could. I got them out to a point that nothing is sticking above the ground anymore and filled the top in with fresh soil and grass seed.

My neighbor must have noticed the work I did because he made a comment about the fresh soil. I told him I had to remove some roots since my daughter tripped on one. He asked what I meant by “remove” and I told him I dug a bunch out and cut them out as best I could.

He got pi**ed and told me I probably k**led his tree. I told him that removing a few roots isn’t going to hurt a tree that big and they were creating a tripping hazard. And since they were in my yard, I did what I needed to do to remove them.

He told me there are other ways to deal with roots like that instead of cutting them out and causing stress to the tree and he would have gladly helped if I had asked. He said that tree is probably going to d** which means it is probably going to have to be removed and said that a tree that large is going to cost thousands of dollars to take out.

I told him that sounds ridiculously expensive. He said if the tree d**s and he has to have it cut down, he’s going to ask me to pay for some of it because of what I did to the roots. I told him good luck with that and that I’m not paying anything for his tree.

He called me an a**hole and told me the previous neighbors at least had the decency to ask for help when they didn’t know what the hell they were doing instead of causing damage to other people’s property.

I told my wife about it and she thinks the guy is just being a jerk and agrees with me that taking a few roots from the top of the ground isn’t going to hurt a tree that big.

She also agrees that there is no way in hell we are going to pay for anything for this guy’s tree. We were just making sure our yard is safe for our kids to play in, it’s not our fault his tree grew roots into our yard.”