HOA DEMANDS I Remove my BOAT from my Driveway.. I’m Not Even Part of the HOA! - REDDIT HOA STORIES

HOA DEMANDS I Remove my BOAT from my Driveway.. I’m Not Even Part of the HOA!

Welcome to today's Ripestories Podcast! My Name is Ripe and I am bringing you the best Reddit Stories and commentary! We have funny reddit stories from r/ProRevenge, r/MaliciousCompliance and HOA KAREN stories about homeowner associations in America! We also read subreddits such as rslash justnohoa and stories about insane funny entitled Karens! We also have the best top rated Reddit Stories to fall asleep to. Our funny Reddit videos are perfect to sleep to!

Ripestories is available on all major Podcasting Platforms and on YouTube under the @Ripestories handle. We cover stories from popular Reddit Subreddits like Entitled Parents, Pro Revenge and Malicious Compliance. You can find new uploads here every single day of the week! We also cover content about HOA stories and HOA Karens.


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Speaker 1: Hey guys, welcome back to more HOA Karen Reddit Stories.

In today's Ripe Stories video, I am not in the HOA.

I never paid them a dime and my house was

here before the neighborhood even existed, but that did not

stop a neighborhood HOA tyrant from threatening a lien on

my home. How do you break the person and forcing

the rules when they don't even apply to you? Let's

dive right into the video. And the first one is

titled HOA demands I remove my boat from my driveway,

but I'm not even part of the HOA. This story

was submitted by a listener via email. So for some context,

I am a retired boat mechanic, 40 plus years of

ranching on outboard motors, inboards, jet drives, you name it.

If it floats and it broke, I fixed it. My

hands look like catcher's mitts and my knees sound like

a bag of gravel when I stand up. But my

mind is still sharp and my patience, while legendary in

some circles, is not infinite. I live in the same

house my grandfather built with his own two hands, and

I was lucky enough to inherit it. And yeah, it

sits on a nice chunk of land at the end

of a road that used to be nothing but cow

pasture and pine trees, but then the developers came. Like locusts,

they bought up everything around me, scraped it flat, and

threw up houses so close together, you can hear your

neighbor sneeze. My property was grandfathered in though, meaning the

HOA that came with all those shiny new houses has

about as much legal power over my land as my

cat does. And my cat, bless her furry heart, has

zero interest in my property taxes. I'm telling you this

because it is the foundation of everything that really follows.

My land, my driveway, my rules, simple as biscuits and gravy. Now,

of course, I also own a boat because I'm a

retired boat mechanic. That's like being a retired baker and

not owning an oven. She is an old 19-foot beauty

that I've rebuilt. She sits in my driveway on my

trailer under a proper fitted cover because my garage is

full of tools and parts and one very judgmental cat.

And for years, this was never a problem. But then

she moved in. I don't know where she came from.

And honestly, I don't care to find out. But I

imagine it was someplace where the sun never shines and

everybody walks around with a stick lodged somewhere. The sun

does not shine either. She bought a house a few

doors down and within two weeks she was on the

HOA board. Of course she was. Some people join boards

to help the community, but she joined it like it

was a military occupation. I will call her Karen from

here on because that's exactly what she is. The first

time I ever laid eyes on her, she was standing

at the end of my driveway with her hands on

her hips staring at my boat like it had personally

insulted her ancestors. I was just out watering my tomato plants,

so I gave her the neighborly knot, you know the one, the, howdy,

nice weather, knot. But she did not beg. She marched

up my driveway. She asked, is this your boat? Yeah,

it's mine. You cannot have that here, she said. HOA

rules prohibit boats in driveways. I wiped my hands on

my pants and gave her my best grandpa smile. Um, ma'am,

I'm not in your HOA. She said, everyone on this

street is in the HOA. Not me. This house here

was here before your HOA existed, before your house existed,

before the bulldozers came and evicted all the cows. My

property is exempt here. It's all in the county records

if you would like to look. She informed me and

I quote, that's not how it works. I said, well,

that is actually how it works. She said, don't be

so sure about that. Spun around and marched back the

way she came. I went back to my vegetables and

I figured that was the end of it. A little misunderstanding,

you know. A new neighbor learning the lay of the land. Oh,

you sweet summer child passed me. Oh, how little you knew.

About a week later, I found a printed notice in

my mailbox. It said my boat was in violation of

community standards and I had 14 days to remove it

or face fines and escalating enforcement. I sat on my

porch steps and read that thing like three times. Escalating enforcement?

