Living in a neighborhood with an HOA comes with restrictions, which is to be expected.

When your neighbor is nosey and reports every minor infraction, however, it can get pretty annoying.

That is what is happening to the guy in this story.

Take a look at how he got his petty revenge.

Neighbor used HOA against me. Two can play that game.

I’ll give the relevant origin story for our villain, Scumbag Steve (SS for brevity).

Roughly 6 years ago, my wife and I decided to move (pre-covid times when everything was cheap still).

Long story short there, we couldn’t find any pre-existing houses that we really liked but did find the neighborhood where we currently live and built a house with the developer.

As people do, we drove by every so often to look at the progress they were making on the house.

One night we stopped and went out to look at the hole in the ground, as they had just gotten ready to pour the concrete for the basement walls.

Sounds like a nice enough guy…so far.

Here comes SS, acting like a concerned neighbor because “materials have been getting stolen.”

We explained that we’d be the new neighbors and had a brief conversation where he commented that he and another neighbor are the “unofficial neighborhood watch.”

Missed that red flag at that moment, but we left feeling warm and fuzzy because the neighbors looked after each other.

Unbeknownst to us, SS is really just an overactive nosy nellie and really just looking for ways to mess with people.

Oh, he is one of those.

A bit of foreshadowing now, some things that he has done to other neighbors are letting his dog poop and pee wherever she wants without cleaning it up, looking through neighbors’ trash cans, asking about a neighbors’ doorbell camera (how far it can pick stuff up, etc. I know I’m being a bit nit picky here, but it tracks for him).

We also found out later that he’s a drunk and he’ll proudly proclaim/brag about how he beat his DUI that he got after a heated argument with his wife.

He’s also a scavenger/scrapper, so who’s really stealing those materials, Steve.

One day I decided that I want to start being a bit more self sufficient and picked up some chickens to raise for eggs.

Now, I’m really not that guy that wants to be annoying to my neighbors, but even then, the area that we live in is surrounded by farms and is “farm themed.”

I did my due diligence and checked town ordinances and the HOA guidelines that we were given and found no rules or ordinances against having chickens/poultry on your property.

Backtracking slightly, when we signed our contract AND went to settlement, we only received a one-page flyer that went over some basic items restricted by the HOA.

All pretty normal restrictions.

No grilling in the front yard, no permanent basketball hoops in the street, no boats/rv’s on a permanent basis, etc.

There was no mention of anything about the types of animals you can or cannot have.

So, working on the idea that I am in the clear, I buy some chicks and begin raising them.

I decided that, since I had a kennel at my old house (we rented from my in-laws for a couple years until we were ready to move) I’d go pick that up and set it up around my coop for the chickens to have some free roaming space.

The kennel had four fence pieces that I could move on my own, but they were heavy, so I backed my truck up to my fence where the kennel was going to go in the back yard and start heaving them over.

Again, what a nice guy!

SS sees me doing this and offers to lend a hand with getting them over the fence, so sure, why not?

He asks why I need a dog kennel if I have a fence, to which I inform him it’s not for my dogs and for the chickens.

I should have known that he was going to cause issues from here, because the next thing he asks is “your HOA allows chickens?”

It was phrased that way because he had lived there when the first developer of that neighborhood owned it, but they went bankrupt, and my developer took over.

It’s the same HOA, but we didn’t know that at the time.

Anyway, I told him that I didn’t see anything in the paperwork provided to me regarding chickens and that was that.

Until the next day… SS comes over with a loaf of bread from his mother’s bakery that he occasionally helps at and is making small talk when he brings up the chickens again.

This time he’s only talking to my wife about it, but he again brings up that his HOA doesn’t allow it and he was bummed about that.

That’s where the story should have ended.

Oh gee, I wonder who reported them.

Maybe about a week later or so, I got a letter from the HOA. “It has come to our attention that you have chickens on your property. Per bylaw “X” that is not allowed and you have 30 days to remove them from your property.”

I was perplexed, how on earth did they find out about them, and why was I not provided with a copy of the HOA bylaws when I signed the contract for my house?

The day after receiving the letter, my wife and I are on our way home from some errands when another neighbor that we’re friendly with flags us down and tells us, “I don’t know if you know, but SS went to up to your fence as was taking pictures of your backyard.”

For context, there was an empty lot between SS’s house and ours, but that finally clicked for us. SS reported us to the HOA!

Me being me, I’m not going to take this sitting down, I’m going to fight this.

Some BS HOA (which is the developer’s “maintenance corporation”) isn’t going to tell me what I can or can’t do on my property! (spoiler alert, they did indeed tell me what I couldn’t do).

Through a bunch of back and forth with the HOA, I get a copy of the bylaws and I start picking through them with a fine-tooth comb.

I found out that someone had sent in 7 pages worth of pictures of all the infractions of the HOA rules, including the picture of my coop.

I should also mention that I was in hot water with the HOA when I had our fence installed because it wasn’t a split rail fence with chicken wire, so it didn’t match the aesthetic the “developer wanted for the neighborhood.”

They never said another thing about it though, and I ended up being the catalyst for everyone else doing whatever they wanted with fences.

Time for revenge.

Also, since I’m being petty, literally any fence that is white vinyl is technically against the HOA bylaws, as it states that they can only be split rail, a maximum of 5 feet, and made of wood. But here’s finally where the petty revenge comes in.

You see, SS has an area of his backyard that is blocked off by some wood privacy fencing that is NOT split rail and much taller than the 5-foot maximum.

Oh, and there’s some unsightly plant growth that is outside the HOA guidelines regarding the plants you can have on your property?

Well, I think it’s high time the HOA hears about these gross infractions of their bylaws, seeing as how we’re all trying to do the right thing and follow the rules.

So, I snapped a couple pictures of the privacy fence, the eyesore plants, and the static line he has for his dog in the front yard.

I felt a little bad for the dog initially, but he’d leave her out for hours and she’d run into the street at cars driving by, since the static line was long enough for her to get her whole body past the curb. I can’t tell you how many almost heart attacks I had because I thought I was about to run over a dog.

Well, I can tell you that probably about a week or so later, SS got his nastygram from the HOA informing him that he needed to move the static line and remove the privacy fence because I watched with absolute glee as he removed his privacy fence.

For the life of me, I can’t see why people are willing to put up with an HOA.

Let’s see what the commenters say about this story.

Sure, some HOA’s can be tolerable. I guess.

This commenter knows how to mind her own business.

Good fences make good neighbors.

This person avoided the HOA.

Yup, do your research.

Wow, HOA’s really are the worst!

They need to be a thing of the past.

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.