Nothing frustrates an HOA faster than a homeowner who reads the rulebook more closely than they do.

What would you do if your HOA sent you a letter demanding you take down a small yard sign supporting a local business?

Would you quietly comply and take it down? Or would you search for a way around the rules?

In the following story, one father finds himself at odds with his HOA over this very issue. Here’s what he did.

My Father vs. the Home Owners’ Association

I’m a little fuzzy on exactly when this was, but for loose context, it’s 2018-ish. We’re living in this little two-story in a subdivision in upstate South Carolina, which my parents still own.

My family just had a full run of renovations done on the house – kitchen remodel, new floors, wallpaper removed, new paint on the walls, etc.

The folks who painted did an especially good job.

Since they were a small, local business, they wanted to know if they could put a little sign in our yard for a few days as an advertisement (y’know, those little plastic-type yard signs, nothing big or fancy).

The HOA was not happy about the sign.

My dad was happy to oblige and showed them where to put it to avoid the sprinkler system.

Everything’s great.

Two days later, a letter arrives in our mailbox. It’s from the HOA (Home Owners’ Association). According to the bylaws, no signage can be placed in a yard for more than 24 hours.

We hadn’t been planning to leave it up more than a few days, maybe a week at the most, but to be told that supporting a small business was an eyesore came out of left field.

This is the part where I tell you that my father, despite being a very considerate and respectful man, has some sort of problem with authority—especially when that authority is arbitrarily telling him what to do on his own property.

He listened to what she had to say.

The first thing he does is pull out his copy of the neighborhood bylaws.

He and my mother both look over it, and lo and behold, the quoted passage does indeed state that “no signage or similar mode of advertisement is to be displayed in a yard for more than 24 hours.”

Not one to go down quietly, my father took to combing through the applicable section, looking for any loophole he could find.

He found one in the word “yard.”

Two or three days after that, one of the ladies who works for the HOA came down to our house to personally ask us to remove the sign. She and my dad stepped out on the front porch and must have been out there for nearly half an hour.

I don’t think I heard him say anything other than the occasional “mhmm” or “yes, ma’am” until the very end.

Ultimately, the sign stayed up for about a month.

See, the sign was no longer in our yard – it was in the flower bed.

Other parts of the bylaws, even in the cited section, distinguished the flower bed as separate from the yard, and since this particular clause mentioned the yard alone, the flower bed must have been fair game.

And he told this (honestly quite nice) woman as much, without so much as knitting his brows or raising his voice.

The sign stayed in our flower bed for nearly another month, perhaps out of spite, before we finally took it down.

Nice! That’s one way to handle the HOA.

Let’s see what the readers over at Reddit have to say about HOAs and bylaws.

This reader clearly doesn’t like HOAs.

That’s very spiteful.

The sheer mention of an HOA sends this person running.

This would’ve also worked well.

He definitely won that battle.

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.