From a voluntary organization I never joined, never agreed to,

never paid a dime to. By the way, guys, I

guess the mafia was or is a voluntary organization too,

because I think that is also one of the organizations

that can threaten escalating enforcement without a reason. Yeah, that

is like a gym I never signed up for sending

me a bill for not showing up. I did what

any reasonable old boat rancher would do. I ignored it.

I figured, let her spin her wheels. She will go

bother somebody else eventually. But sadly, I was very wrong.

So she came back and this time she knocked on

my door at suppertime. I answered it holding a fork

because I'm not a man who abandons a good plate

of spaghetti for just anybody. She said, we sent you

a notice. I got it. Nice job. You didn't comply. Yeah,

I sure didn't. The boat has to go. The board

has voted. Well, the board can vote until the cows

come home. And believe me, the cows used to come

home right about where you are standing. Does not change

the fact that I'm not a member, though. She then

said the sentence that turned this from a nuisance into

a war. She looked me dead in the eye and said,

If you don't remove that boat, we will place a

lien on your house. A lien? On my house? The

house my grandfather built. The house that has been in

my family longer than plastic has existed. This woman who

had lived in this zip code for about as long

as Milk keeps was threatening to put a lien on

my family homestead over a boat sitting legally on my

own property. I set my fork down on the porch

rail very gently... Like a man putting down his weapons

before picking up bigger ones. Ma'am, I said, you go

right ahead and try that. And when your lawyer stops

laughing at you, you come back here and tell me

what he said. She said, this is not a joke.

I said, you're right about one thing today. It ain't

a joke. It's a hobby of yours and you picked

the wrong driveway. She left. I finished my spaghetti and

it was a little cold, but I didn't care. I

was too busy having an inspiration. Here's the thing about

Karens and I've lived long enough to study them like

a wildlife biologist. They don't actually care about rules. They

just care about power. The rules are just a costume

the power wears. If the rules don't give her power

over me, she will invent new rules. And if she's

inventing rules to swing at me... A man who is

not even in her little kingdom, you can bet your

bottom dollar she is swinging them at everybody else too.

So I started asking around and oh boy, the stories

came pouring out. The fella across from me, fine for

his trash can being visible from the street, it was

behind a bush. The bush grew and the bush committed

the violation, but he still got fined. The young couple

down the road, they got fined because their mailbox paint

was faded beyond community standards. Another neighbor, a sweet woman

who bakes bread for the whole street, got a notice

about her garden decor. And here's the kicker, by the way,

the big juicy one, the one that made my whiskers twitch.

Several of these folks told me that Karen herself had

stuff going on at her house that the HOA rules

very clearly prohibited. But honestly, who was going to fine her, right?

Who was going to fine the finer? She was the

enforcement committee. That's like letting the fox run the henhouse

security company. I did some digging, and what do you know?

Turns out our dear Karen had a lovely little storage

shed in her backyard that was never approved by the

architectural review board, which is required under the very bylaws

she was clubbing people with. She also had a fence

that was several inches taller than the allowed height. And

my personal favorite, she had been using HOA funds to

print her little notice campaign, including the notice she'd taped

to my mailbox, which is not an authorized use of

HOA money, not even a little bit, not even a smidge,

and I put all this in a folder. Then I

sat back and waited, because I had one more move

to make first, and it was a beautiful one. You see,

my property not being in the HOA means that her

rules really mean nothing to me. But my driveway is

at the end of the street visible to everybody who

drives in. It's prime real estate advertising-wise, so I went

and bought a second boat, a project boat, a sad,

sorry sun-bleached one-blown motor that some fella was practically giving away.

I hauled that beautiful disaster home and parked it right

next to my first boat. So that was two boats,

side by side, in my driveway, and then I talked

to my neighbors. I told them my driveway is HOA-free territory.

If any of them had a boat, a trailer, a camper,

anything with wheels that Karen had ever hassled them about...

They were welcome to park it in my driveway free

of charge, as long as they liked. The trash can

fella had a little boat his wife made him keep

at his brother's place, because of the HOA, and it

came home that very weekend. The mailbox couple had a

pop-up camper collecting dust in a storage unit, costing them

money every month because HOA rules said campers could not

be visible. They hauled it out of storage and parked

that beauty in my side yard, right where the whole

street could admire it. By the end of the month,

my property looked like a marina having a family reunion.

