My HOA President Put An $11,640 Lien On My House Over My Late Husband’s Clothesline. Then The County Records Showed Neither Of Our Houses Was In His HOA

The landscaping crew showed up at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning in June, three young men in green shirts with a truck and a trailer, and they started pulling up my tomatoes before I’d finished my first cup of coffee.

I came out on the front step in my housecoat. Sully, my beagle mix, came out with me and started barking at the trailer like it had personally insulted him.

“Excuse me,” I said. “What are you doing?”

The one with the shovel looked embarrassed. “Ma’am, we’ve got a work order from the association. Front-yard vegetable beds. Remove and restore to sod.”

Those beds were two raised boxes of cedar my husband built in 2009. They had Cherokee Purples and Sun Golds in them, staked and already flowering.

At the end of my driveway, on the sidewalk, stood Trent Vandermeer, president of the Thistle Creek Homeowners Association. He was holding a coffee from the drive-through and wearing the kind of quarter-zip pullover men wear when they want you to know they don’t have to be at an office.

“Morning, Vera,” he said. “You had sixty days.”

“I wrote you a letter. I asked for a hearing.”

“And the board considered it.” He took a sip. “The board’s decision was in the letter we sent back. You should read your mail.”

The young man with the shovel looked at me, then at Trent, then put the blade into the dirt. I stood on my step and watched them dump my husband’s tomatoes into a contractor bag, flowers and all.

Trent stayed until they rolled out the new sod. He even took a picture of it with his phone.

The Clothesline Stan Built in 1992

I’m seventy-three. I was a reference librarian at a public high school in Garner for thirty-one years, which means I spent most of my working life helping sixteen-year-olds find things they swore didn’t exist. I was married to Stan Wexler for forty-four years. Stan carried mail in this same part of Wake County for thirty-three. He died in October of 2021, in his recliner, during the second inning of a Durham Bulls game. I like to think he’d have wanted it that way, though I’d have preferred the ninth.

We bought our house at 14 Larkspur Court in the spring of 1991. Three bedrooms, a carport, a backyard that runs down to a little drainage creek where the box turtles come up in July. It cost $86,500. Our daughter was eleven.

The summer after we moved in, Stan sank two T-shaped metal posts in concrete in the backyard and strung four lines of plastic-coated wire between them. He did it because our dryer was a hand-me-down from his sister and it scorched everything. And then the new dryer came, and we kept the clothesline anyway, because Stan liked how sheets smelled after a day in the sun, and so did I.

For thirty-two years, I hung sheets on that line every Monday it didn’t rain. Nobody ever said a word about it. The neighbors’ kids ran through the wet sheets playing hide and seek. Our grandson Xander did too, when he was small.

After Stan died, I kept hanging them. There’s no good way to explain it to somebody who hasn’t lost a husband, but the line was something his hands built that still did its job every week. It felt like a conversation.

The New President

Trent Vandermeer and his wife bought the big brick house at 9 Teasel Lane in 2018. They redid the whole thing: new windows, a pool, a black iron gate across a driveway that has no reason to need a gate. In 2019, he ran for the HOA board, unopposed, because nobody ever ran for the HOA board. By the spring of 2020 he was president.

The Thistle Creek HOA had, for most of its history, done three things. It mowed the strip by the entrance, it paid for the light on the entrance sign, and once a year it sent a letter about trash cans. Dues were $180 a year. I’d paid them on time since 1992 without ever thinking twice.

Trent had bigger ideas. He hired a management company. He raised dues to $540. He started a monthly email called “Thistle Creek Standards,” with photographs of people’s houses, and he walked the neighborhood on Saturday mornings with a clipboard, which I know because I watched him do it from my kitchen window.

My first letter came in March of last year.

“It has come to the Board’s attention that an exterior clothes-drying apparatus is visible from the common area at the rear of your Lot, in violation of Article VII, Section 12 of the Declaration of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions. Please remove the apparatus within thirty (30) days to avoid fines.”

The “common area” was the drainage creek. You could see my clothesline from the creek if you were a box turtle.

I wrote back. I explained that the line had been there since 1992, longer than anyone on the board had lived in Thistle Creek, and I asked politely whether a grandmother’s sheets were really a threat to anyone’s property values.

The reply came on the management company’s letterhead and was signed by Trent. The answer was yes.

My Laundry on a Projector Screen

The annual meeting that year was in the fellowship hall of the Methodist church on Old Stage Road. Maybe forty people came, which was forty more than usual, because Trent had promised free pizza.

About an hour in, he put up a slide that said “Ongoing Compliance Issues.”

