lawyers/neighbor/noise/Townhome associations, Baned from all auto activity Options

[drive-ability]

My neighbor launched a lawsuit naming me and my association as defendants, the suit is based on noise from my garage. This is a condo/Townhome and we are attached. The short story is she hired the biggest law firm who enlisted a sound specialist to study the noise. This was a huge dog and pony show in there there sound specialist had recorded 3 weeks of sounds, in short my garage is now off limits to anything but parking. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/WTF.gif) I suspect she put out between 5 and 7 thousand dollars to whip this together.
P.S. Its not over till the fat lady sings, however I wont spend a cent on lawyers.. The noises that made the cut were all from making parts, cutting, grinding and hammering. I'll just have to make the parts somewhere else, however I wont stop tinkering and didn't spend a cent.

This brat is gearing up to do a sound study based on household noise, she says we wake her up every night, so I suspect there will be a round two.. I would guess its going to be a much harder sell for her to get traction with this issue..

I hate condos x infinity but its made me 500K in the last 10 years but will be replaced by a farmhouse home in Washington state some time soon..

[Pnambic]

I was given a real nice basketball goal years ago. Nice rectangular clear plexiglass backboard, etc. I got home and was showing my neighbor and he told me that I couldn't put it up. He wasn't being mean, he was just telling me that the bylaws in the neighborhood association prohibited permanent basketball goals. He said he had been told no and thought he'd save me the trouble. I looked it up and sure enough, its perfectly OK to have the moveable ones that look like crap and are all beat up because the kids knock them down all the time. But you can't have a nice one. When I submitted a request to have an exception, I was given the "If we grant you an exception, then we'd have to do it for everyone else" bullshit cop-out. Geniuses... Still have it, in the box. Waiting for a time and place to put it up.

I remember reading a story about a lady (I think she was in Michigan for whatever reason...) who grew weary of the noise where she lived in the city, so she decided to move somewhere rural. She bought a nice little farm house and all was well. Until a few months later when the farms around her started fertilizing the fields and it smelled like manure. She actually filed a lawsuit against the nearest farms claiming they were infriging on her rights with the smell of manure. I'm pretty sure it was thrown out, but I can't seem to find the story anymore.


Like someone else said, HOA's are only as good as the people enforcing them. The scary thing is that most HOA's are not really governed by local law enforcement. Most local law let them do whatever they want as it takes work off their busy desk. There was that guy a couple years ago, about a year after 9/11 I think that had his house taken from him, by the HOA, because he put up a flag pole in his front yard.

Interesting little read...

HOA's are simply given WAY too much power. Problem is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease and we all know that the squeaky wheels are the ones that work so hard to mess with other peopls' lives via the HOA.

The rest of us who are perfectly happy to live and let live are ignored because we make less noise....so to speak....