I knew that I wanted to get our property surveyed from the second I saw it. Actually, I guess I would want to get any property we purchase surveyed!

There’s a few reasons that it’s important to get a survey of a property. The first and obvious reason is to define our property boundary. There’s an existing fence on the south end of our property, so we have a good idea where that property line is, but there’s an empty lot to the north of us. So we don’t have an exact idea where that boundary lies. Lucky for us, when the property was subdivided our southwest property corner was marked with rebar, capped, and recorded with the County. So it was relatively easy to find that Property corner and work from there.

The second reason that we wanted to get our property surveyed is to have an “existing basemap” to start our design from. I’ve mentioned before that our lot has a slope to it, therefore site placement and the home design needs to be integrated into the existing topography as much as possible so that the home doesn’t look out of place. There’s no way to define the topography of land better than contours. And to get contours a topographic survey must be done.

The third reason we wanted to get our property surveyed is to find out how much of our land has actually been cleared. Back in 2005 the was an approved clearing and grading permit issued and the old owner cleared off all of the existing vegetation/trees. Now we’re left with a cleared site and it’d be great to know the extents of the clearing limits so that we can convey to our designer the limits that they have to work with. This is especially key for a landscape designer (although we haven’t started that design yet).

The fourth reason that getting our property surveyed is to fully visualize the property with a Digital Terrain Model (DTM). Our surveyors take all of the existing elevation points and contours and create a 3-Dimensional model of our existing ground. I think it’s awesome to be able to view our property in a 3-D model, and I know our designer will love to look at it and use that to shape our home and it’s placement. I’m even hopeful that the person doing the exterior rendering of our home will be able to use it to accurately represent our property. More on that in the future I guess!

Finally, the fifth reason that getting our property surveyed is important is because I’m simply used to having a basemap to work from! I design roads and freeways all the time and there’s no way to do a good solid design without knowing what the existing conditions are!

On August 12th, I hired a couple of licensed surveyors from my firm to perform a property survey for us. Lucky for us they are coworkers and I was able to pay them a heck of a lot less than if I hired an outside firm (and I trust these guys so much more).

It took two guys about seven hours of field work to survey the property, a lot of this time I’m sure was because of the existing sticker-bushes they had to whack through. While out in the field, the crew staked the property lines as seen in the photos below. Now we know exactly where our property boundary lies!

Existing southwest property corner located on the west side of the road

Close-up of the property corner marked with rebar and a yellow cap

Set the northwest property corner based on the marked southwest corner

Surveyed benchmark was set with its elevation

The northern property line defined

Northern property line stake

Afterwards they came back to the office to process the file data and pass the information along to one of our survey CAD technicians. This person took the raw field data from the survey equipment and put it into a legible format that designers can use…In our case AutoCAD. And that’s what is shown in the image below. In the basemap we can read all of the existing contours to understand the topography as well as see existing features that are currently out there. This includes larger diameter trees, the neighbor’s fence on our south property line, a large boulder, existing utilities, and the existing tree drip line.

A plot of the existing topography “basemap” based on the survey.

One note on the existing utilities is that I really should have called One Call to “paint up” the existing utilities that are in the road on the west side of our property. This is a free service, because the last thing that any utility owner wants is for one of their utility lines to be accidentally damaged during construction. Avoiding utility conflicts is always ideal for any project! One Call would have come out and spray painted the existing utilities and our surveyors could have added those shots into our basemap. A couple of the utilities are shown in the basemap because they are clearly flagged or because there are utility boxes out there, but it would have been nice to get all of them in the survey. In the future I’ll have One Call paint them and I can add them into the basemap myself based off field measurements.