We purchased our home in MD 4 years ago after renting it for 1 year. At the time of the sale, the bank sent surveyors out to mark property boundaries. The lead surveyor took me to each corner marker and indicated where lines ran to and from. I took photographs at that time. He made mention that one neighbor's driveway clipped our property line and that he had notified the neighbor of this. Since the boundaries were clearly marked, we immediately started making changes: trimmed back overgrown shrubs (we didn't know they were ours), planted trees & shrubs, removed the existing fence from the rear property line and replaced it with a new fence. Immediately following this, we had irrate neighbors to the left & right of us stating that we were on their property. We explained the sale, the survey, showed them the map provided by the surveyor, etc. They claim the surveyor was wrong and one neighbor even made the comment that he "didn't care about no survey. It don't matter....I was here first and that's all that matters. You don't want to make an enemy out of me." We dropped further plans to add fencing on these two sides partly because we didn't want to antagonize and partly because we couldn't afford to hire another surveyor for a new survey.
Today (5 years after we moved in here), yet another neighbor showed up on our doorstep. He claims that he owns the property to the rear corner of ours (he was using it as rental property) and that he's trying to sell it. He then informed me that we had our "stuff" on his property by about 4-5' and that we had to remove it because he was getting complaints from potential buyers and that we needed to clean up all the trash we dumped in his woods. There are several problems with his statement: we are, at most, 6" over the property line to the northside with some recent hedge clippings that I intended to burn (his property is uncleared), he seems to be in disagreement with where the property line falls and any trash in the woods was definitely not dumped there by us. We could see the trash in the winter months when there's no foilage and someone has dumped tires, misc. trash and air conditioners. It may have been the previous tenants or it may have been someone before them...we don't know. There's also been a horrid doghouse discarded at the edge of the woods (on his side of the property line) as long as we've lived here and it looked like it had been there a long time before that. We've never had an outside dog or doghouse.
I have 2 questions from this mess. What is our best solution regarding the dispute over the accuracy of the survey done when we bought our house (lots of angry neighbors to appease) and are we responsible for removing anything dumped on this man's property if it was dumped by a previous tenant of this house?

