The Balcony Over My Backyard

The balcony overhung my property by four feet, three inches. It was not a couple of feet. It was not a rounding error. It was four feet and three inches of another man’s structure hanging in the air I owned, and now I had a licensed professional willing to swear to it.

The second thing I did was go to the county building department, the same county I had worked for at the road garage for years, and I asked a simple question. I asked whether there was a permit on file for that balcony.

There was not.

Let me say that again, because it is the whole hinge of the story. Travis Carter had built a two-story cantilevered balcony, a structure that hangs out in the air and has to be engineered so it does not fall down and kill somebody, and he had not pulled a single permit for it. No permit. No inspection. No engineering review. Nothing. He had rushed it up in seven days while I was gone precisely because a permit would have taken longer than that, and a permit application would have shown a setback violation, and a setback violation would have gotten him told no before he ever started. He skipped the whole system on purpose, because the system would have stopped him, and he figured I never would.

I sat in my truck in the county parking lot and I will admit I laughed. Not a happy laugh. The other kind. The kind that comes when you realize the man who tried to run you over has driven himself straight into a ditch.

I did not go back over there and gloat. I want you to notice that, because it was hard. I had him. I had a stamped survey and a missing permit, and there is a part of every man that wants to walk that evidence across the street and rub a smug face in it. I did not. Gloating is loud, and I was still being boring, and boring was winning.

Instead I did two more small, patient things. This is the part where the paperwork does the shouting so you never have to.

First, I talked to a lawyer. A local one, older, the kind who has an office over the hardware store and knows every judge in the county by their first name. I laid it all out for him, the survey, the overhang, the missing permit. He put on his glasses and looked at the drawing for a long time and then he took them off again.

“This is not complicated,” he said. “This is trespass. A structure over your property line is a continuing trespass, and you are entitled to have it removed. And the missing permit means the county has its own interest here, separate from yours. Frankly, son, you are holding all of it.”

He called me son. I am nearly sixty. I did not mind.