The house on Bonacres Ave. was a cottage in the city. It sat on a sprawling lot in Scarborough with a ravine and a creek running through the backyard, offering a peaceful reprieve from urban life.

When Pauline Platt bought the modest bungalow in 2008, she thought she would live there forever, or until she ended up in a nursing home.

Five years later, the 52-year-old abruptly sold the property and moved for a reason she would later describe in a statement of defence: To escape her next-door neighbour.

“Heaven help the next people that purchase this house,” she wrote in a 2012 letter filed in court.

Ron Elliott, who lives with his wife in the home next door, sued Platt last year for $25,000, alleging she caused a flood on his property by deliberately blocking the backyard creek with a fence, despite his repeated warnings about the barrier. Platt disputed his claim, arguing her fence did not cause the flood and alleged that Elliott harassed her for years with a slew of unwarranted bylaw complaints.

The case involves allegations of hurled insults, snipped canoe ropes and the strategic placement of pet rabbits near a fence with intent to aggravate dogs. It has dragged on for 12 months. It has cost Platt and the Elliotts thousands in legal fees. Both sides have described the experience as a nightmare.

They are not alone in their mutual frustration. It is easier than ever for Toronto residents to complain about their neighbours, thanks to an improved 311 reporting system and the instant action afforded to potential complainers by mobile phones. The city launches roughly 50,000 investigations annually into residential property issues such as noise, fence height and driveway boundaries. The number nearly doubled between 2006 and 2011, rising from 34,000 to 61,000. It has fallen slightly since then, with 56,000 last year. Only about one-fifth of the investigations are proactive; the rest come from complaints.

In a city of 2.8 million people, conflict is inevitable. We cannot easily ignore our neighbours, particularly when Torontonians are increasingly sandwiched into smaller homes, condos and apartments. Many disputes are settled amicably, other neighbours simply ignore each other, and sometimes things go completely off the rails.

In the past decade in the GTA, citizens have gone to court over dog feces, fumes from a cooking wok and the alleged placement of a bloody coyote carcass on the hood of a neighbour’s pickup truck. Homeowners have installed surveillance cameras to monitor their neighbours, built fences to block access to mutual driveways and fought to change laws that govern clotheslines .

The disputes draw on municipal resources, eat up time in courts and can sour relations across entire neighbourhoods as conflicts develop, spiral out of control and, in some cases, explode. How do adults who are otherwise responsible members of society find themselves at war over poop, tree branches and a few measly inches on a rickety old fence?

To complain or not to complain

The decision to complain about a neighbour or hold one’s tongue depends in part upon the perturbing act, but also on the offended individual’s perception of it. How does one define noise? How does one define what is unsightly? Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.

Not all complaints are created equal, even though city investigators must treat them that way. Some are made for health and safety reasons, while others are entirely subjective. Falling squarely into the latter category: a recent noise complaint about a local ice-cream truck.

“I don’t want to trivialize some peoples’ problems because to them it’s the world, right?” says Mark Sraga, director of investigations in the city of Toronto’s municipal licensing and standards division. “But looking from the outside in, sometimes you look and think if that’s all you have to worry about in the world, you really don’t have a lot of problems in your life.”

Residential property complaints can be divided into several unofficial categories. On one side of the spectrum, the city has its indisputably Bad Neighbours — the owners of crack houses, drug dens, grow-ops, and other cases that are typically dealt with by police rather than city investigators.

Then there are the Absentee Owners, who let their abandoned houses fall into disrepair, leading neighbours to complain about overgrown lawns, rodents, structural concerns and, in some cases, intruders. In Parkdale , residents on Springhurst Ave. have been waiting at least a decade for a long-gone owner to sell his derelict house.

Hoarders, or residents with other vulnerabilities, are among the most complex cases because they often require a team approach, with bylaw, public health, animal control and Toronto fire officials working together. When the city boarded up Davisville resident Dennis Cibulka’s jam-packed house in 2012, declaring it a fire hazard, he lived on his porch for 18 months until firefighters finally conducted a forced cleanup . Neighbours were not happy.

The Oops-I-Didn’t-Know Neighbour is a breeze in comparison — a polite citizen unaware he or she was violating a bylaw and willing to make necessary changes as soon as investigators identify the problem.

“We have other property owners that have the opinion, ‘It’s my property, I’ll do what I want with it,’ Sraga says. In other words, the King of My Castle Neighbour.

Most loathed by the public are the Vexatious Complainers , who roam the streets armed with a measuring tape, making dozens of 311 calls about their neighbours, often in retaliation for a complaint made against them. In Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker ’s Scarborough Centre ward last year, one resident made nearly 100 complaints about fence height, hedges, long grass and other obscure infractions. The complaints can cost homeowners hundreds of dollars to appeal and thousands if they have to lower a fence or reverse a driveway widening that may have been off by only an inch.

“All it takes is one person to walk around a subdivision with a clipboard and snitch on all the neighbours,” says De Baeremaeker, “and the inspectors will come.”

The enemy

Not everyone who gets involved in a neighbour dispute is unreasonable, even though it can seem that way when the parties land in court and start flinging accusations at each other.

“Reasonable people can disagree,” says Colm Brannigan, a GTA-based community conflict mediator. “If they stay reasonable they will continue to communicate. If they get bogged down in a position and move to looking at the person they are disagreeing with as an enemy, then it becomes unreasonable.”

