Shame on me for taking on this survey, but hindsight is 20-20..
An estate is trying to break a 20 acre tract into 4 equal tracts to satisfy a probate. Those 4 tracts are to be owned by "the kids". All in their sixties and seventies. One "kid" lives on the property and the garage makes it impossible to create four equally dimensioned lots.
I calc'd a line to miss the garage by ten feet and it only skews the line slightly. I have figures for four equal area parcels. Another surveyor started this survey and then bailed. They wound up with some preliminary drawings of his...and they're...well, junk in my opinion. But they are stamped "Preliminary".
Everything has to be flown past one of the kids in Kentucky. She's a nit-picker. I just spent an hour on the phone explaining the 4'10" on my drawing was not 4 feet and 10 inches. The "other surveyor" showed 3'55"....
"no it's not feet and inches, it's minutes and seconds, and no it's not a lot of difference; it's just what we measured, ma'am "...
I think I know why the last guy bailed....:bored:
I don't know why it happened, just my luck. For the last 40yrs estate surveying has followed me around from company to company and since 1987 with me. It is usually from one client to another and from several Attorney's that send me work.
Estate surveying is a client that changes all the time and even the smallest meekest appearing little lady can become the worst nightmare to the surveyor.
When contacted, my first question is who is your attorney. If they say none, I let them know, YOU WILL NEED ONE.
That attorney then becomes the person you talk to and they talk to the client.
I am in the middle of three now and I've finished one of them twice over and need one more good day to finish it the third time and all will be over.
Then there are the few that say equal acres any way you can put it on the ground and they don't have anymore to say until you contact them that it is done.
😉
It's a little old lady thing in my opinion. Doesn't matter whether it's an estate or just a common boundary survey.
My first nightmare with a little old lady involved was a case of splitting a sizable rural tract to sell off the house with about 20 acres. She lived 120 miles away so all information was passed to me through her real estate agent, a fellow with whom I had worked several times.
Plan #1 was to start here, go there, then there, then there (several times), then parallel to the road all the way to the east line, then up the east line to the road, then back to the start. Oh, oh. The south line based on that plan went through the middle of a two-acre pond. (Oh, and the job MUST be done for a closing prior to December 31.)
Plan #2 was after the agent consulted with the owner. Same plan, just adjust the south line like such and such to move to just get by the north side of the pond. OK. The catch was it was about 7 below zero and the wind was howling across the pasture land involved and the only way to get there was on foot. Hand calculations are no fun under those conditions, let alone trying to do anything physical.
OMG, on the night before closing, the buyer who is extremely religious is visited by God in a dream telling him to not buy the property as that will lead to some calamitous circumstance for someone connected to him. He walked away from the 20 percent earnest money he had put down.
A couple of weeks later the property owner came to the site and asked me to show her how we had laid it out. She went ballistic! That absolutely, positively WAS NOT the plan she had conveyed to the real estate agent. She then lead me to each corner point that she had intended. We trashed the first two plats and successfully got it done correctly on the third try, on a very nice January day. It took a couple of months for the payment to show up, though, because since the sale fell through she wanted to wait for an interest payment on a very large CD to use to pay my bill.
Much suffering, both mental and physical, would have been prevented had she met me onsite to start with. Maybe that would have moved the closing to an earlier date and the visit from God might not have happened which would have greatly sped up my pay day.
Those are [sarcasm]FUN[/sarcasm]. I had one that nearly a rectangle to be split three ways amongst the heirs. Easy right? WRONG!!! He got more frontage than I did, she got the pond, that fence line is too far from the property line, I wanted that old oak tree, the house and well are on one property but the septic system is on another. Luckily I had an aerial photo of the property (from another project) and just had them sit down at one time draw lines that would be acceptable. One of the heirs was a friend so I had no problem with being paid, just heartburn from all the "negotiations".
Andy
At least you didn't get to PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE!
My "favorite" was a little ole lady who would call at 5:30 a.m. and want an update or progress report. It was too early in the boundary work to say definitely what the projected outcome was, so I would give scenarios, or possible outcomes and anticipated events should this happen or that happen. She wanted to discuss each at length. The next morning, she had thought up another bunch of questions and wanted to discuss them at length. Again. At that time of morning I was still sound asleep, and the jangling of a telephone caused much anxiety on us at first. No one calls at that time of day unless it was an emergency. And it was hard to get my mind up and running that fast for a little old lady who got up with the chickens , had a cup of coffee, and thought about what she was going to say before she called me, assuming that I was like her and already was up awaiting her call with answers! After a few morning calls, my wife would just grab the phone and hand it to me. It was a chorded phone, so I would figure out that it was "one of those calls" and go to my office at the other end of the house. My wife would hold the phone until I picked up on the other phone. Usually, my morning ritual is to go to the bathroom first, or I would have to do the "pee-pee" dance until I could go! A twenty minute conversation discussing possible outcomes seemed to take forever! And, I discovered that she was not familiar with a lot of surveying and legal terms, and she would then ask me to explain. That survey seemed to take forever, and since I was working on weekends and it took several weekends to finish, I got a lot of phone calls. I learned to be brief and limited in my discussions with clients from then on in my young career. Now I am an older fart and a little more gruff and jaded. And no more speculation. Wait until I finish the preliminary work and I get a work map done. Then we can discuss face to face on how to divide up the old home place and what to do about that neighbor's fence and.....and...
After all, I am a consultant working for my client. But time in the business has caused me to not be as accommodating as I used to be. People tend to take advantage of you if you let them.
update, I'm sorry to report...
This is the one that is gonna put me in the ground.
In the course of this survey we located ALL of the structures on the entire tract. There's a "chicken coop" up on the north end, close to the fence. I have 4 shots, one on each corner. On the preliminary layout I labeled it "chicken coop". What could go wrong? It's approx. 12'x14', on a 50 scale drawing.
Well according to my client I've got it facing the wrong way..o.O
From her Sunday email:
"...One thing that don't mean nothing to us, but to Linda it might, on the drawing, of the smaller tract, it shows a small building at the North end, facing N & S. it should face E & W. That's a framed chicken house they detached from a building 3 weeks ago."
I don't know how I ever made a living before I met these fine folks that are nit-picking their survey to death! :bored:
One of the few reasons my prelim drawings and possible split drawings and just about everything except a final no longer have bearings on them. They can never be used or mistaken for final docs then.