An HOA cannot tell you where to put your kitchen sink. It can tell you where the dumpster sits, what the vent cap on the gable end looks like, and whether you may cut a window well into the side yard so a basement bedroom counts as one. That is the shape of the problem. The covenants stop at your door, and a remodel almost never does.
The letter never arrives early. It arrives after the drawings are finished, after a deposit is down on windows, after a neighbor has watched a trailer sit on the street for a week. By then the choice is a redesign or an argument, and both cost money that reading your own covenants first would have saved.
So we ask it on the walkthrough, before anything gets drawn: is there an HOA, and who reviews. Around Geist, Sunblest, Britton Falls, Avalon of Fishers and Bay Creek, the answer is usually yes, with a committee behind it. Assume yours does until you have read otherwise.
What the covenants actually reach
A declaration of covenants is recorded against the land, not against you. It runs with the property and survives the sale, which is why a seller's "nobody enforces that" is worth nothing. Under it sits an architectural review committee — ARC, ARB, modifications committee; the name changes and the function does not. Its jurisdiction is the appearance of the lot.
Almost nothing inside the house is in scope. Layout, cabinets, tile, a wall moved inside the envelope, flooring, a shower rebuilt from the studs out — those are a question for the building department and the house itself, not a committee.
Almost everything outside is in scope, and the list is longer than people expect:
- Roofing, siding, exterior paint and stain, including a color you are certain is identical to the last one.
- Windows and exterior doors where size, grille pattern or frame color changes.
- Decks, patios, pergolas, screened porches, fences, sheds, driveway extensions.
- Exterior lighting, satellite dishes, solar, generators, condensers.
- Grading, beds, tree removal — anything that changes how water leaves the lot.
Between the two sits the band that stops interior remodels — inside work that still ends in a hole through the envelope. Its own section, below.
Two documents, not one
There is the recorded declaration, and there are the design guidelines the board adopted. They are different animals and you need both.
The declaration is the hard document. Recorded with the county, difficult to amend, usually written broadly — no structure shall be erected or altered without prior written approval, that kind of language. Broad is dangerous. A clause that says altered and never defines it means the committee decides what counts.
The guidelines are the soft document, adopted by the board and amended far more often. The specifics live here: fence heights, permitted siding lines, which paint deck the colors come from, whether a vent cap has to be painted to match the field. It is also the version most likely to be stale on the neighborhood website — so ask the management company in writing for the current one and the current application form, and keep the reply. A PDF someone posted to a neighborhood page is not evidence of anything when a violation letter arrives.
Two approvals, and neither substitutes for the other
An ARC approval is not a permit. A permit is not an ARC approval. They answer different questions — how the work looks from the street, whether the building is safe — and each authority is entirely indifferent to the other's decision.
In Fishers the permit trigger is structural, electrical, plumbing or HVAC change, which most real remodel scopes hit. Applications go through the city's online portal, and residential applications are typically issued in no more than 15 working days when the submittal is complete. Once issued, work must commence within 12 months and be complete within 24, absent an extension. Permitting and Inspections is on 317-595-3120, and what the city actually requires is worth reading before you decide your job is small enough to skip it.
Geist complicates this. It is a reservoir community rather than a municipality, and the shoreline crosses three jurisdictions — depending on which side of the water a house sits on, the permit comes from the City of Fishers, the Town of McCordsville, or Marion County's Department of Business and Neighborhood Services. We confirm which one applies to an address before quoting, because it changes the timeline. If the answer is Marion County, the applicant there must be a licensed Marion County contractor or the property owner. That is true of Marion County only. Confirm your own case with the authority that has your address — nothing here is a substitute for that call.
Sequence them, and put the HOA first
Design to the point where you can describe the outside of the job — material, color, dimensions, where it sits on the lot — then submit to the ARC, then permit, then order.
Only one of the two approvals can force a redesign of something you have already paid for. A building department tells you an assembly is wrong and you fix the assembly. A committee tells you the well cover is not permitted on a street elevation, and the whole basement bedroom moves to the other side of the house, taking the framing, the duct run and the electrical rough-in with it.
The permit clock argues the same way. Pulling a permit against a design the committee has not seen starts the commence-within-12-months clock on a drawing that might not survive review.
Two practical notes. Committees meet on their own cadence, and none are obliged to be quick — find out before you plan around it. And many declarations carry a deemed-approval clause: no response inside a stated window and the request is treated as approved. Submit in a way that produces a timestamp, and never rely on a board member saying it will be fine at the mailbox. Written, or it did not happen.
