It's only a small victory, but I'm going to savor any victory against them as long as I can.

We are doing a home renovation right now and our HOA is the worst to work with. It took us months to get all the approvals from the HOA which we then finally submitted to the city. After a lot of back and forth we finally got everything approved.

We have the electrician out doing all his work and realized that we wanted to setup the proper voltage for a hot tub in the future. Mind you, we aren't putting in a hot tub anytime soon (as it wasn't in the plans), we just want him to wire for it so we can do that in the future without having to tear up our stucco and redo that part down the road.

Our HOA told us in order to do that we had to sumbit a whole new packet to them, with signatures from our neighbors and photos, etc., and then wait for their 20 day approval process before we could go down to the city for approval. This would delay our whole project by a month... just to put in a plug for a hot tub.

So instead, I went down to the city and politely explained the situation. They approved me on the spot and said not to worry about the HOA.

Now I have the most satisfying email in my inbox form the HOA saying, "We need more information before we approve your request! Please don't proceed with any work until you hear back from us!"