The last time I lived in a HOA neighborhood, I tried to mow my lawn and couldn’t get the mower going. I waited a couple hours until my husband got home to start it, and put it back in the garage after mowing.
I got a letter complaining that I was “storing my lawn mower” in front of my house.
A friend recently purchased a home that had been vacant for over half a year. During that time, the yard died. Less than a week after he moved in, he got a letter from the HOA complaining because his law was brown. He contacted the Board President, and told him it’d been that way for six months, that he’d just moved in, and he’d get to it once he got unpacked, but that wasn’t acceptable. So he went out, bought some lawn paint, and painted it an obviously phoney green. When one of them remarked about how it looked, he said, “yep, natural grass would have been better, but you didn’t want to wait for that.” He’s now put the “new lawn” project on the bottom of his to do list.