A devastated US home owner is mulling her next step after returning from holiday to find only a pile of rubble where her long-time family house once stood.

“I am furious,” Susan Hodgson told the Associated Press at the weekend.

“I keep waking up thinking, ‘Is this all a joke or something?’. I’m just in shock.”

Hodgson can’t even begin to process how her vacant family property in Atlanta ended up destroyed. Her nightmare started while she was on holiday and got an unpleasant a call from a neighbour.

“[She said] did you hire somebody to tear your house down next door to me?’. It’s been boarded up for about 15 years and I said ‘no’ and she said ‘well, there’s someone over here who just demolished the whole house and tore the entire house down,” Hodgson said.

The neighbour confronted the workers, who were from local company You Call It We Haul It. But Hodgson said she was told to “shut up and mind her own business”.

So she sent a family member over to see what was going on. They asked to see a permit.

When a person in charge at the site checked his permit, Hodgson said he admitted he was at the wrong address.

“We keep it boarded, covered, grass cut, and the yard is clean. The taxes are paid and everything is up on it,” she said.

Hodgson said she had filed a report with police and had spoken to lawyers but the situation remained in limbo.

“We’re still in this process of figuring out what to do,” she said. “We keep pressing in different directions to see if something is going to happen.”

Hodgson said she was yet to be contacted by anyone from You Call It We Haul It.

“It’s just hard to believe someone thinks they have the right to just come and tear something up and walk away from it and didn’t come back and say ‘I’m sorry. What do I need to do to fix this. It was an accident’. They didn’t give me nothing,” she said.

“I’m just left with a big ole mess.”

The company did not immediately return a request for comment by AP.

“I think he owes us an apology, and he needs to fix the problem. He needs to fix the problem,” Hodgson said.

The company did tell WAGA-TV it was investigating and working to resolve the mishap.

-with AAP