The first photograph was my backyard. It had been taken from the creek, zoomed in. My sheets were on the line. So was my underwear.

There was a little ripple through the room. A man near the front laughed and then stopped when his wife elbowed him.

“Now, this is a good example,” Trent said. “We’ve got a resident who’s been asked repeatedly to remove a laundry line, and who’s taken the position that the rules don’t apply to her because she’s been here a long time.” He smiled at the room. “I respect that. I do. But some of us moved here for the property values, not to live next to 1955.”

I stood up. I’m not a woman who stands up in meetings. I spent my whole career telling teenagers to use their indoor voices.

“Mr. Vandermeer,” I said. “That’s my underwear.”

“Then you might consider drying it indoors,” he said, and a few people laughed, and he moved to the next slide, which was about a basketball hoop on Primrose Drive.

His treasurer, Sheila Ulrich, a pleasant woman who sold insurance, came up to me afterward by the pizza boxes. “I’m so sorry about that slide,” she said in a low voice. “I told him not to use it. But honestly, Vera, the fines are adding up. It might be easier to just take it down.”

“How much are the fines, Sheila?”

She looked at her shoes. “Twenty-five a day. Since April.”

Self-Help

In the next eight months, I got eleven letters. The clothesline was joined by my tomatoes, because the front beds were “an agricultural use inconsistent with the residential character of the community.” Then my mailbox, because Stan had painted a bluebird on it in 2014 and the approved mailbox color was black. Then my carport, because I parked in it and the Standards preferred garages, which was difficult, because my house doesn’t have one.

I kept paying my dues. I asked for a hearing in writing three times. Twice I got no answer. The third time, I got a hearing in the management company’s office in Cary, which took eleven minutes, and at which Trent read the violations aloud and the other two board members looked at their phones.

Then came the Tuesday in June with the landscaping crew. Two weeks later I got an invoice for $1,900 for “removal and restoration,” which the board had added to my account.

In September, I got a certified letter from a law firm in Raleigh.

The association had filed a claim of lien against my house at the Wake County Register of Deeds. The amount was $11,640: fines, the $1,900 for the crew, late charges, interest, and the law firm’s own fees. The letter said that if the balance wasn’t paid in full within thirty days, the association “reserves all rights, including foreclosure of its lien.”

I read that word four times. Foreclosure. On a house Stan and I paid off in 2006.

I called my daughter in Charlotte. She wanted to pay it. “Mom, it’s eleven thousand dollars. It’s not worth your blood pressure. Take the line down, pay them, be done.”

Xander, who is twenty-two and just started law school at Campbell, got on the phone after her. “Grandma,” he said. “Before anybody pays anything. Have you actually read the declaration?”

I was a reference librarian for thirty-one years. I was ashamed he had to ask.

What Tobias Remembered

The same week, I took a plate of zucchini bread across the cul-de-sac to Tobias Zane.

Tobias is eighty-four. He and his late wife were the very first people to buy on Larkspur Court, in 1990, when it was still red clay and survey flags. He sits on his porch most afternoons with a transistor radio and a glass of sweet tea, and he knows everything that has ever happened on our street.

I showed him the lien letter. He read it slowly, holding it at arm’s length.

“Phase Three,” he said.

“What?”

“We’re Phase Three. Larkspur and Teasel and the end of Primrose. The first builder, the one who did Thistle Creek, went bust before he got to us. Sterling-Toomey. Banks took the land. Another outfit came in and finished our streets. Cheaper houses. No pool, which was supposed to be in the original plans.” He tapped the letter. “I don’t remember ever signing anything with that association. Nobody asked us to. Then about ’93, they sent a nice letter asking if we’d chip in for the entrance sign, and everybody just kind of started paying.”

I sat back in the rocking chair.

“Tobias, are you telling me we’re not in the HOA?”

“I’m telling you I’m an old man who used to drive a forklift,” he said. “You’re the librarian. Go look it up.”

The Register of Deeds

The Wake County Register of Deeds is on the first floor of the Justice Center in downtown Raleigh. Most of it is online now, but the older plats and declarations are scanned images, and some of them are hard to find unless you know the book and page. I went in person on a Thursday with a legal pad, three sharpened pencils and a granola bar in my purse, the way I used to prepare students for a research day.

The deputy register who helped me was a young woman named Yolanda Suarez. She had reading glasses pushed up into her hair and the patience of a saint. When I explained what I was looking for, she said, “Oh, I love these,” and pulled a chair around to my side of the counter.

We found the Declaration of Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions for Thistle Creek first. It was recorded on April 4, 1988, in Book 4219, Page 0377. Exhibit A, the legal description of the property it covered, referred to two recorded plats: Thistle Creek, Phase One, and Thistle Creek, Phase Two.

