I haven't had reason to rant in a while, however, my homeowner's association continues to remind me how truly bad they are.
Not everyone has a homeowner's association, and I wasn't familiar with them until recently. Usually, these are like the PTA. People in the neighborhood run for "president", "treasurer", and "secretary" - much like other small organizations. They typically organize a block party so everyone can get together and publish a newsletter with neighborhood information. They generally have a positive effect on the community.
My homeowner's association is nothing like that. Known as MVF (Montgomery Village Foundation), it was created to oversee the community to ensure that community standards are being upheld. We have strange rules like "no pickup trucks", however, Hummers and Suburbans are allowed. I do not understand the logic of this, but change does not come to this organization easily. They have other rules that dictate the color of your house and they must be contacted for things like changing windows and doors, siding, decks, and various exterior home improvements to ensure that community standards are being met.
In order to make sure that community standards are being met, the association also has its own building, many paid employees, and a slush fund that is regularly abused. The people running the homeowner's association seem to run it as their personal fiefdom. I seriously doubt that their budget would survive a true independent audit.
They do seem to take this to an extreme.
We bought an old house that was not doing well. The homeowners association does not have a problem with your house falling apart. The siding was masonite, which is basically painted cardboard, and it had soaked up some moisture over the years and had started to warp and fall off. They had no problems with it looking like crap, however, it did need to be changed and we decided that when we bought the house, we'd have to change it so the water doesn't leak into the house. And this is where the problems started.
They don't make 9" siding with the little lip anymore. They make 8" siding with the lip. So if we replaced the section of the house that had the damaged siding, we'd have to replace the siding on the whole house per MVF. Ok, we can fix some of the other issues while we're at it. It'll just take us more time. We went to MVF and got the siding approved with a color change on the house. (You have to pick from an approved set of colors and get them approved, no matter how dated the set of colors is. Thinking outside of the box is not their strong point.)
If you've ever done siding on a house, it's a long thankless task. First, you rip off the siding. Then take off the "cardboard" inner layer. We found poor insulation, so we had to replace the inner insulation, put plywood back on, followed with Tyvec, and then put siding on top of it. It takes a long time if you're doing it yourself and we have a few levels on the house. So the first year, we did about half of it and the second year we almost finished the siding. We have to do the section around the front door to finish.
In the meantime, we needed to replace the garage doors since the doors were masonite and started to rot. Note to MVF - you don't complain about old rotting doors, you complain about new doors? We had someone replace the doors - nice new garage doors. MVF noticed right away and sent us a nastygram about the doors not being in compliance even though they were identical to our neighbor's doors, only ours had two horizontal panels and theirs had four horizontal panels. Apparently, you can have none panels, four panels, six panels or eightpanels. Two panels, it appears, to violate some feng shui guidelines for having a harmoneous neighborhood. Of course, we appealed and they denied our appeal. Later, we get a nasty letter (I forgot what it said), but we had to call up and appeal the appeal. Finally, someone had some sense to approve the two panel doors.
Then we got a letter saying that the garage doors needed to be painted to match the siding color even though they told us that we had to match the trim color. We called them and they fumbled a bit and admitted that we were right, but that since our trim colors are different, we had to change all the trim colors to match the doors or change the color of the doors to match the trim. We told them that we'd be painting the trim, but that it would take a while and may have to finish in the spring.
We ended up with a couple of nice days in November and I managed to get some painting done on the front peak. It's high, I don't like heights, but I wanted to get closer to finishing and get MVF off our back. I thought I did a good job.
So today I get a letter saying that we are in violation and that the matter has been referred to their attorney. WTF? I thought we were making good progress until winter set in.
For those of you not into painting, there are two requirements for painting that must be met. First, the surface must be dry. First, painting while raining is not good for the paint as it is water based and tends to wash off. We had several days of rain in the fall that prevented me from finishing the paint job so we were delayed a bit by the rain. The second requirement for painting is the temperature. The paint requires at least 50 degrees to paint in so that it can adequately dry, and I've found that 70 is ideal. In case people in the homeowner's association haven't checked, it snowed yesterday. I think when it snows, the temperature is not warm enough to paint, not to mention the moisture that is out there.
So here I sit, waiting for the lawyers to call me and tell me how I'm supposed to change the color of the house in the dead of winter. They may have access to paint that I can put on during a cold snowy day. I cannot believe that I have found a group of people that I dislike more than lawyers and politicians, and that's saying plenty.
