A subdivision plat that was correct.
Tackling what should be a fairly simple split of a single lot in a 15 lot subdivision of roughly 30 acres out of a much larger tract. The subdivision was created in 1981 by a surveyor who later lost his license for some reason, but who did a lot of good work.
The first obvious problem was that a road with nicely sloped ditches on either side resulted in the elimination of most of the front lot pins. The second obvious problem was the installation of buried telephone lines incredibly close to the approximate back lot lines, plus annoying telephone pedestals and power poles approximating lot corners.
We finally find enough monuments (if you can call 12"-long, 3/8" diameter rebar monuments) to begin to rough in where the monuments we really need should be. Suddenly, there is absolutely nothing making the metal detector sing.
Give up. Whip up an AUTOCAD drawing of the 33 year-old survey. Uh oh, somethings wrong. Apparently the copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original plat shrunk down to about one-quarter original size is causing me to misread handwritten dimensions and/or relative angles of lines. A nice 60 mile (one way) trip to the courthouse leads to the discovery that I have been reading the numbers correctly. But, a careful reading of the full tract description leads to the discovery of a 10-foot problem. The boundary description says that from here to here is 250.2 feet but the plat shows 30.0 feet plus 230.0 feet. Return to the site and move our search areas ten feet to the south. Well, looky there! A nice supply of 3/8" bars come into view with a little bit of digging. Now everything starts to work. One-inch to eight-inch discrepancies can be handled and a rationale developed .
>telephone pedestals and power poles approximating lot corners.
I think the utility people believe they are doing a favor by putting their stuff at the corner of the lots.
Consider yourself lucky if the plat only has a blunder or two. The 1950's plats around here won't close mathematically within a foot or two even given a few assumed blunders, and also there are a lot of missing pins - perhaps only block corners in some places.
A few more pet peeves
Three basic pet peeves.
1) getting a sub plat the says “Not legible at time of recording” so why bother recording ?
2) Curve and line tables. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should. If you have curve and line tables 50 to 100 or more lines, your scale it too big. I absolutely hate seeing “C23” and the value is 15.25 – and that extra 2 digits of the value could easily have been inserted instead of the curve number. My opinion is that each lot should stand on it’s own with a Bearing & Distance or Arc length and Radius – if you want to add chord, delta or tangents in a table, fine, but don’t make me look up every number for each lot in a table. I swear the people who use hundreds of curve and line table entries have never been in the field.
3) Sub plats that are technically correct, but leave off just that one dimension or angle that would let you check the overall math. Or townhouse plats that don’t have redundant ties to building lots floating in a bigger lot --- then the one number you need is smudged out by the recorder.
Utilities place their appurtenances at approximately the lot corners so that their drop cables are entirely on the property of the customer being served. This typically is only critical where the utility in question does not have an easement and has their cable/peds/poles in the Highway right-of-way. They do this to avoid what they referred to as "aerial trespass".
bad plat images
I've got a cross country line I'm currently working on. The records and title search are the responsibility of others (contract like myself).
Although this fella's contract specifies "hard copy" records as deliverables, he decided to snap 1800 or so jpegs of the records in one county...and then crashed my inbox by emailing them to me.
Here's how legible some of the stuff is:
ALMOST readable...but leaves a lot to be desired. I wanted to email him back and tell him, "you're doing it wrong, son"...but I didn't. I just tattled on him to the client. I understand he reeled when he realized what the term "hard copy" meant. At a buck a page, he better take his Discover card....
bad plat images
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> . At a buck a page, he better take his Discover card....
$1 per page? My county charges $15 per page for hard copies of plats. Online, they can be downloaded for $3.