Now, I already had gone over about the place we had in Texas where we made the mistake of buying into a community with a Home Owner's Association. You can read about that experience here:
Having lived all over the world with being in the Air Force, gave us a lot of insight into different types of homes.
To look back at the Texas home, it was nice and big! It was a lovely home, a bit too big for our needs but it was really grand to be able to have a house built for you and with everything inside it that YOU pick out, down to the grout color even in the tiled floors! Can't beat that!
The mistakes here were:
A)Getting wall to wall carpet. Bad mistake when you have cats.
B)Choosing to live in a community with a home owners association that got to dictate to you how many pets and what types you could have, when you could have your trash cans out and how quick you had to be to get them in. When you could have your holiday decorations out and how quick you had to be to take them down. To keep your trees trimmed like truffula trees in Dr. Seuss' story The Lorax. Just on and on it went to the list of things you had to do, not of least was the dues you paid which were expensive like over $300 semi-annually. YIKES! Making you buy passes for your guests if they wanted to go to the community pool. Or that you had to keep up this wooden fence including painting it by a certain time or you'd be fined. Had to ask permission as to working on your garden or any major changes to it. If you didn't weed, you could be fined. The list just goes on and on really.
C)Even choosing Texas to begin with as it is so hot and humid that we were miserable in the summer time.
Now all that said, I love Texas, I do. I love many people who are Texans that live there. But although I spent 8 years there, I am not a Texan. My hero died at the Alamo, and I love and adore San Antonio but yea, I am a northern girl who enjoys the cooler weather and all four seasons and does not like humidity at all.
Texas however was fun. I got my own personal home haunt going that got bigger and bigger there each year. Met a lot of great people.
We had hail, so that the roof was pitted slightly but not enough to where I had to replace it although we sure did get bothered by a lot of roofing companies trying to tell you it needed it just after one hail storm.
We had two a/c units, one for downstairs and one for upstairs. This could have been expensive.
When we went to sell the place, unfortunately the people who were to buy it, lived in our community. They had an inspector come in and try to tell us we had to replace the roof and found this itty bitty scratch and this other one and all this little nitnoid things. It was as if they wanted us to fix it all so that they could move into a perfectly new house?! DOH! It was 8 years old, it was going to have dings here or there. We didn't even have little kids nor dogs in there but yea, the cats but they were fixed and declawed although that did not stop them from having accidents on the carpet. That was the bad thing.
So looking back, I would not ever buy into a community again. Not with a home owner's association and not to where you had neighbors so close to you like that. My neighbors were very nice however, so I got lucky.
I also didn't have any problems with anything being stolen, so again, I got lucky.
It was hard to be there for that many years when you've been in the military and used to moving every 4 years. 8 years was a long time.
We quickly did move however to take our daughter up to Maine and we landed in Delaware on an Air Force Base....
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