Props to the Kansas Court of Appeals for respecting homeowners’ rights — and the English language — in a dispute between a Wichita couple and their homeowners association over who has to fix the fence.

I’ve never lived in an HOA — and frankly, I never will. I’m too fond of the freedom to park and repair cars in my driveway and my two-tone lawn of Bermuda and fescue grass. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I’d never buy a home in an HOA that would have me as a member.

But I will admit to a certain morbid fascination watching rich people fight with other rich people over the right to tell each other how to live.

Such disputes were endemic in the tony areas of Los Angeles and Ventura counties that I used to cover.

There was the homeowner who got caught trying to disguise his prohibited satellite TV dish as a patio umbrella; the guy who painted his banned basketball backboard beige to try to skirt HOA rules; the woman who got cited for prohibited tennis court lights, but beat the rap by taking down her tennis net and putting up a trampoline (trampoline lights weren’t covered in the rules). And there were many others.

Alas, such stories are few and far between here in Wichita, where homeowners associations are not nearly as common nor aggressive as they are out west.

So my antennae went up immediately when I saw the case of Ron and Amy Restum v. Hawthorne Master Homeowners Association during my regular check of appellate court decisions.

I wasn’t disappointed.

The Restums live in the upscale northeast Wichita neighborhood called The Hawthorne.

Behind their house is an eight-foot-tall wooden fence that separates their subdivision from the more-or-less identical upscale development next door.

After about 20 years, the wooden fence is getting a bit ratty from exposure to Kansas weather, and the case before the courts is who has to fix it. In total, the fence is 2,500 feet, nearly a half-mile long.

The Restums contended that the HOA is responsible for maintaining the entire fence. The HOA argued that each homeowner adjacent to it is responsible for taking care of their own section.

The case hinged on interpretation of Section 6.1(B) of the “Hawthorne Master Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, Restrictions, Easements and Disclosures,” which is HOAspeak for “contract.”

“The Association shall maintain, water, fertilize, mow and keep clean the portions of the Hawthorne Common Area which are to be maintained by it hereunder and the portions of the arterial public streets adjacent to the perimeter of the Property. It further shall maintain, repair and/or replace the decorative entrance treatments, fence(s) and walls erected and installed by Developer or the Association.”

The Restums argued that the language is clear: The developer put the fence up, the association has to maintain, repair and/or replace it.

The HOA had a more nuanced interpretation, arguing that the paragraph, taken in its entirety, only applies to fences in the Hawthorne Common Area, not the long fence between developments.

District Court Judge William Woolley sided with the association’s interpretation and dismissed the Restums’ case. The appeals court reversed Woolley’s decision and reinstated it, with instructions.

The appellate judges ruled that accepting the HOA’s interpretation “would alter the meaning and scope of a provision that makes sense as it is currently written — steps we are loath to take.” And even if it was ambiguous as the HOA claims, the Restums still would win because under Kansas law, ambiguous contracts are interpreted in favor of the party that didn’t write the document.

Also, the appeals court ruled that requiring the Restums to fix the fence would violate other provisions of the Master Declaration:

“Section 5.23(B) restricts the locations and styles of fences that homeowners may install, making it impossible for a homeowner to erect an 8 foot-tall, wooden privacy fence (as the developer did) or to install a fence on the far eastern edge of their property. It seems unlikely that the Declaration intended to place the responsibility for maintaining the privacy fence with the homeowners but then prevent them from replacing that fence with a fence of similar height and material in the same location.”

So chalk this one up as a win for the little guy — assuming you can stretch that term to include people living in a neighborhood of $700,000 homes.