Article II of the Declaration said additional land “may be annexed” and made subject to the Declaration, but only by recording a Supplemental Declaration, signed by the Declarant, describing the new property.

“Okay,” Yolanda said, cracking her knuckles. “Let’s find the supplemental.”

We searched by the developer’s name. By the association’s name. By the subdivision. By the book and page of the Phase Three plat, which was recorded in October of 1990 by a company called Carolina Pines Development, the outfit that had bought the land from the bank.

There was no Supplemental Declaration. Not in 1990. Not in 1991. Not ever.

Yolanda searched again. Then she called over her supervisor, a gray-haired man in suspenders who had worked in that office for thirty-six years, and he searched too.

“There’s nothing,” he said finally. “Phase Three was never annexed. The Phase Three lots aren’t subject to this declaration.” He looked at me over his glasses. “Ma’am, unless you signed something yourself, that association has about as much authority over your house as I do.”

I pulled out my own deed, which I’d brought in a manila folder. It said our lot was conveyed “subject to easements and restrictions of record.” Yolanda and I checked. There were no restrictions of record on Phase Three. Carolina Pines had never recorded any.

I sat in that plastic chair at the counter with my legal pad and cried a little bit, and Yolanda handed me a box of tissues from under the counter like she did this every day. Maybe she does.

Article Four, Section Two

That night, Xander came over with a pizza and his laptop, and we read the association’s bylaws together at my kitchen table, the same bylaws Trent quoted in every letter.

Xander found it first.

“Grandma,” he said. “Article Four, Section Two. ‘Each Director shall be an Owner of a Lot subject to the Declaration.'” He turned the laptop toward me. “Where does Trent live?”

“Nine Teasel Lane.”

“Which phase is Teasel Lane?”

I didn’t have to look it up. Tobias had told me that afternoon. Larkspur and Teasel and the end of Primrose.

Trent Vandermeer, president of the Thistle Creek Homeowners Association, who had put my underwear on a projector screen and my house under a lien, did not own a lot subject to the Declaration. He’d never been eligible to sit on the board. Every letter he’d signed as president, every fine, the hearing that took eleven minutes, the work order for the landscaping crew, the vote to file a lien against my house: all of it rested on the authority of a man who had none.

Xander sat back in his chair. “That,” he said, “is the best thing I’ve ever read.”

A Letter on Real Letterhead

I’m not a person who has a lawyer. Xander’s property law professor gave him a name: Yvette Stroud, a real estate attorney in Raleigh who had, according to the professor, “spent fifteen years making HOAs regret things.”

Yvette was fifty, small, and wore a navy blazer with sneakers. She read my packet in about four minutes and then read it again, more slowly, with a yellow highlighter.

“Mrs. Wexler,” she said. “Did you make these copies yourself?”

“At the Register of Deeds. They charged me a dollar a page.”

“You tabbed them.”

“I was a librarian.”

She smiled for the first time. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

Her letter went to the association’s law firm the following Monday. It was four pages long. It said the Phase Three lots, including mine, had never been made subject to the Declaration. It said the claim of lien was therefore invalid on its face and constituted a cloud on my title. It said the association’s agents had entered my property without permission and destroyed my plantings. It noted, in a separate paragraph, that under the association’s own bylaws, its current president was not eligible to serve, and that every action authorized under his signature was open to challenge. It demanded the lien be cancelled of record within ten days and that my damages be paid.

It also mentioned, very politely, that there were forty-one homes in Phase Three, and that every one of them had been paying dues to an association they didn’t belong to for more than thirty years.

The law firm stopped answering Trent’s emails. I know this because Sheila Ulrich told me, standing in my driveway in her work clothes, nine days later.

“He’s furious,” she said. “Their lawyer told the board to stop all enforcement on Phase Three and not to say a word to anybody. Trent wants to fight it. He says it’s a technicality.”

“Sheila,” I said. “The whole HOA is a technicality. That’s what a recorded declaration is.”

She laughed, then covered her mouth. “There’s a special board meeting Thursday,” she said. “I thought you should know. It’s open to homeowners.” She paused. “Well. To owners. I guess you can come anyway.”

Thursday Night at the Fellowship Hall

The fellowship hall was full. Word had gotten around Phase Three in that way word does, from porch to porch and mailbox to mailbox. Tobias came in a pressed shirt with his transistor radio in his pocket. People from Phase One came too, I think mostly to see what would happen.

