The playhouse had been built in May by eleven Make-A-Wish volunteers, and my granddaughter sat in a lawn chair wearing a mask and watched them work for two days. She has been in treatment since she was four, and the whole point was to give her somewhere outside where she could sit, read, and feel like a normal kid for a little while. In June the architectural review committee sent me a removal order because I hadn’t gotten approval before construction. I filed the application afterward, paid the fee, and attached photographs along with a letter from her oncologist explaining why the playhouse mattered. The committee chair denied it anyway, saying the structure wasn’t consistent with the community’s approved materials list.
I appealed to the board in August, and they upheld the denial four to one. The president told me there was an exception process if I wanted to pursue it, so I went home and read the entire governing document looking for it. There was no exception process anywhere. In September they started fining me, and my daughter eventually paid the fines using money people had raised to help with my granddaughter’s medical bills. I didn’t understand why they were willing to go this far over a small playhouse that wasn’t bothering anybody. Then in November, a woman from the committee called my house, screamed at me over the phone, and suddenly went quiet. Before hanging up, she admitted the chair had received exactly one complaint about the playhouse before the removal order was issued.
I asked who had complained, and she said it came from the resident directly behind me. That was the same neighbor who had brought a casserole to my door the week my granddaughter was diagnosed and had spent an afternoon talking with my daughter when she was having a difficult time. I called her because I couldn’t believe it, and she denied filing anything. Then she asked me to come outside because she wanted to show me something. She had received a copy of the complaint from the committee chair, and it wasn’t about the playhouse at all — it was a letter asking the board to remove “the medical family” from the neighborhood because their situation was “lowering property values.”