“Then there are times,” he admits, “when you really do feel like, my goodness, where has common sense gone?”

They are the Neighbours Who Push Each Other Over the Edge.

Full-blown neighbour wars often begin with simple miscommunications, which Brannigan says are more apt to happen nowadays, with neighbours chatting via text messages or email. Problems begin when one side retaliates for a perceived slight. It’s easy for a person to lose perspective when the source of his or her frustration is on the other side of the wall, or fence, or property line.

The precipitating factor is often a bylaw complaint. Instead of approaching a neighbour to discuss a noise or fence issue and work out a solution, many complainants choose to go directly to the city. “That does not go over well with a lot of people, understandably so,” says Sraga, the city investigations director. The complainant’s name stays off the record, which often leaves the other party confused and suspicious about who raised the red flag about their fence or hedge, and wondering why the neighbour didn’t approach them first. “If individual property owners communicate with each other about their concerns before they call up the city to deal with the issue,” Sraga says, “that could go a long way.”

Judges have lost patience with some feuding neighbours who take petty grievances to court. In a ruling earlier this year, Justice Ed Morgan told a group of misbehaving neighbours in “tony” Forest Hill that they need “a rather stern kindergarten teacher,” not a court.

John Morland-Jones, an oil company executive, and his wife, Paris Morland-Jones, sued their neighbours Gary Taerk and Audrey Taerk for damages totalling roughly $1.8 million over a litany of alleged offences, including a “campaign of harassment that has spanned nine years.” The Taerks denied the claims and argued the Morland-Joneses were the ones harassing them.

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The lawsuit included allegations of goading, shouting, 24/7 surveillance, the flipping of the middle finger, the alleged parking of vehicles with intent to annoy and the recording of insults and profanities on a dictaphone. But it all started 10 years ago when the Morland-Joneses undertook a renovation project and someone called municipal licensing and standards to see if proper permits were held, which led to a temporary work stoppage. The Morland-Joneses believed Audrey Taerk was the complainant. The addition was eventually built with approval from the Ontario Municipal Board.

From there, the relationship devolved “into a deeply-rooted dislike, and mutual disdain ... an atmosphere of apprehension” and “watchfulness,” according to a police report submitted as evidence in court. In a June 2010 handwritten letter, Paris Morland-Jones accuses the Taerks of leaving a plastic water bottle at her curb. “No one ever trashs (sic) our property unless they have a state of mind like you. Instead of this negative energy, why don’t you take pleasure in your grandchildren and your new dog!!??” Then, a threat: “We will sue you for the same amount of money that you borrowed from BMO to purchase your house.”

Not everyone can afford to launch a lawsuit, but those who are the target of a legal action must defend themselves — and doing so can quickly become expensive, even for the wealthy.

“It’s amazing what people will get up to if they have the resources,” says Peter Bruer, a conflict resolution manager with St. Stephen’s Community House in Toronto. “You almost wish they didn’t.”

No end

Pauline Platt and Ron Elliott were on friendly terms before she moved into the house next door. They had known each other through a mutual acquaintance.

When Platt took possession of the house, she installed a chain-link fence in the backyard to keep her three dogs from escaping. The fence, which ran across a small creek that flowed through both properties, would become the source of great conflict.

In statements filed in court, Elliott said he warned Platt about the fence and its flood potential “countless times” — gently, at first, until the relationship began to crumble. In July 2013, he took her to small claims court, seeking removal of the fence and $5,000 in damages for a flood that he said occurred in August 2012 after debris got caught in the barrier.

In a counterclaim, Platt had a different story to tell about the origins of the dispute. She alleged Elliott was retaliating after she asked him to move a shed that was encroaching on her property. The lawsuit, she said in court documents, was a continuation of a years-long “policy of harassment” against her that began when she rebuffed his romantic “advances” — a claim he denies.

She said Elliott initiated no less than eight “frivolous” bylaw investigations about her property and “maliciously” filed a conflict-of-interest complaint with her employer — she works for the city as a technologist with Toronto Water — after “none of (his) alleged complaints amounted to any infractions.” Platt later withdrew her counterclaim, but continued to rely upon its arguments in her defence.

Elliott denied her allegations. After Platt filed her counterclaim, he amended his own claim to seek $25,000 in damages. He admitted to initiating some of the bylaw complaints against Platt — about her barking dogs and the alleged waterway blockage — but said they were warranted. He denied making an official conflict of interest complaint. He also argued that Platt sold the Bonacres Ave. house for her own reasons, not because of him.

Neither side would speak about the particulars of the ongoing case for this story, but both said they just want it to end.

The neighbours appeared in court in early June for a bewildering hour-long hearing — lawyers disagreed on whether they were there to argue the case or discuss damages — that ended with an order for a new trial. “It is now clear that I misunderstood the complexities of the case,” Deputy Judge Burton Tait wrote in a decision afterward. “It will clearly require a full trial.”

Since then, another dispute has emerged. Robert Tighe, a lawyer representing the Elliotts, told the Star in late June his clients had accepted a settlement offer to be paid by Platt. Paul Shenton, Platt’s lawyer, denies an agreement has been reached.

The two sides cannot even concur on whether they have settled.

Shenton said in court in June that he has proof Elliott fabricated photographic evidence of the alleged August 2012 flood, but it is unclear whether that claim will be tested in front of a judge or if the case will even make it to trial.

The Elliotts now have a new next-door neighbour. She has removed the fence.