A violation of their own governing documents. Their own rules said they couldn't do this. Braddock included section 7.4 on page three of the response letter, underlined. We sent it certified mail, and then we waited.
The waiting part is always the interesting part. It was a Thursday evening when Braddock called, and I could tell from the 3-second pause before he started talking that whatever he'd found was significant. "Garrett," he said, "have you looked carefully at where exactly the dock structures sit?" I had a survey map. I pulled it out and spread it on the kitchen table under the overhead light.
The paper was slightly yellowed at the edges, the property boundary lines drawn in that precise bureaucratic blue ink that surveyors use. I looked at the north shore. I looked at the east bank. The dock structures, three of them, including the big two-slip platform where the nicer boats tied up, sat on the lake shoreline. And the shoreline on this parcel was entirely within Harlan's original property boundary.
All of it. The HOA's property ended at a setback line roughly 30 ft from the water's edge. That setback had always been Harlan's. Now it was mine.
"The docks," I said, "they built the docks on my land." "All three of them," Braddock said. "I pulled the 2016 special assessment records. The board raised $22,000 from homeowners specifically to fund dock construction and improvements. They hired a contractor. They built on the Beaty parcel on what is now your parcel, without a recorded easement, without a lease, without permission.
Just built." I sat down. Here's the legal principle that mattered. In Virginia, as in most states, structures permanently affixed to land are considered part of the real property.
They transfer with the deed. You can't build a house on someone else's lot and then claim the house is yours when the lot sells. The same logic applies to boat docks, piers, and any other fixed structure.
When I bought Mill Lake, I bought everything on it and attached to it, including the docks the HOA had funded with a $22,000 homeowner assessment. Takeaway: Structures permanently attached to land belong to the landowner, even if someone else paid to build them. What made this particularly sharp was the downstream implication for the residents themselves.
These were homeowners, real people, families, people who had scraped together their share of a special assessment because they wanted nicer docks. They'd been told by their board that they were investing in community infrastructure. What they'd actually done was fund construction on private land the board had no right to build on, and no one had ever told them.
Dolores and her board had approved a $22,000 construction project on land they did not own, did not lease, and had no legal claim to occupy. They had done this knowing because of Harlan's 2019 letter that he wanted payment and a formal agreement. They had ignored him, spent the money anyway, and collected dues and special assessments from their own neighbors on the basis of an asset they had no right to offer. That's not just a property dispute. That's a board that had been misrepresenting the community's assets to its own members for years.
I looked at the survey map for a long time. The pine trees outside were doing their evening thing, moving slightly in the wind, the sound a little like white noise through the walls. Then I picked up the phone and called Braddock again. "I want to know," I said, "exactly how far we can take this." "Pretty far," he said. "Let me tell you what comes next."
There's a particular kind of satisfaction in moving from defense to offense. It feels different in the body, less reactive, less tight, more like construction. You're building something now, not just patching holes. Braddock and I spent two evenings at his office in Fredericksburg, his conference table covered in survey maps, CC&R printouts, and a legal pad where he'd written a three-phase plan in the kind of handwriting that only attorneys and doctors seem to have. Technically legible, slightly threatening.
Phase one was the formal notice of ownership. Braddock would send a certified letter to the HOA stating clearly, with legal citations and the survey documentation attached, that the dock structures on Mill Lake were located on Garrett Wolfson's private parcel and therefore constituted real property transferred with the deed. The HOA would have 30 days to respond.
This wasn't a negotiating tactic. It was a legal position. We were putting it in writing, creating a record, making it real.