HOA Tried to Seize My Garage as Abandoned Property—My Lease Agreement Crushed Their Case

HOA Tried to Seize My Garage as Abandoned Property—My Lease Agreement Crushed Their Case I was standing on the threshold of my detached garage, a place that was rapidly becoming my sanctuary, holding a beautifully restored Stanley No. 5 hand plane. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the gravel driveway, and the air smelled of freshly cut oak and WD-40. It was, until that precise moment, a perfect afternoon.The woman on my driveway was Brenda Hixson, President of the Oakhaven Estates Homeowners Association. I knew this not because I was a member—I was emphatically not—but because her face was plastered on the quarterly newsletters that were mistakenly delivered to my mailbox, her smile a rictus of forced cheerfulness that never quite reached her cold, assessing eyes. In person, that smile was gone, replaced by a pinched mask of self-importance. She was a woman built of sharp angles and simmering resentment, poured into a pastel pink tracksuit that was a size too tight and a decade too young. Her hair, a helmet of peroxide blonde, seemed to vibrate with indignation. #HOA #HOAStory #HOAstories #homeownersassociation #story #stories