New England does also have Historical districts. To do any exterior work on those homes you need detailed plans approved by the historical society. These can take months and months to get approved.
I think originally HOAâs were to make sure people kept their homes looking neat and not like a junk yard. now some of them take it a bit too far.
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Yeah, restrictions such as limitations on what you can plant in front of your home.
That type of rule wouldnât work for me.
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I have been following this thread and have a couple of comments:
- I donât think $600.is out of line for the repair. Electrical problems are hard to track down. In the vacuum tube days, I spent hours tracing down a problem in my high fidelity receivers and amplifiers and my television setsâŠI am also convinced that people that deal with mechanical things have a different mindset than those who work with electronic issues. My brother is a plumber. He can go into a job, survey the situation and go right to the problem. Yet, he will call me on an electrical issue he may encounter on the job. He also anchors the keyboard in jazz and blues bands. He doesnât have music in front of him. He seems to know instinctively when to.modulate to a different key. He has difficulty reading music or following a wiring diagram. On the other hand, I play French horn in two concert bands and a chamber orchestra. I have to have the music in front of me. I made extensive use of schematic diagrams in repairing electronic equipment.
- I have never had rodents chew the wiring in any vehicle I have owned. However, the air conditioning went out in my house. The problem was caused by a chipmunk chewing the thermostat cable in the crawl space under the house that ran from the thermostat to a relay in the outdoor unit. Rodents cause damage.
- As far as homeowners associations are concerned, I really think they overstep their bounds. I had two representatives come to my door and wanted me to.sign a petition against my neighbor who parked his RV in his driveway. I wouldnât sign. The neighborhood association then put in a regulation against storing RVs in oneâs driveway. I told my neighbor that the regulation came about a year after he purchased the RV and the association couldnât.force him to move it. Being a nice guy, he now pays to store it elsewhere. I grew up in the country. Our neighbors had a car that was totaled in an accident and did not have collision insurance. They bought a similar car with a bad engine and swapped the engine from the wrecked car into the replacement. The wrecked car sat on their property for a year before it was hauled away and nobody objected. The funniest situation I heard was from a colleague who lived in an upscale neighborhood. He had a Craftsman riding mower which was red. He was told by his neighbours that the mower looked cheap and wasnât in keeping with the standards of the neighborhood, and if he was going to continue to cut his own grass rather than hire it done, he needed to buy a John Deere riding mower. My colleague repainted his Craftsman mower with green spray paint to look like a John Deere.
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You were correct. The US Constitution expressly bans Ex Post Facto laws and regulations. Even though a neighborhood association isnât a governmental organizationâper seâtheir attempt at an Ex Post Facto regulation such as the one you mentioned could be easily challenged in courtâif anyone wanted to take things to that length.
Well-run HOAs are nice to have around. If my neighborhood were part of an HOA, my neighbor wouldnât be storing junked appliances in his side yard right next to my house. 
The trouble starts because people lead busy lives and donât want to take the time to deal with the responsibility of being on the HOA board. And so such positions often fall to the only people who run for them, and thereâs an old idea that people who most want power are the least qualified to wield it.
Thatâs how you end up with martinets on the board who go around with a tape measure making sure everyoneâs fence is the right height and distance from the center of the street, and sending nasty letters if you paint the shed the wrong shade of âearth tone.â If you can keep those fools out of the picture, then your HOA will be smooth-sailing.
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Well I suppose that answer has two parts. Skill sets/tooling and profitability requirements of the business.
Now when I say electrical/electronic work I donât mean splicing in a new taillamp socket or replacing a window motor. I mean things like multiplexed system diagnosis/repair, intermittent electrical issues, parasitic draw that kills a battery over a week, and things like that. A wiper motor that doesnât run, where we have verified 12V and ground but no input on the LIN bus to tell the motor to do something. Rodent or water damage thatâs affected electrical systems.
