Need Your Advice!

As I have mentioned, we're in the midst of one heck of a snowstorm. It's the light, fluffy snow that is fun to play in and pretty...but it sure does pile up fast. Luckily, we had an early holiday gift of a snowblower, and that has come in handy. Todd loves to use it, and this is the first time as homeowners that we have not had to hire someone to plow us out.

Imagine our surprise however, when we realized that someone in a silver truck was plowing us out! I was amused by it, thinking it might be a neighbor doing a good deed or something. But Todd was peeved, as he was looking forward to using the snowblower again. NEITHER of us were happy when we heard the truck or the plow or whatever run into our garage. Sydney and I were at the kitchen table clipping coupons and heard the noise. Todd was upstairs at the time, but thought it might just have been the plow scraping on the paved driveway. He finally got bundled up to see what was going on outside a few minutes later.

Come to find out, the guy was supposed to be plowing our neighbor's driveway! He did not however, mention running into our garage or asking to check for damages. Todd didn't think to look until he went back outside to use the snowblower, when we noticed this:

and when Todd tried to see if the piece of wood would move back into place, it splintered at the visible line:

SO...now what do we do?

I went over to the neighbor's house and apparently it was his dad that had just plowed their drive (which means it was our new neighbor's dad that plowed into our garage). The neighbor said he would let his dad know. I'm not exactly sure what that means.

Our child care provider's husband is a builder/contractor so we could probably ask him to come and take a look and give us an estimate. We don't want to get anyone into trouble, but we also don't want to spend our money to fix damage that we didn't cause. Do snowplowers have special liability insurance? We have a $1K deductible on our homeowners insurance, so I'm doubtful it would be worth the claim. Do we need to cover ourselves and file some sort of damage report with the police? Ugh.

I could really use your advice. How best should we proceed?

And if you have someone plowing your yard this winter, you may want to ask for more details in advance of any accidental damage of your property.