The HOA President Painted My Fence While I Was On Holiday

I came back from ten days away to a fence that was the colour of a hospital corridor.

My fence had been brown. It had been brown for the eleven years I have owned the house. It was, as of that Tuesday, "Heritage Sage", which is a colour invented by a committee to punish people.

Taped to my door was an invoice. Six hundred and forty dollars. Payable to the association. For "restorative maintenance completed in the owner's absence".

I want to be measured here. I sat on my own step for about twenty minutes.

Then I did three things, in this order.

I photographed everything. I filed a police report for criminal damage, which the officer took extremely seriously and which the HOA had clearly not expected any homeowner ever to do. And I wrote to the board asking, politely, for the specific bylaw permitting entry to a private lot for cosmetic work without written consent.

There is no such bylaw. There has never been such a bylaw. There is a bylaw about maintaining fences "in good repair", and my fence was in good repair, and even if it had not been, the remedy is a notice, not a paint crew.

The board's reply was six pages long and contained the sentence "the president acted in the spirit of the community's aesthetic standards", which I have had printed and framed and which hangs in my downstairs toilet.

They dropped the invoice. They also, when the police report went to the insurer, dropped the president, who resigned "for personal reasons" at the next meeting, in a chair she had bought for the clubhouse herself.

Here is the bit that still gets me, though.

She never apologised. Not once, not in any form. When I passed her at the mailboxes a month later she looked at the fence — my fence, sage, hers now in the only way that mattered to her — and she said, brightly, "It does look better."

And I stood there with my bins and I thought: she is right, actually. It does look better.

I have not repainted it. I cannot decide if that means she won.