Windstorm blew down fence - neighbor doesn’t want to share cost

[Troy Welch]

So a storm blew thru Port Neches, Texas last week and knocked down the wooden fence between my SFH rental and the neighbor. It snapped 10 posts at grade. My handyman quoted $1600 to put new posts and rehang the panels.

Before we even contacted our handyman, we asked our neighbor how he wanted to handle this. His response was that the previous owner of my house put that fence up and that he considered that my fence not his. He later came back and said something about rebuilding it himself - which we were like ok, how much will that cost us ( because he wasn’t clear on that point, but we are open to options).

Today we presented the handyman’s bid and asked for more details on him rebuilding. We were told that his dog hasn’t gone into the tenants yard, but the tenants dog has been in his multiple times. He hurt his back, is going to put up temp fence material but will not assist in the cost of a new fence.

The old fence is pretty much in tact. It has a rot board at the bottom attached to a 2x6. It isn’t really even panels - the builder spanned the top rail, middle rail, and bottom rail across multiple posts and staggered the joints like you do flooring. It is strong, that is why it snapped the posts all the way down.

I am thinking chain link at this point but not even sure if that would be cheaper than repairing the old fence. The problem is - I repaired the fence on the other side of the house last year because of wind (neighbor split the cost on that one) - this is getting expensive.

What would you do?