Not sitting on the fence

ok, straight to the point. It's my house, it's my yard, F*ck You HOA.

We wanted a fence, nothing fancy, just a fence. In fact, we really liked the ones that surround the rear yards of the townhouses across the street. So, we do the right thing and file a bunch of papers with the HOA, filling in the blanks in a couple of forms so they knew what kind of fence we wanted, how high it was going to be, who was going to be installing it and when it would be started and completed. Simple right? Bzzzzzt, WRONG.

To cut a long and annoying story short, we cannot have the fence we like or want. You see, we live in a single family home, we pay more HOA fees than the people in the townhomes, in fact we pay more than other people in single family homes because we live on a pipe stem. We cannot have the same fence that the folks in the townhomes have, we have to use an ugly three-bar ranch style fence because we live in a single family home and that's what the regulations say we can have. Not only that, but it must be a maximum of 3 feet tall. We tried to get an exemption stating that a 3 foot tall, 3 bar fence just is not going to keep our Great Dane from leaving the back yard whenever he feels like it. No go. Not a chance. However, we can have wire netting attached to the inside of the fence as long as it doesn't exceed the height of the top rail of the fence. The wire can either be colored green or left to go rusty.

Upshot of it all, we cannot have the nice, well kempt, 5 ft privacy fence like the spiffy looking ones across the road but we can have some piece of shit 3 bar, 3 ft ugly ass fence with rusty wire on it that would be better suited to surround some shack in the backwoods of West Virginia.

Fortunately, our other home, out in civilized Illinois, is not in a neighborhood that has an HOA. In fact, there are no HOAs in the entire city or the surrounding area. We have a really good looking privacy fence out there, looks good, just like our neighbors' fences. Most of the houses in the neighborhood have the same kind of fence around their back yards. (Helps keep the deer out of swimming pools). HOAs aren't needed. period. They exist for one thing and one thing only, to make more money for other people who don't live in your neighborhood.

F*ck you HOA. You suck.