Two boats, a john boat and a camper, all lined

up neat as you please, all legal as sunrise, all

sitting there like a giant middle finger for Karen. I

put a sign on the fence and it said, Not

HOA property. Ask me about our parking rates. I was

kidding about the rates, though. Mostly. Karen drove past my

house so many times that week, I'm surprised her car

did not wear a groove in the road. Each pass

she slowed down, each pass her face got a little redder,

and by Friday she looked like a stop sign with

a wig. And she totally broke. Oh, let me tell

you how gloriously she broke. She showed up at my

door on a Saturday morning and she had brought reinforcements

to other board members. I recognized one of them, the

board president, a decent enough fella who always looked like

he was apologizing with his whole body. This is harassment,

Karen announced before I even finished opening the door. It's

a Saturday, I said. And it's my yard. You're doing

this deliberately to provoke the association. Ma'am, I'm doing this

deliberately to store boats. And to provoke you. Which is

legal on my property. Which is, by the way, not yours.

We've been over this. There's a whole conversation we've had.

Multiple times. She turned to the board president. Are you

gonna let him get away with this? And here's where

the tide really turned, folks. Here's where the seas literally parted.

The board president looked at my boat collection, he looked

at Karen, he looked at his shoes for a good

long while, and then he said the words. I will

treasure until the day they nail my coffin shut. Karen,

we need to talk about the notices and the shed

and the fence. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.

I have never seen a Karen experience buffering in real

life before. It was just magical. Turns out I was

not the only one who had been digging. Several neighbors

emboldened by my floating protest fleet had filed formal complaints

about her, the board president told me later over a

beer I happily provided that the meeting where they reviewed

everything was the longest and most satisfying night of my career.

So then Karen got removed from the enforcement committee. The

board reprimanded her formally in writing and the unauthorized fines

got refunded and the fines, well, the very weapon she

loved to swing came swinging right back at her. Yes,

you heard that right. The board fined her for the

unapproved chat, they fined her for the fence, and they

made her repay the HOA funds she spent on her

little harassment campaign. The lean threat, by the way? Obviously,

just an empty threat by Karen Jong-un. Now, before you ask, yes,

the boats eventually went back to normal. The neighbor boat

went home once the HOA revised its rules to be,

in the HOA board's president's words, written for humans this time,

and the camper went on a trip with the mailbox couple,

first vacation they had taken in years. and the project

boat got a new powerhead, and I sold her to

a young fella who promised to send pictures from the lake.

My original boat still sits in my driveway right where

she belongs under her cover, minding her own business, and

Karen still lives down the street. She does drive past

my house every so often, but she doesn't slow down anymore,

she doesn't look, and her hands grip that steering wheel

like it owes her money. And the next one is

a petty revenge story which is titled Party On. My

brother's son Paul was bullied by the kid next door. Constantly.

He was a year ahead of my nephew in school

and much bigger. And there was name-calling, belittling, physical contact

and objects would be thrown too. My brother talked to

the parents a few times but was told that was

just stuff that kids did. The final straw came on

the bus. The bully said next to my nephew... kept

running a finger through his own butt crack and wiping

the finger on my nephew's face, calling it war paint.

The principal claimed there was nothing he could do because

there was no witnesses, but the next day my brother

and his wife pulled Paul from the high school and

enrolled him into a private school, but that didn't stop

it completely. If Paul had friends over, the bully would

go after them as well, and there was a vacant

lot between the two houses owned by the county that

had run pipes underneath. It was about 50 feet wide

by 100 feet deep, big enough for a small football

or baseball game that couldn't be played in small yards

for the houses on the street. However, when Paul and

his friends tried to play there, the bully and his

friends would insist on joining them and disrupting the games.

And at the end of the bully's senior year, his

parents decided to hold a big graduation party for him.

And Paul learned about it because his friends still went

to the same high school. Invites were handed out and

it looked like it was going to be a blowout.

My brother was concerned that the lot between houses would

be the site of the party and that there would

be rowdiness, loud music, cars driving on the lot and

even vandalism right next to his house. Also, the party

was scheduled from 1 to whenever and that probably meant

noise continuing into the night. We discussed this a few

weeks before and then came up with an idea. My

daughter was turning 10 the weekend after graduation and we

decided to have her birthday party on the vacant lot

the day of graduation. About 25 kids were invited, as

well as parents and siblings, and a moon bounce was

booked to take up space on the lot, and we

planned on a few tables for food and drinks. A

couple cornhole boards, and we had enough to fill the field,

so no cars could park on it. We just needed

it to be on the full swing before graduation was over,

and kids started arriving. The bully's high school graduation ceremony

was held on a Saturday at 9am in the morning,

and his family left around 8, and we went into action.

