Plan B Forum

Devastated parents have hit out at 'disgusting' council red tape after they were refused planning permission for their children's Wendy house.



Michael Heron and Jenna Hulme spent £239 on the play area for their one-year-old daughter Remie and four-year-old son Jacob, and put it in their front garden.

But bosses at Oldham Council have ruled that the toy is an 'unacceptable development'.

Michael, 26, said full-time mum Jenna, 25, was left in tears after the family were informed of the officers' decision on Thursday.

And the family have vowed that the Wendy house is not coming down without a fight.



The council forced the couple to apply for permission after First Choice Homes Oldham, which owns the house in Diggle, Greater Manchester, received a complaint from a neighbour.

Michael, a counsellor, said: 'I was surprised that we were asked to get permission, but the fact that they've then turned it down is totally disgusting.

'Jenna was in tears when she found out and apparently now they can force us to remove it.

'We put it up overnight for Jacob's fourth birthday in May and now I'm going to have to tell the kids it's gone? That can't be right.

'We don't have a back garden and the kids are clearly too young to go and play in public. This is somewhere safe and fun for them to be outdoors.

'The situation is a complete joke and has come about from just one objection. I won't be taking it down unless they come and force me to.

rubato wrote:Send them over here, our HOAs

We had this one strange guy in our neighborhood who liked to build strange things in his house. Well I guess one day he decided to take his hobby outside and build a tree house in his backyard. Our HOA president was a city councilman at the time, and he was not happy in the slightest. This literally turned into a two year dispute where the HOA would keep asking him to add safety measures to the structure in hopes that he would eventually give up, and dismantle the tree house.

Eventually, the HOA told him that he would have to have the plans signed and stamped by a qualified engineer saying that the structure was safe.

At the next meeting, he handed in the blueprints signed and stamped by no other than himself. That was a great meeting.

It turns out that he had a PhD in civil engineering, and there was only one guy in the room that didn't find it funny.

2. Thou shalt not use "inconsistent" shingles — even after a plane destroys thy house
After a plane crashed into the Sanford, Florida, home of Joe Woodard, killing his wife, Janise, and their infant son, he decided to rebuild a new home on the same lot. But his reconstruction came to a screeching halt when his HOA informed him that he'd positioned the new structure unacceptably and failed to achieve a perfect shingle match with his neighbors' homes. Threatened with a lawsuit, the grieving widower told a local reporter that he'd hoped to change things up to avoid "reliving" painful memories — but eventually capitulated to the unsympathetic HOA.