Paint Color Restrictions

The new Board at the HOA has the task of selecting appropriate / acceptable colors that homes may be painted. As a new Board member, I see this as rather arbitrary since a color I may not like may be liked by many people. Who am I to judge? Most paint manufacturers and their outlets now provide nice brochures where they provide numerous examples of what colors "go together" for a structure's main color and then nice accents. Not only do I see the proccess of BOD selection of colors arbitrary, but the next BOD may select other colors or not permit colors this BOD has selected. Would like your thoughts.

Your board needs to look at the style and number of houses/buildings in your association. Some in the Colonial style stick with Historical colors put out by the various paint manufacturers. If your buildings are Victorian with a lot of fancy woodwork you can have many different colors on one bldg. (the painted ladies of San Francisco look). You may want to consult with the paint specialist at a good local paint store and have them make up some color schemes.

THANK YOU for understanding this simple fact. As you know, you won't please everyone but you can let everyone have a say.

My suggestion would be for the Board to assign a committee of interested homeowners to research and propose color changes (obviously, you would keep the existing colors in the list).

Once the Committee gives submits their proposal, the board should look it over and make any changes deemed necessary.

The Board should then send the information to the membership for review and call a meeting of the membership to vote on the colors.

This way, everyone has had a voice in the process. Even if an approved color is one someone doesn't like, everyone had there say and the colors were selected by majority vote.

Perhaps, I should have stated when I asked the original question, that any house re-painting goes through an approval process. Also, we seldom deal with extremes (oranges,pinks, and fire engine reds). Our community has 395 homes,most 2-story, with a base color and a trim and an accent trim. Originally, the houses were pastels (by the developer) and gradually we have gone to earth tones. Newer develoments in our area (and we have one of over 400 homes just one mile away) are using the much "stronger" colors that are coming into vogue today. Our sellers/homeowners need to compete with these new homes. Color is one factor, albeit maybe a minor one. I see such local outlets as Home Depot having 6-page fancy brochures recommending over 50 color schemes. Other stores and manufacturers are doing the same. These schemes appear to be well done with, I suspect, some professional decorator input. We ask residents to submit paint chips with their request to re-paint. My problem lies with how arbitrary a person can be in the case of a color: i.e. light green trims are okay -the Mineral Spring from Behr is OK, but let's not OK the SeaFoam from Parker since it's just a pinch darker or lighter. I have a genuine feeling that the following day, if the colors were not labelled by name, no one could distinguish between what was approved and what was not. I have another brochure with 36 whites. Paint chips are fine for what they are, but it's even hard to distinguish the difference between some of the whites on the paint chips. Who am I to say Polar White is better than Arctic White when the difference is utterly minimal. I totally agree with maintaining the character of the neighborhoods, considering geographic location within the USA, considering the type of architecture, etc., but my problem lies in saying a person can only have a transparent Olympic Cedar Stain on their fence and not a solid color Olympic cedar stain when I have two fence slats in front of me and the difference is hardly noticeable. I'm just wondering if a resident submits a color scheme from one of the manufacturer's brochures why not consider it? The committee may not have even known about a color scheme or envisioned it. People like to have private property rights, and I believe that selecting colors -without going to the obvious ridiculous extremes - is their choice, esecially if the paint color combination appears in a good brochure or in a national house or home magazine.

> Who am I to judge?

You were ELECTED to judge, on this and other matters.

It's a very good idea to seek input and comment, but ultimately the board needs to do its job.

Andy:

I take this view on colors, I think it is ok for an HOA to have a color pallete and say to your membership if you use these colors go to town and paint the heck out of it. But I also do not think it is right to limit the selection to just a few colors, if anyone has ever picked up a sample stick of paints you realize there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of variations of paints out there and I think it is important for homeowners to have "some" freedom to paint their house how they want.

With that said I would offer this, have some standard colors that are automatic approvals but also have a process that if a person wants to deviate from that, for example instead of beige they go with sandstone...same color family different shade, that those can be approved as well.

I think what you want to protect against is the person who trips on Acid and thinks a hot pink house or an all black house or a neon green house would look pretty cool while they are tripping. I think creativity is alright, you just want to have protection against extremism.

my 2 cents