The moon bounce was delivered, blown up, and tables set up,

A grill and some coolers were brought over and people

started arriving around 11 and by noon there were no

more empty parking spaces on the street within 100 yards

of the party. 50 to 60 people milled around and

the lot was pretty full. A large catering truck dropped

off big containers of food and drink in the driveway

next door along with tables and chairs filling it up

and the parents drove up after the graduation ceremony and

saw that the street was filled with cars and the

lot was filled with people their driveway had no room

for them to park in it. They left the car

in the street and then got out. The wife, husband

and bully came over and she started yelling that they

had over 100 people coming in an hour for a

graduation ceremony and that they needed the lot actually. My

brother and I explained to her that we also had

a party and there was no room for them here.

One of the advantages of having a party for young

kids is that both parents typically come to it, so

there were a lot of dads there, and most of

them came over to see what was going on, so

it was strength in numbers. She asked what time we

were gonna end it, and we told her we had

no set ending time. By this point she was totally furious,

and it got worse when my brother told her she

couldn't park in the street like she was, because it

was blocking a traffic lane. A car was parked in

front of her house as well as one in front

of my brother's, And she orders us to have it

moved so they could at least park their car there.

By this time, a couple cars had parked far away

and teenagers walked up expecting a graduation party. The bully

explained to them what was happening and they hung out

for a few minutes before walking back to their cars.

The bully moved the car to a distant parking spot

and stayed there to tell the arriving cars that they

didn't have anything set up yet. We ate, drank and

made merry for the next few hours, bounced, cornholed and

even did some dancing to the music playing. The neighbors

set up a couple tables on their small front lawn,

and a dozen or so teenagers hung out there, but

that was the extent of their party. Cars constantly drove up,

talked to the bully, and kept going, and by six

there were just a few dads still at our party

hanging out. They knew what was going on by this

point and were glad to stay. claiming possession of the

site as long as there was food and beer. And

the next one is a beautiful malicious compliance story, which

is titled, Let me know what I owe you. Yeah,

I definitely will. So this happened a while ago back

in college. I was working at a gas station for

cash under the table, as well as doing some side gigs,

paying my own way through school, if you will. So basically,

I was working with an irresponsible fellow we will call Dave,

and Dave was also going to school, but of course

on his parents' dime. So was not a busy, harried

or desperate as he was truly, just working for rent

and beer money. Dave worked the graveyard shift 12am to

8am and I worked the shift before 4pm to 12am.

We did not have a time clock or anything and

we just got paid for the shifts we were scheduled

for and well, Dave started coming in late. Just 5

or 10 minutes most nights but it really annoyed me

because I was not getting paid for that time. He was.

And finally one night when I called his house at 12.10

and his roommate said he was still playing video games,

he lived about 15 minutes away, I had it. I

laid into him when he finally walked in the door,

a full half hour into his shift. He put on

the whole reasonable guy being confronted by frothy-mouthed unhinged co-worker routine,

eyes wide, hands up, etc. and told me to let

him know on payday what he owed me. I had

considered going to the owner of the gas station, but

then I had a better idea. I started keeping track

of every minute he was late, Five minutes here, 10

minutes there, sometimes 15 or 20. Weeks went by and

I'm sure he thought he was off the hook. Well, actually,

I was being really nice telling him to take his

time getting in, no rush. And then the week before finals,

I walked into the store when he was covering a

day shift for someone, pulled the schedule off the wall

and handed it to him. Which two shifts do you

want to take? I asked. He looked at me funny

and then realized what I was saying here. I rolled

his eyes and reached for his wallet. No, no, no.

Leave your wallet where it is. I don't want your money.

I want your time. So I handed him the graph

where I had meticulously recorded every minute he had been late,

and I said, you owe me 16 hours, two shifts,

pick them. Dude, it's the week before finals. He whined.

I told him I didn't get to pick which nights

he came in late, so he didn't get to pick

the week he paid me back. Unless he wanted me

to hand the graph to our boss, of course. Suffice

to say, he didn't. I had plenty of time to

study that week, and I aced the finals. And the

next one is a funny story from r slash malicious

compliance and is titled, Don't wake me. So I'll start

by saying we usually don't go to bed separately. However,

I got laid off at the time and was not

feeling too keen to go to bed yet. So last

night I came to bed rather late, despite my attempts

to creep across the creaky floor and slowly peel back

the sheets. So I woke up my lady, though no

wrath was sent down upon me until sunrise. It turns

out I had ruined her sleep. And after a discussion,

I promised to come to bed earlier or try harder

not to wake her up. This evening, though, she is

fast asleep. I quietly slip into the bedroom under the

sheets and she is none the wiser. Well, she is

still asleep on the couch after falling asleep watching the movie.

I am in bed and she has not been woken. Update,

I'm alive, although I've been told to watch out. Hopefully

my silver can keep me safe. And yeah, guys, thanks

for watching. I will see you again tomorrow.