Imagine living in a neighborhood with an HOA, and the HOA loves to enforce nit picky rules. Would you learn to live with it, or would you rally your neighbors to overthrow the HOA board?

In this story, one family is in this situation, and they choose the second option. They refuse to play the HOA’s game and even get the board’s lawyer on their side!

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Revolution against our HoA

My wife & I moved into a 64 townhome community that was 10 years old at the time.

The HoA board was comprised of 5 members that were original homeowners when the community started and had been the sole board members since the community started.

Their sense of entitlement was crazy.

They thrived on their quarterly walkthrough of the neighborhood as they would write-up every single home for some kind of violation regardless of how minor the offenses were. EVERYONE gets a violation letter.

The HOA wanted these homeowners to fix quite a few minor things.

Our first letter, the first month living there was that our garage door paint was starting to peel (it was a 2cm scrape where the panels met), it needed to be repainted, the siding needed to be powerwashed (there was a patch of green moss behind a bush) and the sliding door on the deck was dirty (there was dirt on the bottom of the door from recent rain) and it needed to be washed.

We had 30 days to fix the issues or beginning accruing a fee of $25 a day until they are resolved.

I asked around and everyone gets these ridiculously petty letters every quarter. No matter what you did to maintain your townhome, you were going to get a letter about something.

But there were a couple big problems the HOA had yet to resolve.

As this was going on, none of the major items the neighborhood needed fixed were addressed.

After a decade since the construction, the ground had settled unevenly and many homes had standing water issues where it wouldn’t drain after a storm. The rain water would sit for 5-7 days in peoples lawns.

And more importantly, there had been a legal fight with the town since the community was started about our road being “Dedicated” meaning the town was responsible for snow removal.

Our HoA dues included paying for our own snow removal (which we shouldn’t have to) and we were paying an attorney for ten years to fight this with no resolution in sight.

The HOA tried to prevent them from overthrowing the HOA board.

Fast forward a two years and a few of us had enough and decided to band together to replace the board at the next annual meeting.

The existing board got wind of this and hit us all with pages worth of issues with our properties since if you have outstanding issues, you are not in good standing with the community thus can not run for a board position or even vote for those running.

This petty move brought the community even closer and we all spent the weekend before the meeting helping eachother clean out their HoA honey-do lists.

We took pictures, documented everything then we had the US Mail certify delivery of each packet with the completed list and photos to the HoA board who lived 75 ft away.

Let’s see how the board meeting goes…

Come board night, oddly enough, the lawyer was there to give an update that no progress has been made with the township on dedicated our road.

He stuck around as we moved to the elections for the next board.

We brought our signed petitions to add our names to the ballot.

The board says were not eligible as we all have outstanding issues with our property.

I’m starting to like this lawyer!

We call nonsense with our receipts from the post office that they received our completed lists with documentation.

They reply that they haven’t reviewed them yet.

We tell them that’s not our problem and we are in good standing.

They lawyer overhearing this states we are eligible to be on the ballot if we can confirm the issues with our homes were resolved prior to the meeting.

The HoA president glares at the lawyer but the lawyer just shrugs saying, “the rules are the rules”

It was a success!

With the exception of the 5 existing board members voting for themselves/eachother, we are voted in nearly unanimously to replace them.

I lead the revolution because I was tired of the petty BS when there were real problems in the neighborhood.

Sadly, the rest of the elected board members vote me as President.

I have no idea what I’m doing. But we spent the next few sessions removing all the dumb violations from most of the neighbors. We went through the by-laws to really focus on what’s important.

They finally found out why the lawyer was taking so long dealing with the case.

What happens next?

Ends up that lawyer was a friend of the previous President and was in no hurry to resolve anything as he was enjoying our excessive bill.

I notify him if its not resolved in the next 6 months were finding new representation.

He was actually good at his job when pressed to do it.

The lawyer really did a great job!

He won the case, the town appealed and tried to drag it out.

He fast tracked the appeal as it had been going on for ten years and we won the appeal too.

The town dedicated our road, then the lawyer pressed that it should have been done years ago, it wasn’t him slowing things down but the town.

He ends up getting us a settlement from the judge for back pay on us paying for snow removal that the town was responsible for.

They fixed all the other issues too.

We ended up using that settlement to have French drains installed across much of the community to clear the standing water issues.

With the money left over, we fixed a lot of the neighborhood issues that the HoA should have been doing the whole time. Fences & sidewalks in disrepair, replaced dead trees & shrubs etc.

It was great getting all that done without having to hit our capital reserve fund.

They eventually moved on.

I remained President until we moved a few years ago.

Our family began to outgrow the townhome. Now we live in a new larger development… with a new HoA…

I was asked to run for a position on it.

I replied, “not a freaking chance… but I will lead a coup d’tat if I need to”

I’m surprised they moved to another house with an HOA after all that drama, but good for OP for overthrowing the old HOA board and being a good HOA president.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

I hope they did this too!

Yes, this is pretty much what happened.

It’s too late to do this now that he moved on to another house.

HOAs really don’t make sense.

The HOA board couldn’t stop them!

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.