Neighbor's tree branches have hit two of our vehicles- what do we do?
I've been in this house (first time homeowner) for 2 years now. About a year in, we had a tree in our backyard that had some rotting limbs. One started to rot and slowly one morning started to lay down toward the neighbor's house. Some small branches were starting to touch his roof, which he had recently redone. He was scared, understandably, and wanted us to take action immediately. My wife and I want to be good neighbors, so we called a tree guy we know and he came out within 30 minutes. He said it would be $600. At least in our state, because the branch is in his property now, it is technically our neighbor's problem to deal with, but again, we want to be understanding people, so we agreed to split the cost.
Fast forward about 3 months, a large tree in his yard lost a large limb in a storm and it landed out my truck. I loved that truck. Old (ish), 2013, but reliable. It had 165k miles and I was confident it was going another 100k. Plus I had done some small modifications to it, so I just really liked the truck. Anyway, it was totaled. Obviously, I talked to the neighbor to try to come up with a similar solution as before when we were generous to him. We were hoping he would be willing to use his homeowner's insurance to help with the cost or something like that. He just said he wished he could help, but he couldn't. I asked him, do you see the irony here? I just helped you with a tree and now we can't even have a conversation about this? Used my own car insurance for a less than I'd hoped for payout and had to move on.
I need a vehicle for work, so we went out and bought a new to me truck. It's a 2024 F150, so it was very expensive still, but I just figured that although I didn't want an upgrade, maybe this could be my new "forever" vehicle. We would have strongly preferred to upgrade my wife's vehicle first, but that was sort of taken from us. I told him he really should get the tree taken down and he agreed that he should because he said he has lost a few other limbs over the years (information that would have helped us possibly make a claim against his insurance if he had been more forthcoming originally).
8 months go by and the tree is still there. This week a big storm came through again and guess what? Another tree branch fell and hit my new truck. Fortunately, this time it fell a little short and hit our basketball hoop first, so the damage is "minor." But here's the question, what do I do?
Damage- scratches scattered from front driver side panel, both doors, truck bed panel scratches, two small windshield cracks, and two small dents that I can see so far. The scratches are kind of all over.
Because of the widespread, but relatively small in themselves damages, I just don't know how to even go about repair or making the situation right. This time, he said he wanted to make it right. I'm not quite sure at this time what that means, but where do you even start? Such systemic small damage can add up to be a lot of money. This truck only has 8k miles on it and was in brand new condition. I feel like if this damage was done to my old truck, I would much more easily shrug it off as things happen over time. But to a new truck? I don't even know where to start.
Thanks for any help you may have to offer!