Imagine living in an HOA that has a rule that you can’t park a boat so that it’s visible from the street. What would you do if you owned a boat?

In this story, one family is in this situation, and they are able to strategically park the boat so that it’s barely visible from the street.

That’s not good enough for the neighborhood Karen.

Keep reading to find out how the family complies with the HOA rules while still annoying Karen.

Another HOA story

This was about 10 years ago, 2010ish. My family lived in a very nice gated community with an HOA.

It was during the summer, and most weekends we would bring our boat to the house on Friday nights to take out on Saturdays, and then move it back to where we stored it Saturday night.

HOA had a rule where you aren’t allowed to keep boats within view of the street, our drive way ran up beside the house and we’d intentionally position it to be as invisible as possible, for the ONE night it would be there.

Basically all that was visible was a small T top over my dad’s truck.

The HOA isn’t really the bad guy in the story.

Our HOA was actually pretty awesome, super laid back and really only did anything when there was a complaint.

It was a relatively small neighborhood less than 50 houses, and the HOA was really good at throwing monthly parties where we’d shut down a cul-de-sac and everyone would bring food and music and we’d all have fun.

This was kind of what an HOA is supposed to be in theory, a good thing.

Karen complained.

Well Karen had made a complaint to the board about our boat and had provided time stamped photos of multiple violations (mind you 1 night a week, but she’d claimed it was consistent).

The president came by to tell us and it wasn’t there when he was.

We told him our side of the story, basically it was only there for about 12 hours on the weekend.

And he said he nor anyone on the board had ever noticed it, but since they had a complaint, they had to request we remove it. (I completely doubt they’d actually fine or do anything past asking, but rules are rules.)

OP’s dad had a plan.

Queue my fathers mastery of the art of malicious compliance.

Well an important bit of information about this piece of property, when the neighborhood was built, my dad bought the house, as well as a property bordering the back of ours that was not a part of the HOA, or in the neighborhood and originally had a small chain link fence between it and the house.

It was accessible through a small street with a few homes on it bordering our neighborhood.

Well, My dad’s beautiful brain started thinking about, and for the cost and inconvenience of storing it at a storage place, he could probably just build a pad for it behind the house.

Karen complained again.

He had a gravel pad put in the corner of the property with a shed over it, intentionally as close to the edge of the property so it would preserve the view out the back (or be very visible from the front of the house either one).

There wasn’t any real backlash about it, apparently Karen brought it up again and the board politely informed her that they had no control over that property, and I think she admitted defeat.

The board actually found it pretty funny, and never had any other issues with them. Karen moved about a year later, and my parents moved about 2 years ago.

Loved the neighborhood though, genuinely a positive HOA experience, just an annoying Karen to make life inconvenient.

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That was brilliant!

This is a unique situation where the HOA board isn’t the problem. It was a Karen problem. At least Karen wasn’t on the board!

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

It is odd.

Boats and work trucks aren’t exactly the same.

This is true. The HOA wasn’t the bad guy.

I don’t see the issue with a boat being visible, but OP’s family certainly found a great way to comply while still annoying the neighborhood Karen.

Not all HOAs are evil.