Out of 6 of us in the shop there are 2 of us who I feel confident can fix anything electronic. This requires a complete understanding of wiring diagrams, system operation, meters and scopes, and knowing that replacing a window switch in your Tahoe also means dealer level programming. This requires years of experience, tooling, and skill. More so than replacing a serpentine belt or spark plugs. The job is simply more valuable.
You want a nuts and bolts example of tiered labor rates? Say you call the shop and ask for an alignment. The first thing we say is what kind of car do you drive? The answers:
2005 Camryâ$99.95
2019 Camryâ$109.95 because it requires steering angle calibration
2012 F150 with 6 inch lift and Moto wheels with 37" tiresâ$139.95 because those big stupid trucks are a pain
1956 MG with all new front and rear suspension and custom alignment specsâ$189 per hour for as long as itâs on the rack.
The second part is simple, profit. If the business does not generate enough cash flow to remain profitable for the owner, it wonât be here to fix anyoneâs problems. So we need to maintain some sort of per hour income. Letâs say the labor rate is 100/hour and your car needs a starter which is a 1 hour job. Iâll charge you $100 labor and I will make $50 markup on the starter. In simple terms the shop makes $150 in an hour. Now lets say you have a bad ground somewhere in the power window circuit. I find and repair it in an hour, but the only parts I sell is a $2 eyelet. Now the shop is making $101 in an hour for more complex and valuable work. That is simply poor business and can not be allowed to happen.
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Thereâs an old joke about the repairman who gets called down to fix a factory machine. The ownerâs been trying for days and couldnât get it running. The repairman walks in, flips one dipswitch, and the machine works. He submits an invoice for $100, which infuriates the owner because the job only took a minute. The owner demands an itemized invoice, which the repairman submits:
Flipping the dipswitch: $1
Knowing which dipswitch to flip: $99.
People who specialize in something should be compensated more than generalists. They put in the time and effort to learn to do more complicated jobs, and people wonât be inclined to do that if they then have to do harder work for the same pay as everyone else.
In my mind, asking why an electrical systems specialist gets paid more than a regular mechanic is like asking why a certified mechanic gets paid more than the high school kid at Jiffy Lube.
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Thank you for the detailed reply.
Columbia,mMD is one big HOA (Columbia Association). Want to paint your front door a different color? Apply to CA for permission. Too intrusive for me, and thatâs why I donât live there. OTOH, it keeps weird neighbors from getting too weird. The entire county has zoning laws, and you might consider them a HOA of sorts. No farm animals in neighborhoods not zoned for it. You canât build anything too close to the property line without permission from that neighbor. That last one worked in my favor. My neighbor wanted to put a parking pad on the side of his house then park his 25â boat with trailer on it. I heard from another neighbor that he wanted tondo that and told him that I would not OK it. I thought it was important to do that before he started construction. Once that happened, I would have gone to the zoning board and forced removal. I didnât want to make him pay anything for a parking pad that wasnât going to stay anyway.
There are a couple homes like that the next street over. Luckily there are a lot of trees and brush blocking the view. One guy has at least 20 appliances in his back yard. The live free or die state has no laws against it.
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Last 2 houses Iâve owned (2008-current) have been in neighborhoods with HOAs. I donât have any complaints about it. Sure, if I want to paint my house I have to choose from their color palette, but thatâs not an all bad thing. HOA pays for maintaining the community parks, mowing and tree trimming for the parking strips in front of my house, one paid for street repairs/resurfacing and streetlights. The cost has been in the $30-$40/month range, quite tolerable.
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Thatâs just not true, like many of your broad sweeping generalitiesâŠ
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It may be true in some areas, but it is definitely not a universal reality. In my area, HOAs exist only in Condo communities and in gated communities.
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The county where I live have required a HOA for all new house developments built during the last 25 years. The cities/county do not want the responsibility of code enforcement.
Obviously, this is something that varies from one county or state to another.
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