If you want your house and neighborhood to look like "Wisteria Lane" you need to follow instructions and guidelines from your HOA (Home Owners Association). They basically control everything and their approval is required for about just anything, specially at Highlands Ranch.
If you want to repaint your garage door or balcony, even with the exact same color, you need to fill up a form and wait for their approval. Once painted, you need to inform them and they may check the work done to ensure it complies with their standards.
Same if you want to remodel your garden or repaint your fence, redo your roof or repaint your house... and they event have the right to fine you if your garden (front or backyard) does not look good enough for the neighborhood... It is basically the home owners' police!!
The painting:
The painting company was a complete disaster and I am happy that we managed to escape from it (they actually released me from their contract). I am far from being a painter, but I know the basics...and when a balcony / deck have not been painted in 10 years and the guy only add a layer of paint without even sanding the wood, I say that there is something that does not turn right. At the end of the day, every single part they were supposed to paint, had to be redone (by me)...a complete disaster!!! I even had to sign a paper swearing that I will not write "bad things" against them on the local blogs... Welcome to America!!
I am now almost done with the painting: balcony and deck are done, garage door & service door are ok too. I still have the windows eaves around the house to repaint but I need to borrow a tall ladder from my neighbors.
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| Our new sanded & stained deck...all done by me!! Color: "Teak" and the handrail is an "Aspen white" |
The gardening:
A major remodeling had to be done to our garden as it was really not adequate for little Mila; remember that picture on my previous post?
I found a great landscaping company (HomeStyle Landscaping Inc.) that did a great job in less than a week. The project got approved by the HOA (I actually received a "conditional approval" with a long list of guidelines). We then had to slightly change our plan but at the end, it is very close to the initial idea. Let me show you why it took to do that:
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| Let's start to work!!! |
The first phase was for me to get rid of all (most) of the rocks from this "dry river"... I don't remember how many wheelbarrows of rocks I actually carried but I guess not to far from 25-30 of them, over 2-3 weekends. This helped me to save close to a thousand dollars (estimation from the landscaper)!!! Thanks to Cyrille for having borrowed me his wheelbarrow + shovel + rake, they really helped me a lot!!
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| Garden ready for remodeling...finally!!! |
I got rid of most of the big rocks and the smaller ones ended up on the side of the house.
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It's always good to keep stock of rocks...
Overall, I would say +10cm of rocks on the house side!! |
Here are a few pictures of the in progress phase:
First day:
