The new privacy fence looked like progress—clean lines, fresh boards, the kind of upgrade people do right after buying a place. But in Benton, Louisiana, that “simple” backyard project turned into a boundary fight that ended with a court-ordered redo of the property line and an order to pull fence sections back off a neighbor’s land. The court record in the source opinion reads like something every homeowner dreads: pins in the dirt, accusations about moved stakes, and the slow realization that what everyone assumed was “the line” might not be the line at all.
At the center were Richard and Gloria Neill and their next-door neighbors, Tom and Amanda Coday. The Neills owned multiple lots in the Neill Acres subdivision—lots 1 and 3—while the Codays bought adjoining lot 2 in 2018. Then a fence went up, and suddenly “my yard” and “your yard” needed an official definition.
The first sign wasn’t the fence — it was the old one
Most people assume the existing fence tells the story. In this neighborhood, that assumption was part of the trap.
The Neills had originally created the subdivision and installed older cyclone fencing, but they placed it several feet inside their own property instead of right on the boundary. That kind of choice can feel harmless—maybe you don’t want to fight with brush, maybe you’re giving yourself room for maintenance—but years later it can become the seed of a major misunderstanding. If the “visual boundary” isn’t the legal boundary, every later project is built on guesswork…