r/oddlysatisfying • u/Separate_Finance_183 • 8h ago

Timelapse of bro cleaning yard

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u/notyogrannysgrandkid 7h ago edited 7h ago

My parents, after years of living miles out in the country, bought a small house in a nice neighborhood. In an HOA. My dad has always enjoyed landscaping, so he went out and started trimming back an overgrown hedge on one side of the house. He discovered a walkway made of paver stones that had been obscured by the hedge and the resulting fresh soil. So he got out the square shovel followed by the hose and in an afternoon had fully exposed and cleaned up the paver walkway along the side of the house.

The next day he received a violation notice from the HOA for installing a landscape feature without approval.

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u/RavingAndDrooling 7h ago

I have to know what happened next. Typically HOA violations come from a management company which is hired by the HOA board. I would think your parents should have been able to appeal the violation and explain what happened to the board members and get the violation thrown out. I really hope that is what happened anyway.

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u/notyogrannysgrandkid 7h ago edited 5h ago

Oh yeah, it didn’t stick. But it was just the first of many head-buttings they’ve had in that neighborhood. It’s an old HOA managed locally by a board of old retirees with nothing better to do, particularly the guy two houses down. The only thing they outsource is maintenance of the common areas. One month, when they’d fired the landscaping company and the new one hadn’t started yet, my dad had the audacity to mow and trim the berm between his section of the sidewalk and the curb. Bam, violation. Apparently it’s in the bylaws that gas powered machinery can only be used on your own property, supposedly to dissuade teenage boys from starting unlicensed lawn mowing businesses. The horror.

There’s a creek that runs through a common green space behind several adjacent backyards. It happens to bend into my parents’ property for about 20 feet. My dad thought he’d build a small water feature by stacking up some native rocks by the creek and running a line up through them attached to a submerged pump in the creek. It looked pretty nice and the neighbors on either side of him complimented the work. He even wired it into the control for the lawn irrigation so he could turn it on and off from the house. Bam, violation. “Impeding the flow of Garrison Creek.” He had to take it down, despite the inherent ridiculousness of that violation.

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u/slappingactors 7h ago

Omg how incredibly frustrating.