Legal advice seriously appreciated! new neighbours, new porch, loss of the storage space locker under our porch as a result....

[Susana Moreno]

Hi all,

Well, things got messy with our new neighbours. They needed to replace the stairs (they were rotten), and they wanted a new deck. All of this was cool by us. But...it turns out that the stairs and the new porch have ruined the storage unit space we had under their stairs. 

Before the stairs were closed; now they're an open design. We approved their plan because our downstairs neighbour had mentioned having a metal structure underneath to help with snow removal. I should mention the metal structure was not listed in their official plan. We were away on vacation, made an assumption that the metal structure would still be in place, only to find out it wasn't part of the plan. We can still work with this.

There are many other ways to create a roof for our storage locker, so this is doable. We need a roof of some sort, and our doors no longer fit due to the neighbours enlarging their porch by 6 inches. We either need new doors or they need to find a way to reattach them, which apparently doesn't seem likely according to our handyman.

I mentioned the roof part to my neighbour and unfortunately, things got very ugly:( She said she was shocked that we would ask her to fix our locker and said it was our responsibility to fix. It went downhill from there.

I've talked with a couple of people, and they've mentioned that in our co-propriete if they dismantle something of ours, they need to restore it. But it's in  French "legalese". I guess it's on pg. 28 article 80. We're not entirely sure what it says though....

Another friend mentioned two legal terms: "bien acquis" or "droit acquis." I'm not entirely sure what these mean either or what the difference is between the two.

This is what we want--some sort of roof for our locker--cheap, makeshift but sturdy works great by us. Our doors to fit onto our storage unit or new doors. The guy is pretty handy and could probably build this stuff for cheap. We don't need or even want anything fancy. As long as it stores our stuff--something we desperately need living in a condo--we're content. I wrote a draft of an email to her calmly talking about some of this stuff, but I don't have enough of solid info (our rights from the co-propriete or bien acquis/droit acquis).

If anyone has info like this, I would be BEYOND grateful if you could help educate me! I'd like to send off the email today if at all possible. If you know of a lawyer I could talk to, I'd welcome any legal advice. I have absolutely no desire to sue. That's not our style. We're hoping that they'll just be cool and fix our locker, but having information that supports our claim would help a great deal.

Take care,

Susana