NO! NO! NO! The HOA Wants Me To Paint My House!!

You have probably seen a phone company commercial featuring Ted Danson. In it, he’s on a step ladder painting a house orange.

Along comes a straight-laced older woman, yelling at him,

“Youhooooo ! No no no, no! You can’t do that — that’s against HOA rules.”

We’ve all seen videos of HOA busybodies and nosey neighbors checking the height of mailboxes and challenging flag flying, and other community infringements and we laugh at it. HOA rules can’t be that bad or intrusive—or can they?

After living in Southern California for 25 years, I reluctantly decided to sell my beautiful home and leave. The ever-increasing exorbitant taxes, the cost of water and electricity, and an intolerable political situation became too much for me. Even though I had solar on the roof and artificial turf on the ground, the expenses were just too much. When Gov. Newsom started to talk about giving reparations to descendants of slaves (California never had slaves), I knew it was time to go.

Daughter Pat, her husband Bob, and I decided to move to Arizona because Pat had lived there before and liked it. In Arizona, you can almost buy two houses for the price of one in California. So, while I stayed home packing things up, Pat, a real estate broker licensed in Arizona, went house hunting. She quickly found a house set up for two families. Yes, it had HOA rules to live by, but I wasn’t intimidated—yet.

The home needed extensive renovation. The owner’s boyfriend was an artist, and he had painted the interior bright shades of red, yellow, purple, and green. In one room, the ceiling was painted to look like a circus tent. Another had a huge tree painted on the wall. The windows were covered with heavy drapes. Long story short, we tore down the drapes and replaced them with plantation shutters. The circus-colored walls were painted white. We made other “adjustments,” and eventually, it looked like a model home.

However, that was not and is not the end of our woes. The original landscaping, front and back, was overgrown and looked like a jungle. I assumed the HOA was not active. Boy, was I wrong. I think they were just waiting for an idiot to buy the property and require them to take care of the mess.

We hired a landscaper to draw up plans for the external renovation and submitted the plan to the HOA. All went well until workers got to the backyard. It was such a mess that heavy equipment had to be brought in to clean it up. That meant a portion of the high block wall had to come down to make way for the monster clean-up machine.

The machine promptly did what it was supposed to, but replacing the hole in the wall needed to get the machine into the yard took a while. The HOA was unhappy about the delay in closing the hole in the wall, and we were told to repair it as soon as possible. That was done, but the HOA didn’t like how it looked and decreed that the blocks in the wall needed to be realigned, which was taken care of ASAP.

We then decided we needed a shed to store yard tools. Permission for the shed was required because we wanted to place the shed on the side of the house facing the street (the house is on a corner lot). Although only the top of the shed could be seen over the high wall, it had to be approved by the HOA. It was approved without discussion.

After the completed yard renovation, we occasionally get a letter from the HOA telling us the shrubbery on the side of the house was overgrown and needed to be cut back. We obey the HOA because we didn’t want to be seen as cranky old farts.

However, the HOA was not done with us. I recently received a letter saying I needed to paint the house! It is currently painted regulation tombstone gray with faded wine-colored trim. The HOA saw spots of peeling stucco that must be repaired, which meant a whole-house paint job was needed!!

(To digress a bit — everything in AZ is tombstone gray, pukey purple, sea-sick brown, or yucky yellow. Nothing is bright or cheerful. Even the trees and roadside shrubbery look more gray than green. )

To continue –we were given a chart of accepted colors. That doesn’t mean my selection will be approved, which helps explain why everything looks pretty much the same, including the depressing undertaker/tombstone  gray color.

There is a lot of exterior to cover, which means painting the house is not inexpensive. The HOA doesn’t care about your finances. If you don’t have enough money in the bank — take out a loan or get a second mortgage.

To avoid a legal squabble with the HOA, I will fight tooth and nail to choose a background color that suggests the people inside the home are alive. Tombstone gray belongs in a cemetery.

In planned communities, I understand the need for an HOA to prevent cars and trucks on lawns or to prevent entrepreneurial neighbors from operating a machine shop in their garage that eventually grows beyond garage doors. But telling you when and how to paint your perfectly compliant home is beyond the pale.

We recently installed a security screen door on our front door without the HOA’s permission. Almost immediately, the HOA vehicle appeared across the street, and viewed it for a significant time. I’m expecting a letter from the HOA any day now. One thing is for sure  — I won’t take it down!  Please visit me if they put me in jail, or send soup.