The interior jobs that come out through a wall
This is the band that catches people. Work entirely inside the house, and somewhere in it a hole gets cut through the envelope.
Bathrooms
A bath fan has to duct to the outside of the building, not into the attic, which means a wall cap or a roof cap somewhere a committee can see. Sizing and duct route are their own post — the covenant question is only where it terminates and what color it is. Cheap at the design stage. Expensive after the drywall is up. A new window in a shower wall changes the elevation and the assembly at once. Everything else in a bathroom remodel stays between you and the framing.
Kitchens
A ducted range hood ends at an exterior cap too, and a proper one is bigger than a bath cap. A new window over the sink, a wider one, or a door out to a deck is an elevation change and reviewable. Moving a gas or electrical service can put hardware on a wall the guidelines have an opinion about. The rest of a kitchen job stays inside.
Basements
A basement finish runs into covenants hardest, because two of its requirements are visible from the yard.
The first is egress. Indiana Residential Code Section R310 requires an emergency escape and rescue opening in every basement sleeping room: minimum net clear width 20 inches, minimum net clear height 24 inches, minimum net clear opening 5.7 square feet, sill no more than 44 inches above the finished floor, opening from inside without keys or tools. Net clear opening is the number that trips people — the actual hole when the window is fully open, not the frame and not the glass. A narrower exception exists for openings at grade floor, which is exactly the sort of thing to confirm with your local building department rather than assume. Read the egress numbers in full before choosing a window. In a below-grade wall that window arrives with a well, a cover and often a regrade — all outside, all reviewable, and the shapes available are set out in window wells and walk-outs.
The second is radon. Hamilton County carries an EPA Radon Zone of 1, the highest of three, meaning a predicted average indoor screening level greater than 4 pCi/L; the EPA action level is to fix at 4 pCi/L or higher. Sub-slab depressurization is the standard fix, and what it produces is a pipe that terminates above the roofline. Whether that pipe runs in an interior chase or strapped to an exterior wall is a design decision worth making before a committee makes it for you. Radon in a Hamilton County basement covers why finishing the space changes the reading at all.
Walk-out lots have it easier. Where a door already exists, egress is solved and the elevation is what it is, which is why Geist basements often finish with less exterior work than an identical basement further inland.
The rules that apply while the work is happening
Plenty of covenants govern the job rather than the result, and this is where owners actually collect letters:
- Where a dumpster may sit, and for how long.
- Portable toilets — permitted, screened, or prohibited outright.
- Contractor parking, trailers left overnight, street versus driveway.
- Permitted working hours, which the city may also have an opinion about.
- Material stored in the driveway or on the lawn.
Ask before the dumpster is ordered, not after it lands. We plan around whatever the answer is — driveway protection, staged deliveries, a smaller container swapped more often — and we sweep the site at the end of every day regardless. If you are staying in the house through the work, both go easier when the neighbors are not already writing about you.
What to submit, and what happens when the answer is no
Most applications want the same things: a plat or site plan marking where the work goes, a drawing or elevation, manufacturer cut sheets, material and color named by brand rather than described, dimensions, photographs of the existing condition. Some want neighbor notification. We supply the specifications out of the estimate, where they are already written down.
Sometimes the answer is no. Two things worth saying plainly.
A covenant cannot waive code. If the committee will not permit the well and the window, that basement room does not have egress and it is not a bedroom — it is a den, and it should be described that way to a buyer and to an appraiser. Making a basement bedroom that actually counts is a code question, and no approval or refusal from a neighborhood association changes it.
And a substitution forced after material has been ordered is a change order. A committee rejecting a siding color the week the siding arrives is one of the cleanest examples in what actually causes a change order. Approval before ordering is the whole defense.
Before anyone draws anything
Do these, in this order:
- Find the recorded declaration for your subdivision and read the section on alterations.
- Ask the management company in writing for the current design guidelines and the application form.
- Write down which parts of your job are visible from the street or from a neighbor's lot. That list is your submission.
- Confirm which authority issues your permit — for a Geist address, that question has three possible answers.
- Submit, get the approval in writing, and only then order material.
Do that and the HOA is a scheduling item. Skip it and you find out what the committee thinks at the worst possible moment, with a truck already booked.
When we walk a job we ask who reviews it and we build the answer into the scope, because a design that cannot be approved is not a design. If you want someone to look at yours, ask for an estimate and bring your covenants to the walkthrough.