A landscaping crew arrived on a Travis County street in November 2021, while the owners of the house were away, and began taking apart the retaining wall behind it. The owners got home and stopped the work before it was finished. By then, the opinion says, the trees in the bed above the wall had been cut down and the retaining wall “required structural repairs.”
The crew had been hired by the next-door neighbors. Both lots sit in the Courtyard subdivision, which runs down to Bull Creek. Only one of the two fronts the creek; the other holds a deeded ten-foot-wide access easement along the creek-side edge of its neighbor’s property, and a boat dock at the end of it.
The wall was in the way. It went in during the early 1980s, built by the previous owners along with a flower bed and two large boulders that, the court wrote, “form part of the home’s foundation.” The wall, bed and boulders reach about four to five feet into the ten-foot lane — for roughly 28 feet of its 146-foot length…