Sometimes the requests and bills from an HOA don’t make sense.

In today’s story, one homeowner uses the HOA’s bylaws against them, and once you read all of the details, I suspect you’ll definitely be on their side.

Let’s see how the story unfolds…

I fought the HOA and I won

I own a condo in a small building.

There are 2 apartments in the basement, 6 on the first floor (including mine) and 4 on the top floor.

A few months ago I came home from vacation to find a substantial leak in my ceiling. It wasn’t exactly pouring out, but it was dripping enough that I needed to put a couple of buckets underneath.

I went to the apartment upstairs and talked to the guy who lives there, and neither one of us could figure out what might be causing it.

There was no obvious issue that we could find.

A maintenance guy took a look at the issue.

It was fairly late at night on a Sunday, so the next morning I called my condo association to let them know what was going on.

They sent a maintenance guy over, who came into my apartment to see where the leak was, then went upstairs to check the other apartment.

He pretty quickly came back, and said that the issue was either a loose connection or a broken pipe behind the wall where it connects to the shower head in the apartment upstairs.

It seemed as though the water had been pooling for sometime before it came through my ceiling, and the ceiling and inside of the wall were both pretty wet.

They thought everything was resolved.

They were able to cut off the water to that pipe to stop the dripping, and the owner upstairs got a plumber over to fix it.

I filed an insurance claim for the damage to my ceiling/wall, and I figured that was the end of dealing with my HOA.

However, I was wrong.

They got a bill from the HOA.

A couple weeks later I received a bill for $140 for “plumbing repairs” from my association.

To me this did not make any sense, since there were no repairs done to my apartment, and the association didn’t even make the repairs to the apartment where the actual issue was, it was a private company.

I was told by my association that since I had called, and the issue was determined to be not in a common area, I was responsible for paying.

They hadn’t even charged the owner of the unit where the issue actually was.

They argued against the HOA using their own bylaws against them.

They told me that once the maintenance guy entered my apartment, it would mean I was charged unless it was determined to be an issue in a common area.

This resulted in several weeks of emails back and forth, ultimately with me refusing to pay the bill until they showed me in the bylaws where I would be charged for this, and also informing them that their bylaws in fact say that something like this is covered by common charges, i.e. our monthly fee.

Eventually, the HOA let it go.

They eventually stopped responding to me, and I looked at my statement today to see the charge has finally been taken off my account.

I know it’s not a ton of money, but it’s nice to be vindicated a bit on something like this.

Good for them for actually reading the bylaws!

Let’s see how Reddit responded…

This reader shared the real reason why the HOA probably backed down.

Another reader thinks the HOA might still try to charge them for the bill.

This person shared the purpose of this particular HOA rule.

Another person had a similar experience but with a different ending.

After hearing this story, another reader is more determined than ever never to live in a place that has an HOA.

It sounds like the HOA learned not to mess with this homeowner!

I doubt they learned a lesson overall, though.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.