Apex wrote:HOA's (that's HomeOwnersAssociations) can sure get rules up that irk ya. But here in Miami, there's an incorporated area, I won't mention the name, but it's close to where I am, that has its own irky rules and ordinances: No pickup trucks can be visible from the road between 7am and 7pm, if your living room is visible from the road, the interior has to be painted in only certain colors, house for sale signs have to be a certain very small size, newspaper vending boxes cannot be red in color. Probably more stuff I don't know about.
No rain in Cal, too much in Texas. Here in Miami, we've had almost no rain so far. My lawn turned brown, then we got some rain, turned green, again no rain, it's starting to get brown again. Some houses around me have nice, green, well watered lawns, obviously have sprinkler systems. How nice for them. Yeah, fake grass or whatever sure would be nice, but I'm sitting on 37,000 sq ft of land here, might be cheaper to have a Corvette sitting on a brown lawn. Unless, of course, the county would like to pay for it. The fake lawn, that is.
The good news is that with hurricane season only two days away, we've had a projection of very few storms this year. All we need is another big or biggish one, another excuse for insurance co's to raise homeowner insurance rates again.
I love HOA's! they're like little, petty Gestapos, a law unto themselves. We were recently looking at a very nice, well made, custom home to buy in our area of Northwest MN. I found out there was a HOA and I told our realtor I wanted a copy of the bylaws before we bought it. I had dealt with them before. He sort of blew me off until after we put in an offer on the house. He finally got the bylaws and guess what? It's a 55+ development which normally means the home owners must be at least 55 years old (notice I did not play politically correct and say "years of age" which I think is asinine). This particular development's bylaws said NO KIDS UNDER 18 YEARS OLD COULD LIVE THERE! And they didn't even have the balls to come right out and say it. The bylaws explained in detail that children were permitted to visit for a certain length of time and there was an underage curfew, they couldn't make noise before or after certain times, etc. I called our realtor and told him to pull the offer and then I proceeded to chewed his butt for not being aware of it before he showed us the house. Come to find out neither the home owners or their realtor knew it either. They were all rather apologetic but I was still pissed. I really liked the house but not enough to send my 15 year old daughter off to the orphanage.
The fake grass idea is OK but I want to take it one step farther...Fake grass
and fake flowers. They have some pretty real looking artificial flowers these days. I figure I can plant them and all I have to do for maintenance is spray a little water on them once in a while to knock off the dust and Ta-Dah, beautiful garden even during the winter here in the Frozen Tundra. Some of my ideas drive the Missus crazy.
