Stepford HOA

Hubby and I celebrated our twentieth anniversary on December 21^st (and the world didn’t end, so much for the Mayan calendar). We built a house after being married a couple years, and a year an a half ago the Department of Transportation tore it down. We just celebrated the one year anniversary of that event. We celebrate bizarre things in this family. ‘Observe’ might be a better verb. Anyway, we have pictures of the house being built, and pictures of it being torn apart. The kids had a blast watching it come down.

Being forced to sell your house to the state at a loss and move turned out okay in the end. No, not bitter. We ended up in another new house that the builder had been sitting on for over a year after the sale fell through. The house is gorgeous and they kept dropping the price. Granted the market was soft and everyone is worried for their jobs (me too) and broke (us too) but we couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t sell this house.

The answer? Everyone else understood one line in the contract: HOA.

I read 1984 in junior high, but it’s fiction, right? (Laughs hysterically.) No.

We have two HOA contracts in our housing development. I thought that was odd. One for the development as a whole, we have a binder for that. A whole binder. We had to sign a contract on it when we signed the closing paperwork on the house. There’s a separate contract and smaller binder that covers our specific cul-de-sac and a few others that border the water features in the development. So two separate sets of rules.

Hubby and I thought it was funny. We laughed, signed, glanced at it, and moved.

We met the neighbors. They talked about The HOA in hushed tones. We laughed.

We started to notice odd things. You don’t see or hear cats or dogs. They’re around, but dogs don’t bark. How do you stop a dog from barking? Apparently our HOA can do that.

           
Hello, Tori. Welcome to Stepford.