Imagine building a huge mansion on top of a hill with a great view. You’re in a very wealthy neighborhood, and some of your neighbors are even celebrities. There’s only one problem. The neighborhood is part of an HOA.

If the HOA told you that you had to repaint your home because it wasn’t an approved paint color, what would you do? Would you argue with them, give in, or get even?

In this story, one homeowner is in this situation, and the argument ends up going to court. That’s far from the end of it!

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

HOA, a mansion and the view

I lived in this town surrounded by magnificent vistas.

There was a small development on the outskirts for upscale homes and mansions. Below the development were a few older homes.

Many celebrities and business owners had vacation properties in the area, multi-million dollar houses they used maybe one month out of the year. Real estate had always been at a premium.

There was one older home amongst all these giant view lots.

This sounds like a REALLY nice house.

A new buyer was a guy who owned a slew of RV dealerships and had obscene amounts of money so he bought the most prominent lot on the top of the hill as you entered the development of maybe 20 lots.

His project was a massive stucco structure with a multi-car garage and a much bigger RV storage space with a huge roll up garage door.

Think of the biggest RVs you’ve seen and he had a garage built for it with an automatic door.

The house was a nondescript sand color with a red tiled roof and the entire lot was tastefully landscaped with different kinds of rocks, small mounds here and there and a few shrubs to be low maintenance.

The back of the property was fenced in with an 8-foot(?) or higher block wall. The fence itself probably cost $100k.

One neighbor wanted to sell his home.

His neighbor was a schoolteacher who had lived there before the development started and had a modest house.

He decided to take advantage of the skyrocketing land prices in the neighborhood and sell, except no one wanted his house when there were much larger empty lots available.

He decided the real issue was that the new behemoth blocked his view and that’s why no one wanted to buy his three-bedroom ranch house at mansion prices.

It was really that his home didn’t appeal to the market.

Like any annoying neighbor, he became HOA president so that his annoyingness had power.

So he became the president of the HOA which included the older homes and the new development. And then the harassment started.

The HOA had formed after the RV mansion construction had begun, but the home was so big, it took almost a year to finish.

The HOA had passed a “design theme” rule that all houses must be painted in a specific color palette, with the predominant color being a taupe that was darker than this man’s standard beige stucco color house. The palette included the taupe and a selection of trim colors in pink, teal, or tan.

It was intended to give the community a Santa Fe look and feel which just happened to be the colors of the president’s house.

The RV owner used the HOA rules to mess with them.

The RV owner took the HOA to court and the trial dragged on for a year. The guy never used the property claiming it was still under construction during this time.

He lost in court and had to repaint his property “using only the design theme approved colors.”

So the guy brought out his contractor and had him repaint the entire property the Pepto Bismol pink trim color. Everything was painted this color — the house, the fence, the trim, and the rocks in the yard.

Then he had the massive driveway to the garage done in the same pink stamped concrete. Even the garage doors were pink.

The house made the whole neighborhood look bad.

He locked up the house and never stayed there.

The HOA was in an uproar because this house could be seen at the top of the hill for miles.

None of the other lot owners broke ground.

The president’s home didn’t sell for two years.

What was the point of all that hard work building that massive home if he never stayed there? And he ticked off the whole neighborhood just because of the HOA’s stupid rules. It would’ve been better to run for HOA president and change the approved paint colors.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This is a good question.

The teacher wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.

It really doesn’t seem like an HOA should be able to do this.

I can picture it.

Forcing someone to follow a ridiculous rule often doesn’t go well.

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.