Paint issue

I kind of want to see what other folks would do in this situation.

Our covenants state that the Association is responsible for the exteriors of the building, including painting, roofs, etc.
It also says if you paint the exterior of your home in the existing, approved color scheme you do not need an ARC request. The shutters and door of every home match and the color scheme alternates, i.e. one house has a black door and shutters, next door is maroon, next door is navy blue, etc.

This weekend, one of our neighbors apparently decided to have a DIY adventure, and I started getting complaints late last night. Apparently he painted his shutters black and his door bright white (which is only approved for trim). I went out before church and took some pictures and emailed them to the other board members and we have been going back and forth. None of us can remember if his house had black shutters before (I think they did, but I had to do Google Street View and it's hard to tell on there.) The black doesn't look bad to me, but the white is obnoxious. My suggestion was to tell him he had 30 days to paint the door to match the shutters since he obviously did both of them and white is not an approved door color.

I am just curious to see what your thoughts are on this. And, before anyone tells me I have too much time on my hands, I feel obligated as a board member to deal with an issue when neighbors complain. And, as hard as we all work to make our houses look nice and have good curb appeal in our neighborhood, this is an issue for us.

Laura

You are jumping around a bit.

Are you saying the doors and shutters must be painted the same color and the color from an approved color chart?

Can adjoining units use the same color?

Is the above in your docs?

Tim
I get the shutters one color and the door another color but the question is do the docs say shutters and doors must match? That was not made clear in the OP.

She said they do allow unit owners to paint as long as it is with an approved color so this implies they do not need ARC approval if they are going to use already approved colors.

Maybe they are approved colors thus back to must shutters and door match.

Even if they do allow people to paint, they should add that the ARC must still approve.

Could the white door be a primer coat?

Sounds to me like they had used the approved color scheme. I would think for this matter to be enforceable the documents would need to be more specific.

The documents aren't very specific. And, as far as I know, the builder didn't leave us a list of the colors they used. To me, though, common sense would dictate if no one out of 236 units had a white door and every single door matched its shutters that you would realize that was the approved color scheme.

It's kind of a catch-22. Our shutters are starting to fade with the sun and I would like to have them repainted, but there are roof repairs that need to be made first and, like most people here, our builder left our reserves woefully underfunded when they gave us control. I do appreciate that the homeowner painted the shutters, but I just don't understand why he didn't paint the door the same color. And I surely don't want a lot of white doors around here.