Reston Association Inspections Postponed to the Spring

There will be several differences in the approach taken by RA and SCS, our management company, which has done Lakeport inspections for the last few years:

After consutlation with Reston Association (RA), the Board will postpone to the spring the architectural inspections of Lakeport homes that RA was originally planning to do this fall. This change will allow owners more time to address maintenance issues or inconsistencies with standards that might be cited by RA (and perhaps take advantage of reduced prices from businesses that need the work right now). Note that although anything identified in this inspection would likely be caught during the required RA inspection when your home is sold, passing this inspection now will not guarantee that no additional issues will be identified at the time of sale. 

• Focus: We have requested that the primary focus of the RA inspection be on maintenance issues (which was the case with SCS), but RA will also be looking for compliance with Lakeport and RA design standards. In addition, RA-trained inspectors may notice things SCS wouldn’t notice (and vice versa).
• Timing: Inspections will now take place in the spring and owners will have six months to remediate any issues that are identified prior to a re-inspection by RA. 
• Enforcement and extensions: Owners will be dealing with RA instead of the Board (which means we will not receive a list of violations and cannot give extensions, as we have been able to do with SCS inspections). 

Because this will be a somewhat different process from the past, we recommend you take the following steps to avoid receiving a violation letter from Reston: 

1. Review the ten Lakeport Cluster standards documents at http://www.lakeportcluster.org/p/cluster-standards.html as well as RA’s Cluster Property Guidelines at https://www.reston.org/PropertyOwnerResources/DesignReview/DesignGuidelines/ClusterHousing/tabid/377/Default.aspx to make sure you are in compliance. Eight of Lakeport’s documents have been changed in the last two years, and these recent changes mean that homes that otherwise would have been in violation (e.g., for missing house numbers, window replacements, or colors of garage doors, decks, or gutters) will now be compliant. That said, some Lakeport homes are still in violation of some of the standards. For example, an owner who recently sold her home alerted the Board that outside light fixtures painted to match the siding and a board added to reinforce the bottom of the garage door were found by RA inspectors to be in violation of Lakeport standards. FYI, if your outside lights match the siding, this might be a good time to paint them black, which is what RA advised the owner to do to resolve the violation.  
2. We anticipate that the main non-compliance issue will be color; so be sure to check all your colors (especially doors and outside lights) to make sure they meet the requirements of the various standards. Lakeport’s Color Summary (available on the standards web page) is a helpful reference, but you’ll also need to check the roof, deck, window, outdoor lights, and garage-door standards separately for those colors. If you aren’t sure of the name of a paint color used on your home, compare the colors on the exterior of your home with the colors used on the other homes in your building. If they’re the same, you probably should be all right because the color palettes are set up so that all the homes in each building are the same. 
3. The checklist that RA inspectors will use to identify maintenance issues is included as Exhibit A below. Please use it to check the outside of your home (safe to do even with Covid-19) and contact contractors to get proposals (again, this should be safe if you discuss the job over the phone and carry on conversations from a distance when the contractor makes a site visit). 

If you have any questions about whether you are in compliance, please contact Lakeport’s Standards Committee Chair Kelly Driscoll (kmdriscoll@outlook.com) or the  Board; please realize, however, that although you will receive a good faith opinion from the Lakeport representative, the RA inspector may interpret things differently. Fortunately, repairs made in response to the SCS inspections over the last three years mean that a number of issues have been taken care of already. And this year’s inspection will do even more to improve the appearance of Lakeport and thus our home values.