“Stubborn Neighbor Not Allowing Access to Fix Condo Leaks”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Mr.TinDC

“Dear PoPville,

I’m currently in the midst of a nightmare scenario with a three-story popup condo (I know, I know…lesson truly learned) I bought about 3 years ago. About a year ago, my downstairs neighbor and I started experiencing all kinds of issues with water leaking through the roof and siding from both the left and right sides of condo. We had a number of roofers come out and $30,000 later, had them reseal the roof and re-side the left side of the pop up. The problem is that to finish the job, we need to re-side the right side, which will require access to my neighbor’s roof (her townhouse is 2 stories).

Our neighbor is an elderly lady who understandably doesn’t trust anyone coming on her property after her experience with the original developer who did some damage to her property in the process of constructing ours. We’ve been going back and forth with her for 4 months now asking her to sign a letter granting our contractor permission to access her property to do the work. The work should only take about 6 hours and we’ve tried assuring her that we will cover any unlikely damages, but she’s not agreeing. We’ve even offered her $1000 cash and she’s still not budging.  Meanwhile, every time it rains, our units are getting even more damaged.

I checked with DCRA and was told by one of their engineers their typical Neighbor Notification Procedures won’t apply because the nature of the work we’re doing doesn’t rise to the level of being called “construction.”

Before we start spending even more money and getting lawyers involved, I wanted to see if anyone had any advice or experience they can share.”