Give-A-Treat – or how we got new windows and learned not to love our HOA

3 years ago, my wife (Tiana) and I had just bought and moved into our very first home after years of apartment living. We spent almost a year visiting properties around Dallas. We had gotten close on a couple of places, but apart from the cute little house in far east Dallas that turned out to be rat infested asbestos filled fire-hazard, which luckily the inspections got us out of, we hadn’t gotten close to finding a place we liked. In fact, the day we finally visited our new home, we had all but given up and had told our realtor that if we didn’t find a place that day, we were going to put a pause on our search and wait another year to look. That day as we were traveling around we grew more and more depressed. There was the house that had an exterior door in one of the bed rooms and the one that had bars on all the windows, making it look like a cartoon prison. We were ready to give up, but luckily our realtor asked us to visit one last condo.

As we walked into the utter chaos of a home where the owner was in the midst of packing to leave, which had not been worked on or anything, something funny happened, Tiana and I looked at each other and said this is home. There was just something about the place that was perfect for us. We immediately asked our realtor to draw up the paperwork and we made an offer which was in short turn accepted.

Moving into our new home, we quickly recognized that as much as we loved the place, which we still do, there were things we wanted to change about it. The faucets and toilets were corroded, the floor had a soft spot in the kitchen and a slight hole in the hallway that needed to be fixed. We replaced the floor in the kitchen, and are planning to replace the floor in the rest of the condo soon, thereby also getting rid of the hole in the hallway. One Day – Some Day. The closets where original and did not fit with what we needed them to be. But the biggest thing was our windows. They were the original single pane windows from back in 1964 when our condo complex was built. In the summer, they kept no heat out and in the winter, no heat in. All of the screens were torn giving our home the appearance of the end of a slasher movie.

That year we were to fortunate that Tiana’s cousin, Barbara, was so kind to give us a miraculous gift which suddenly allowed us to make a needed investment in our home. We choose to replace our windows. Before doing the installations, we reached out to our HOA manager and based on his response believed we could go ahead and replace them if they looked like the other windows in the complex, which had been replaced. This was kind of weird since if you go around the complex you will find at least 8-10 different styles have been installed throughout the 68 units.

After researching the different vendors we ended up selecting one who by eyesight had the exact same windows as some of our neighbors. As we would soon find out they weren’t. Instead shortly after having installed our new windows we received a letter from our HOA notifying us that we were in violation of the community rules as we had not gotten approval from them prior to installing the new windows and that they were 1/16 of an inch taller than our neighbors’ panes. To this day, I am still unable to see the difference or why this matters.

The one thing I have learned about HOA boards, and in particular about our HOA board is that they are often populated by folks that always- even going back to grade school wanted to be politicians. Unfortunately for them, no one liked them so they never got elected for anything. And unfortunately for us, they decided to use this little bit of power they have amassed to its fullest. Unfortunately for them they didn’t know our capability to fight back – we are fierce like tigers. Especially Tiana.

Like George Patton, we immediately strategized on how we would beat them and how we would protect our new beautiful energy star windows. We reached out to our lawyer to see what could be done legally. We dissected the HOA rules and regulations gaining full understanding of every paragraph. With this knowledge at hand we surveyed the entire property for infractions, finding and documenting them in every single unit, especially the board members. We had also saved all the email correspondence with the HOA manager and prior to our meeting with the board we had put together a case to prove that we were acting in good faith. Basically, we were ready to prove that he had given us an approval (which he had).

Although Machiavelli in ‘The Prince’ tells us that it is better to be feared than loved, we figured it would be even better if somehow we also could be loved. By pure luck timing came to our aid as Halloween was fast approaching and in a bold quick move to build report with our neighbors we decided to create a new tradition, Give-A-Treat. The strategy was straight forward, we snuggled our infant son into a pumpkin costume, and walked from door to door doing reverse trick or treating. The idea was simple – everyone loves babies and candy. The effort was successful and our profile in our community sky rocketed. Additionally, when we finally got to our hearing with the board the combination of our positive reputation in the community as well as the fact that we came ready to bury the HOA manager (which we did) helped us stop them from forcing us to remove our windows. Something we were very happy about.

Funny thing happened during our Give-A-Treat. We ended up liking it on its own merits. Yes, about a third of our neighbors refused to come to the door as we knocked on their door. We assume they were startled, maybe even afraid, since it seems no one hardly ever comes to visit them. Yes it was at times awkward meeting people we had never spoken with before. But these are our neighbors and we genuinely felt that we brought a little light and familiarity into their lives. Also, a very nice lady had baked some delicious cake balls that I really enjoyed eating.

Last year we were going to Vegas with some friends of ours on Halloween weekend for a birthday celebration. We had however decided that we still wanted to repeat the Give-A-Treat, so we went out a few days earlier and to our surprise a lot of our neighbors were happily anticipating our arrival though expecting it a few years later. Our now toddler, now in a Batman costume, was greeted with hugs and smiles. Sadly we didn’t get any cake balls, the lady was planning to have them freshly made for us on Halloween as that is when she was expecting us.

This year, for the third time, we will as a family visit our neighbors, sharing our good fortune with them in the form of delicious candies, while our toddler will be rocking his Captain Planet Outfit. After distributing joy through sugar this all hallows eve I am especially looking forward to watching the sunset through my beautiful windows while hopefully having a cakeball in my hand. I hope you will too.