Part 2: "That Looks Like Crap." "I Think It Looks Great." Now What?
(Part 2 of two. Last week was everything you can settle with a gauge, a straightedge, or 48 hours and a piece of chalk. This week is everything you can't.)
Two board members are standing on the same balcony, looking at the same railing, on the same afternoon.
One says it looks like crap.
The other says it looks great.
Both of them are sincere. Neither is being difficult. The contractor is standing ten feet away waiting to know whether he's getting paid for this phase, and there are forty-one more balconies behind this one.
Now what?
Last week's article was about the criteria that have numbers behind them — film thickness, adhesion, crack width, slope, ponding. Get those into the specification and most acceptance arguments disappear before they start.
But not all of them. Some decisions have no measurable criteria and never will. Whether the color reads warm or cold. Whether the stone looks right against the siding. Whether the railing profile is elegant or industrial. There is no gauge for that. There is no ASTM standard for taste, and there never will be.
Here's how to handle the pile that's left.
1. Write the Viewing Standard Into the Contract
This is the cheapest clause in construction and almost no HOA contract has it.
Every finish looks worse at six inches with a flashlight held at a raking angle than it does at ten feet in ordinary daylight. That's not a defect — that's physics, and it's true of every building ever constructed, including the ones we all agree look great. The drywall finishing standards address this directly under the heading of critical lighting, because the industry learned decades ago that without a defined viewing condition, there is no such thing as acceptable work.
So define it:
Work shall be evaluated from a distance of ten feet, at eye level, under normal daylight conditions, without artificial or raking light.
Adjust the distance to the surface — roughly three feet is the convention for interior touch-up, and roofs and upper elevations are commonly judged from grade. The number matters less than the fact that there is one.
Two things happen when this clause exists. Inspections stop being adversarial theater. And when an owner walks up to a wall with their phone flashlight, the board has a calm, non-defensive answer that isn't "we think it's fine."
2. The Mock-Up Is How You Make Aesthetics Objective
For anything with a visual outcome — paint, stucco, stone, deck coating, railings, roofing — build a mock-up before full production. One balcony. One elevation. One section of wall.
Then treat it as the standard, in writing:
The approved mock-up shall establish the standard of quality, workmanship, and appearance for the work. The mock-up shall remain in place and undisturbed until final acceptance.
That single provision converts the whole aesthetic conversation from opinion into comparison. "Does this match the approved mock-up?" is a question two people who disagree about taste can still answer together. "Does this look good?" is not.
It also relocates the argument to the only time it's cheap. A board that hates the finish on the mock-up has a scheduling inconvenience. A board that hates it on balcony thirty-nine has a change order, a remobilization, and a fight.
Review it on site, as a group, on a scheduled date, in daylight. Record the approval in the minutes. That is your decision gate.
3. When There's No Standard, Decide Fast
Now the hard part, and the reason I wanted to write this series.
For the two or three decisions that genuinely come down to taste, here's what I want to say to every board:
Make the decision, quickly, and make it yourselves.
Not because speed produces better taste. Because delay produces nothing at all. More time does not create agreement on aesthetics — it creates more opinions. A decision that sits for three weeks doesn't become more correct; it just accumulates additional people who now feel entitled to weigh in. Meanwhile the crew is on standby or working out of sequence, the schedule is consuming itself, and every day of that is an owner-caused delay you'll see again in month four.
Identify these decisions at the start of the project, before mobilization. There are usually only two or three. Put a date on each one. Narrow the field first — a small group with professional help reduces it to two or three options, because a board choosing among three options decides, and a board choosing among unlimited options does not.
4. Please Don't Send It to the Community
I understand the instinct. It feels democratic, it feels safe, and it distributes the blame.
But a full-membership vote on an aesthetic question adds notice periods, a meeting, ballots, and a quorum — call it thirty to ninety days you never budgeted — and at the end of it you will have a plurality, not a consensus. You will have handed a live, unresolvable argument to several hundred people, and you will still have to pick something.
Two hundred owners will not agree on beige. They have never agreed on beige. Beige is not the kind of thing people agree on.
You were elected to make these decisions. That's not a burden the board took on by accident — it's the actual job description. Every director is fully entitled to advocate hard for their preference in the meeting. But when the vote is taken, it's the board's decision, and it gets communicated as the board's decision. Not "it was three to two." Not "well, I was against it." The moment a director signals that, they've reopened a closed question and invited every owner who dislikes the color to go find a sympathetic director.
Record it in the minutes. Move on. And then — this is the part that takes actual discipline — don't reopen it when four owners complain after installation.
Four owners will complain. That is the fixed cost of having painted anything.
The Bigger Point
Nobody wins on aesthetics.
There is no color, no railing, no stone, no roof profile that an entire community will like. That outcome is not available to you, and a board that keeps searching for it will delay the project, spend the contingency, and arrive at a compromise nobody actually wanted.
What is available is a defensible process: measurable criteria wherever a number exists, a mock-up wherever it doesn't, a viewing standard so the evaluation is fair, gates so decisions happen at the right moment, and a board willing to decide in the room and stand behind it together.
Get the measurable things measured, and the genuinely subjective decisions turn out to be a much smaller pile than you feared.
Make those two or three quickly. Make them as a body. Then go finish the project.
If you'd like the full reference behind this two-part series — the HOA Acceptance Criteria & Viewing Standard Sheet, with measurable criteria by trade, ponding thresholds by industry, ready-to-adapt contract language for the viewing standard and the mock-up, a decision gate worksheet, and a one-page protocol for subjective decisions — comment below or send me a DM and I'll get it to you.
And I want to hear the real ones: what's the aesthetic decision that stalled your project, how long did it stall, and did the extra time actually change the answer? In my experience it almost never does.
Next week: you now have criteria in the specification and a way to judge the things that don't have one. Which raises the question nobody on the owner's side wants to answer out loud — who is actually verifying any of it? The building department isn't. That's third-party testing and inspection, and I've been promising it long enough.
The standards named above are common industry references, not specifications. Your contract documents govern, and contract language quoted here is a starting point for your association's attorney, not legal advice.
Sean Davis, PMP | Civil Engineer | Current HOA Board Member (12 years) | DHA Construction Management | Broomfield, CO
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