Not long ago, after an extensive search of homes in Richmond Hill and other places, my family found the perfect home. Four bedrooms and two bathrooms, it was the perfect start up home. It only had one problem, and that was the fact we shared a driveway with the neighbour. For the first couple of years, we didn't even realize this was a problem.

Then the old couple who lived in the house next door sold their house to a single man about our age. Again, the driveway was not a problem for years. It seemed to follow a fairly natural angle, with a drop off the obvious dividing line. There are homes for sale in Thornhill and many other areas where the demarcations seem much less clear.

And then, one winter, our neighbour and his friends apparently all forgot how to drive. They began crashing into cars parked on our side of the driveway. I answered the door one day to an irate man who wanted to lecture me about where our property lines were so I would stop parking on his driveway. I humoured him of course, going out to look. It turns out there was a property stake in the middle of the driveway showing whose side was whose (and we were parked on our side, but that's a different story).

I had actually never seen those property stakes before; there was another one driven into our front lawn, which cut its space down by half. The front half actually didn't belong to me, it belonged to the city.

Everyone has property lines, although for some they may be more important than for others. Looking for your property stakes is one way to find these lines, but even then, they might not mean a whole lot to you. Trinity Bellwoods homes and real estate in other areas don't necessarily follow straight lines from one stake to the next, as we found out with our driveway, so how can you find out for sure where your own property lines are?

The first place to check is your property statement. These are usually handed over to you when you first purchase your Paris Ontario real estate. The corners of your property are clearly marked, with exact measurements in between showing liens, your own property, and so on.

Of course, finding the actual lines might be a bit more work, when you are thinking of putting in a fence or putting your home for sale in Toronto Canada with all the information available to prospective buyers. In those cases, and if you don't have a statement handy, you might want to call up city surveyors. They can give you a full report on your property lines, documentation, and a walk through of where you can build and what you can build there.