Notice of Noncompliance

My rant for today. Inconsistent HOA's!!! Stuff slides by for years in the neighborhood, now all of a sudden there's a push to clean up....

It's all just so silly, really, it is! Here's the scoop. We have lived in our house for 7 years and have never once, I repeat not even once have we received any sort of warning telling us we were "non-compliant." So the other day I happened to open the door for some reason...I forgot what I was even doing. There was a guy just standing in front of our house looking around with a clipboard. At first I thought maybe a salesman. He looked right at me and said "Merry Christmas" I returned the sentiment and closed the door.

It wasn't until later when I noticed some signs on the mailbox about HOA bylaws that I realized what he was doing-I recognized papers he was holding-since I had one hanging on my door the next day. I now wonder why the heck the didn't guy just say something to me then..."hey, could you please move your yard equipment?" Wouldn't have been so hard. Isn't there something in the HOA about how they go about inspections? I think it was a little cowardice that he didn't say who he was or what he was doing!!!

So we have a rake, a little rake and a broom leaning up against our house in the corner. My neighbor also has a broom on his stoop. I get home yesterday and there was a thing hanging on the door-a "notice of noncompliance" telling us to put the rake/broom out of sight. Are you kidding me? Do they also live here and know what a pain in the neck it is to store stuff in a townhouse, and to do yard work with rakes, etc-especially one right in the middle? Who wants to carry dirty outdoor brooms and rakes all through the house to put them in the storage room? I guess you can call me lazy, but it is also a pain to walk around the whole row of houses to put your stuff away in the basement.

All last year we, along with plenty of our neighbors kept our snow shovel out front. Are we going to get written up for that, too?

Ok, I know there are rules and I want to live in a nice place, but I guess my biggest beef is that there were no warnings-unless there was one I didn't read- that people were going to be inspecting the neighborhood and that they have not been so strict in the past. We just got a new board, so there must be some seriously strict people on it now. Which is fine, but annoying since there has been a "status quo" for some time now. Oh, and the other annoying thing is that we have a screen that fell out of one of the windows and it is leaning up against the house, but they didn't say anything about that. What? I keep trying to put it back in, but give up. So I know I have to fix that, and I feel more bad about that sitting there than I do the brooms. I would have thought that would have been more "offensive" than a broom and rake leaning against the house, and I wouldn't be so annoyed to have gotten a notice for that...but a broom and rakes....seriously!!!

Ok, rant over. I feel better.