Trent stood at the front with his laptop. The association’s lawyer sat at the end of the folding table, a tired man in a gray suit who did not look happy to be there on a Thursday night.

“This is a closed agenda item,” Trent began. “We’re here to discuss a pending legal matter with counsel, and I’d ask homeowners to…”

“Mr. Vandermeer,” the lawyer said, without looking up. “This is an open meeting. You noticed it as an open meeting.”

Trent’s jaw worked. “Fine. Then let’s be clear. Nothing about this changes anything. Mrs. Wexler has been in violation for over a year, and some kind of paperwork error from 1990 doesn’t…”

Yvette, sitting beside me, raised her hand. “May my client show the board one document?”

The lawyer nodded before Trent could answer.

I’d brought a flash drive. Xander had shown me how to work the projector before the meeting. It’s the same model the school library had in 2009, so I knew it better than Trent did.

I put up the Phase Three plat. The streets were labeled in old drafting letters: LARKSPUR COURT. TEASEL LANE. PRIMROSE DRIVE, LOTS 31 THROUGH 41. Under the title block, recorded October 1990, the developer’s name: Carolina Pines Development. Nowhere on it was the word Thistle Creek Homeowners Association.

“This is where I live,” I said. I used the laser pointer. “And this,” I said, moving the red dot two streets over, “is Nine Teasel Lane.”

The room got very quiet.

Somebody in the back said, “Wait. That’s Trent’s house.”

“Article Four, Section Two of the bylaws,” I said, “says every director must own a lot subject to the Declaration. No Phase Three lot is subject to it. The Register of Deeds checked. So did his supervisor.”

I turned off the projector.

“Mr. Vandermeer,” I said. “You put my underwear on this screen last spring. I thought it was only fair I bring something too.”

I’ve never heard a room laugh like that. Not cruel laughter. Relief, I think.

The association’s lawyer cleared his throat. “Mr. Vandermeer,” he said, “I’ve advised the board in writing that Mrs. Wexler’s position on annexation is correct, and that your eligibility to serve is, at minimum, seriously in doubt. My recommendation is that you step aside tonight and that the board cancel the lien.”

Trent looked at Sheila. Sheila looked at the table.

“You’re joking,” he said.

Nobody was joking.

What the Paper Trail Paid

The Cancellation of Claim of Lien was recorded at the Wake County Register of Deeds on November 2. Yolanda emailed me a copy the same afternoon with a single line: “Book and page, Mrs. Wexler! Congratulations.”

The association’s insurance carrier settled with me in January. I’m not allowed to say every detail, but I can say it covered all of Yvette’s fees, the $1,900 for the crew, every fine I’d been charged, the dues I’d paid since 1992, and a separate amount for clouding my title. The total check was $14,980. I put the first five hundred toward new cedar for the tomato beds.

Trent resigned from the board the night of the meeting. He claimed it was for “personal reasons.” Two months later, the Vandermeers listed the brick house on Teasel Lane. When the buyers’ attorney searched the title, he found no HOA restrictions on it, which Sheila tells me knocked some value off, because Trent had been advertising the “exclusive community pool” that Phase Three never had any right to use.

The forty-one homes in Phase Three held a meeting of our own on Tobias’s front lawn, in folding chairs. We voted on whether we wanted to join the HOA properly, with a real Supplemental Declaration. The vote was thirty-eight to three against. We still chip in voluntarily for the entrance sign light. It costs about four dollars a year per house.

Sheila is the new president. She came by in March to apologize properly, and she brought a pound cake, and we sat on my back step and watched my sheets blow on Stan’s line.

“I’d have lost,” she said. “If it were me. I’d have just paid it.”

“Most people would,” I said. “That’s what he was counting on.”

Monday Wash Day

I replanted the tomatoes in April. Cherokee Purples and Sun Golds, same as Stan always did, in new cedar boxes Xander and I built ourselves from Stan’s old plans, which I found folded inside a seed catalog in the carport. They’re in the front yard again. They’re flowering right now.

Every Monday it doesn’t rain, I still hang sheets on the line. Two T-posts, four wires, a little rust at the joints. Sully lies in the shade underneath and snaps at the drips.

Last Monday a young couple who just bought the old Vandermeer house walked by on the creek path with a stroller. The wife stopped and waved, and called up to me that she hadn’t seen anybody line-dry sheets since her grandmother in Ohio.

“Smell them when they come off the line,” I called back. “You’ll never go back.”

She laughed and said she might have to get one. I told her there’s nobody on Teasel Lane who can stop her.

If someone in your neighborhood is being pushed around by a board with a clipboard, pass this along. And tell me in the comments: would you have paid the $11,640 just to make it stop?

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