This Cold House Part IV: The Anticlimax

OK, so it's been a few days since I updated all two of you who give a crap about my house issues. I think I left off where the furnace was fixed, but the Homeowner's Association (henceforth known as the "HOA," or occasionally "those bastards") had decided to finally inspect my house and require that I fix all of the small blemishes.

So those bastards sent a list of ten items that had to be fixed within 30 days. A couple of them were no big deal. Several of them were small (and I mean SMALL) bits of wood rot, most of which I couldn't even see. One was to fix the concrete steps out front, one portion of which had sunk a bit. The big one was that they said I had two different colors of siding on the back of my house, and that I must replace the siding to make the color match.

The wood rot is a pain in the butt, because it is very labor intensive. The concrete was easy (I mean it seemed to take my handyman about an hour). The siding was going to be a problem, and probably very costly. This particularly irked me because I haven't touched the siding while I've lived here- this problem predated my ownership of the house. However, upon further inspection, someone had simply painted the existing siding at some point in the past. And, in a fit of incredible laziness, stopped painting where the ladder wouldn't reach. Now, why you would bother to paint the siding at all is beyond me. But if you're going to do it, do the whole house. Seriously.

So that turned out to be a reasonably easy fix- the handyman just matched and painted the rest of the siding. No problem. There's a bit more wood rot than expected, so that's not fun. But overall, it's not a huge deal. It's costly, but doable.

What really bothers me about this particular incident is the policy of the of the HOA, which apparently was to ignore the housing standards, but to decide to enforce them when I put the house on the market. Among all of the things we're worrying about right now, which obviously include the purchase and sale of houses but also encompasses a particularly annoying problem I'm having with a guy at work and my impending eye surgery, they expect us to shell out a few thousand dollars to fix stuff that they haven't cared about for four years. They call it a "resale" insepction, and it's intended to let the buyers know the status of the house. However, there wasn't one before I bought the house. Apparently it's a change in policy, and two different people have blamed my agent for not noticing the issues when I bought the house. It's all a load of crap.

So that's my story. As the title of this post mentioned, it's rather anti-climactic. Tomorrow I have the first portion of my eye surgery, when I have a pre-operative procedure performed. At some point, I may write something about how this all goes. But I'll put up a warning in case my faithful readers are squeamish...