Kathleen's Blog

I would like to tell you a story about freedom. About property rights. About the American dream of owning a home and doing with it as you please.

This is not that story.

This is a story about how I wanted to paint our house a color, and roughly the population of a small medieval village had to weigh in first.

It started, as these things do, with an innocent idea

The house needed paint. This is not controversial. Even my HOA, on a good day, will concede that houses are improved by not peeling. So I did what any responsible homeowner does: I picked a color, I lined up a painter, and I prepared to spend our money on our house like the rugged frontierswoman I am.

Sweet summer child. That me — the one who thought this was her decision — is gone now. She has been processed.

Meet the Committee

To paint our house, I first had to submit an Architectural Modification Request. This is a document. It has fields. It has a section where you affix your paint chip like you’re entering it into evidence at trial, which, spoiler, you basically are.

The request then goes before a panel. Allow me to introduce the cast of people with strong feelings about my exterior, ranked by how little they are contributing to the cost:

• My next-door neighbor. Has feelings. Will mention them over the fence in a tone that is technically friendly but legally a warning.
• My neighbor’s neighbor. Has never spoken to me. Has, I’m told, opinions. The opinions arrived before I did.
• The Architectural Review Committee. A body of three to five individuals whose qualifications for judging color are that they were available on a Tuesday.
• At least two committee members who, I am increasingly confident, do not live in this neighborhood. I have looked. I cannot find them. They may be a rumor. They may be the binder’s emotional support humans.
• The binder. The CC&Rs. Forty-seven pages of governing documents that carry more authority than I, the deed-holder, will ever possess. The binder is the real homeowner. I am a tenant of the binder.

That’s the short list. I’m not counting the management company, the management company’s portal, or the portal’s password requirements, which are themselves a form of architectural review.

The Scientific Testing Phase

At some point, selecting a paint color ceased being a home improvement project and became a federally funded research initiative.

Jay and I purchased paint samples. Then more paint samples. Then additional paint samples because the first paint samples looked different at 8:00 a.m. than they did at 4:00 p.m.

Soon our house looked less like a residence and more like a color wheel having a nervous breakdown. Jay painted sample after sample after sample on the exterior walls. Not ten samples. Not twenty samples.

Five hundred.

Okay, maybe not literally five hundred. But if you had driven by, you would have reasonably assumed we were attempting to communicate with aircraft.

There were squares. There were rectangles. There were shades of gray so similar that they could only be distinguished by people who professionally calibrate television screens.

Every evening we would walk outside and stare thoughtfully at two colors that appeared identical.

“That one is a little bluer.”

“No, that one is slightly grayer.”

“I think this one has depth.”

Poor Jay. Every day he’d hear the words: “I have one more color I’d like to try.”

No husband deserves that sentence as many times as he heard it.

The Review

Here is the part that brings me genuine peace. The financial portion of this project — the part where we pay for everything — was approved instantly, unanimously, and with zero paperwork. No committee convened to ask whether we could afford it. No neighbor expressed concern about the budget. The money? The money we were trusted with completely.

The color? That required a quorum.

The Verdict

Approved.

The color we went with — the shade that survived the gauntlet, that passed before the panel, that satisfied the binder and the two committee members who may or may not be corporeal — is Dunn-Edwards Slate Gray, DEGR73.

It is a blue gray. A good gray. A grown-up, sophisticated, “this homeowner has her life together” gray. It is mine, hard-won, committee-tested, and now, at last, legally permitted to exist on my own walls.

I love it. I would love it more if I hadn’t had to earn it like a merit badge.

In conclusion

If you don’t hear from me in six to eight weeks, know that I’ve been absorbed into the Architectural Standards Subcommittee and am currently reviewing someone else’s mailbox post for compliance.

I’ve developed strong feelings about mulch. have opinions about a fence two streets over.

I’ve started using phrases like “architecturally harmonious.” The Binder got to me.

Send snacks. Send wine.

And if possible, send one slightly different gray paint sample. Apparently we haven’t ruled those all out yet.