Not a real survey issue, but I was recently talking to a carpenter working on my house doing some repair. And the thought struck me, "original surveying" is to new construction as boundary retracement is to remodelling.
Any carpenters I have known that get into remodeling, will tell you how they always run into problems that you can't estimate for. You have to figure out how to make something work with the existing conditions. Many, many construction workers refuse to go into remodelling work because they might lose their shirts, or they might get into bad blood with a customer who thinks their job should be a snap. Think about how easy it is to run new wiring or plumbing through a brand-new skeleton of a wall (for instance).
I'm not saying that original survey, nor original construction is not a skill, it is, but retracement and remodelling are where real problem-solvers have to work.
The thread with Mr. Detail made me think about this too. He thinks that once he gets through the hard part of finding his "benchmark" it's cake. I have never retraced a boundary that has not come into at least some level of conflict and other knowledge. Mr. Detail (and many engineers, lawyers, or realtors) doesn't have a clue that his legal description may (and I would venture to say more likely than not) exactly match his adjoiner's property. He thinks that 80% precision ratio is how precise the surveyor can run the math in. I don't know the surveyor he talked to, and I think it was a bad analysis, but I would bet that the surveyor was trying to simply point out that the final boundary determination might be different than what some other surveyors might conclude.
There are some non-surveyors who have come into this board and somewhat won the hearts of most of us. But there are a lot that like to come in and tell us how smart they are and that they just have a "simple" question who manage to raise the hairs on the nape of the necks of a lot of us. I've learned that if I go into a crowd of professionals of another trade, I don't want to start telling them that they don't know crap next to surveyors.
:good:
