What an incredible resource of ideas, suggestions, and wisdom! I thank everyone for sharing your thoughts and perspective.
It sounds like its going to take a blend of tools and techniques depending on the circumstances and the objective. I'll explore the ArcGIS path and see where that takes me. I'm on the adjunct faculty at Tarrant County Community College and I'll look into where GIS classes are being offered and perhaps recruit some students.
I should have mentioned one of the first things I did was spend a day at the city asking for everything they had. They had the developer's original four plats and an aerial photo with a GIS overlay. The plats vary in quality; the first phase had some detail, the last phase was hand-drawn and doesn't reflect the current structures. The site is 70% mature trees and, according to the city, the GIS overlay has known problems as well. They have no idea where the water and sewer mains are since back then if it was an HOA it wasn't their problem LOL.
I may try to rent or buy a used robotic total system. I've drawn the plats in Microsoft Visio using VisiSitePlan Shapes Stencil and its given me a good property boundary for starting purposes, which is more accurate than the city's GIS overlay. If I can learn how to use the robotic gun I may be able to fill in details as they're needed for various projects.
My apologies if I came off badly to some asking for the impossible for $1500 or that I was trying to avoid hiring a professional. HOA budget realities are what they are. I'm just making a map for HOA planning and management use, not a legal survey.
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One man survey crew
look for an old geodimeter 600 series robot
some survey companies must have working but outdated gear out there
I tell people as licensed professionals we aren??t the only ones allowed to measure things. ?ÿAs far as I??m concerned there is nothing wrong with what you are doing, it??s just tough on a $1500 budget. ?ÿ
I have done a few surveys for homeowners Associations and am on the board of my own.
I think Mark Meyer has a good handle on this, although a surveyor would have to be very efficient and work for very little to do it for $25K. I might write a proposal for $50K if the site wasn't too bad and I didn't expect any problems.?ÿ
And I expect that you will find out things you didn't know and might not want to know about where things are. When your 53 homeowners see the survey the trouble will begin.?ÿ
@david-livingstone Yep! Every year I encourage my physics students who are interested in construction trades to look into becoming a surveyor. I personally think its a cool job because I like to measure things and I like maps. 🙂
@larry-best
So after I looked at the plats and the city GIS, I noticed a little 0.1 acre triangle parcel that was inside our boundary but not on our plats. Turns out, a local school district took it for back taxes from the developer in the 80s. The little triangle happens to be the deep end of our pool and a piece of our clubhouse LOL. When I showed this at our annual meeting everyone was holy cow! I'm negotiating with the school district to get it.
@tickmagnet
I've looked at this a bit more... I am going to pursue it. It seems to do exactly what I need to be able to do for many parts of this project. Is it appropriate to post "want to buy" on this site or ask Dallas local surveyors for their favorite "walk-in" store for used equipment?
Ah, the trouble has begun. There's a good chance the GIS is wrong. You need a survey but if it doesn't have a stamp on it, it will cause untold trouble. Maybe you should get a survey that shows property lines, buildings, roads, walkways, pool, anything that's a title issue. you could try to add all the landscape features yourself later.
Good luck to you.?ÿ ?ÿ Frankly for the level of detail you are looking for....planting beds and sprinkler heads?....?ÿ I would think $1500 would be about right for ONE of those lots.?ÿ
Add to that the HOA PIA factor... where many on the boards think they know how to do our jobs. (my experience only, not casting aspersions)?ÿ
?ÿ ?ÿSorry.?ÿ I don't think a professional surveyor would touch that for less than 40k.?ÿ ?ÿ
" I've drawn the plats... which is more accurate than the city's GIS overlay. "
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?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ And how, exactly do you know that?
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"HOA budget realities are what they are. I'm just making a map for HOA planning and management use, not a legal survey."
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?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿ ?ÿWhat you are asking for with a $1500 budget is simply ridiculous. Sorry, that's just the honest truth. But, if you printed out the recorded plat of the subdivision, maybe have the pages laminated then have the owners mark up their own lots? That way everybody is helping. Or maybe a few of you go around and mark up the maps. Come up with symbols to use and abbreviations. then take those marked up sheets and have them copied.
GIS should be considered schematic, not a definitive mapping. It's purpose is mostly to enumerate things rather than to place them spatially.
I know of one HOA that covers almost 2k acres and they have taken the final drawings and marked where all the utilities were placed on their copies. One for water, one for telephone and one for electricity.
They also went out and put up a tpost or other protection around water valves and meters and other ground boxes and objects needing protection from mowers and other equipment used to maintain the roadways and HOA property.
When the tracts were platted and roads dedicated, none of the utilities were installed and around here all utilities are inside of the road r/w.
You say that you have found 66 valves and want to document their locations so you can find them again. Perhaps you should make that a priority. You could go to each valve and measure to two, three, or more permanent and visible objects such as house corners, large trees, sidewalks, curbs, etc. Make a hand sketch showing the valve and the objects you have measured to, with the distances and approximate directions. Identify each valve by the address of the nearest house, or by any other method that works for you. Then file the sketches. You can add the information to a map later. Meanwhile, you will be able to find those valves again.
A map on which everything is located with survey accuracy would no doubt be desirable for other purposes, but it wouldn't help you find the valves unless you went out again with a survey instrument. Tie dimensions like those described above would enable you to do so.
I just re read your OP and I sure hope that you do indeed go out and find some sort of survey equipment and actually attempt to locate and map all the items you listed. I think it's the only way you will learn just how ridiculous that $1500 budget is for the amount of work you are proposing.
1500/53 units is $28 per unit to locate and map all the items you listed.
"....showing locations of flowerbeds, valves, telecom demarcs, sump pumps, drains, water meters, make a tree inventory, make a sprinkler system map"
I am sorry my OP isn't clear. I fully realize I can't have a professional do anything approaching the scope-of-work I outlined for $1500. I've hired surveyors for many jobs in the past and I'm pretty well calibrated as to the impossibility of having a pro do a job at the scale and detail I've outlined.
Nevertheless, I need to do something to get better documentation and I've got $1500 in my budget to accomplish it. That's why I came to this site; to ask some pros (the name of this forum is "ask a surveyor") if you had to do the impossible, how would you approach it? Some very helpful suggestions have emerged and I will move forward with several of them.
I really appreciate all the helpful suggestions; nevertheless, I can tell my post has really rubbed some people here the wrong way and I apologize. I wish I could just take it down.
My best advise is to take all the plats that you have and make several scale paper copies. Budget yourself several weeks of time to use a tape and scale, and hand draft in all the features. The problem with renting equipment is that you would have to invest far more time for the training than it is worth for what you are doing. I know builders and engineers that are very good at using survey instruments for making field measurements, but are unable to make a reliable drawing on an existing boundary map with those raw measurements. You can make reasonable scale drawings of your own with a tape, scale and pencil.
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