Why Not Set It On Line? At The ROW Intersection?
Give it some meaning.
Paul in PA
I didn't read all the replies, but my reaction is too much information. Its like picking up the instructions for a power tool. It needs to be about 2 pages long, but instead it's 40 pages long with all the warnings. My point being, the important information is lost in all the other information. Make the legal with out all the fluff and put the rest on the plat and/or in a report.
Kent
> Of course, I'm never so stupid as to give them the description in some editable digital format.
Neither do we. However, witness trees go missing, types of corners go missing, just the normal stuff. We don't have as much of a problem with it as we used to.
Personally, it tickles me just pink for them to pay me to do a survey and then not use any of my work.
Try this:
Begin at a rock, thence run northerly about 400 feet to another rock......
(Let the pendululum swing!)
N
Exactly my thoughts.
Why Aren't The East And West Lines Parallel ?
Or perhaps they are once one adjusts for convergence?
I may have missed it but did not see any mention of convergence.
Course 2) S 27°49'19" W
Course 5) S 27°49'14" W
Course 7) N 27°49'21" E
I am not used to using SPC bearings in a descriptions and I doubt any lawyers are either.
Plus Kent used SPC bearings in the description but reported Ground not Grid distances.
I am extremly confused.
Paul in PA
Its long. I wouldn't have that much in it. Personal preference. If it works for you, so be it.
However, for all of the boundary information you give, you simply note crossing the county line. I would have added bearings and distances to the nearest monuments on the line at each crossing.
Other than that, it's okay, but not much lip service is given to the county line when you went to a lot of work to prove its location.
From What I See The County Line Is Based On One Monument
Again I may have missed something in that long and tedious document.
Paul in PA
From What I See The County Line Is Based On One Monument
Paul, he had at least three monuments he mentioned in earlier posts.
From What I See The County Line Is Based On One Monument
For myself, I'd druther see it all on a plat, with all that data.
And the deed to read "All that land contained in parcel 1, of a survey by KM etc, recorded in Survey Bk 128, Pg 456".
That way, the deed document is short, and the plat would contain the story.
A pic is worth a thousand words, or something like that.
N
I'm speechless
I've seen shorter novels.
First they misidentify cedars, then they call farm ponds,: water tanks, and now this!
What the heck is going on in Texas?
Good grief.
There is nothing stopping a reasonably competent surveyor from placing a document including a survey and an owner's affidavit in the public records so that a lawyer need only refer to the vol/page of that document in deeds or other documentation that the lawyer may find necessary.
That way, the only thing the lawyer can foul up is the vol/page of the document.
We need to find ways to remove the detailed description from the lawyer's interference.
Doing a complete job is one way of providing for the needs of the land owner rather than a perverted legal system, and the job is not complete until the record will be available.
Isn't a public records system designed for that purpose? Why not use it the way it was designed to be used?
No matter how complex, a half-assed job is still half-assed.
Richard Schaut
From What I See The County Line Is Based On One Monument
They don't file or record survey plats in Texas (no public record). So Kent's handy capped. So the narrative gets embedded in a legal description along with the other stuff. He ought to move to a state where he could show his work in a proper manor. He is like an artist that can only write about his paintings as he can't use paint and produce a picture. He can do a plat and give to the client and file his copy in the drawer, but no public admiration or record comes from that. You work your whole life and what is your legacy, a bunch of forty page legal descriptions buried deep in the recorders office rarely seen in the light.
Kent
"No, Central Texas attorneys just like to do things the easy way. They don't redraw maps and they don't rewrite metes and bounds descriptions. It shocks me that somewhere else there is an attorney dumb enough to want to do that."
Like Kris said, you are living a charmed life.
I also work in Central Texas and have been shocked by the amount of times I have found my field notes chopped up by some Attorney.
Nice notes, about 5 miles above and beyond the minimum standards set by the board, but nice nonetheless.
The coordinates are nice, but I will never ever reset a corner by a coordinate value or in better words, a coordinate value not determined previously by me.
Don't get me wrong, I think that your approach is admirable and maybe every surveyor could use a dose of your desire and methods, but if I meet the minimum standards, I think I have done an excellent job for my clients, even with that in mind, most jobs are very tough.
Interesting reading tho.
You do very impressive work!!
Randy
How Does Someone Use A Tie To An Unmarked Point?
"the Westerly prolongation of the line of the remains of a Wire Fence formerly in place
along the North line of that lot..."
What? "formerly in place"? Excuse me, but WTF?
I believe...
that Gurdon Wattles remark on sufficiency of a description was " concise clarity without ambiguity." This may meet one of those three criteria...
Nicely written, Kent.
Having worked with the threadbare narratives I encounter daily, such detail would be a welcome relief.
And I'm taking away the awesome separator... -o0o-
Rick
Kent
> The coordinates are nice, but I will never ever reset a corner by a coordinate value or in better words, a coordinate value not determined previously by me.
Well, the ways that I anticipate those coordinate values being used are these:
1) as a major aid to resurveying. (Just scan the coordinate list, download it and you're ready to navigate to the monuments),
2) a major aid to unraveling other boundaries. (If you're working a couple of lots away, it ought to be a real help to know that I've identified various evidence at the NAD83 positions given.)
3) as a check on mark movement.
4) as a way to drop all the evidence mentioned onto a georeferenced satellite image.
I believe...
I believe that Kent's example of redundancy could really lead to a serious discussion about priority of calls. What if the brg and dist between some of those coords, (due to rounding) is off a hundredth, or a few seconds) and thus we have a discrepancy of 1/2 a hundredth, and thus render the description void!
(Wink)
OR, what if some dingbat secretary accidently left a typo in there....
I think it also needs Lat Lon on every point, with a reference to Greenwich England, and a distance to Obama's statue at Washington DC!
N
> > Actually, in my opinion a written description from a survey should set forth the rationale for the location of the property described, not merely identify some quantity of land somewhere.
>
> Okay....I guess. I was merely mentioning the common theme I have seen for definitions I have read for "Legal Description". I was not trying to set my own definition. Wouldn't "setting forth" the rationale for the location of the property mainly be to help identify the location of the property? In my view, the description is to simply support the deed to identify the property in the transaction the survey. (but perhaps I misunderstand).
No, the rationale is the process of thought by which a particular boundary location was arrived at as a conclusion. For example, in that description I linked, I took some care to demonstrate the basis by which I arrived at the conclusion that Unmarked Point No. 152 was in the position of the NW corner of Lot 17. It wasn't just pulled out of the ether.
> Perhaps I misunderstand again, but your point-to-point distances in the metes-and-bounds calls are to a precision of only 0.01. Regardless, that is not a real point of contention, because, as I stated, adding another unit of precision does no real harm in my opinion.
I frankly don't get the folks who are bothered by expressing coordinates to the nearest 0.001 ft. That is the best estimate of the point and makes it possible for inverses between coordinates to match those recited.
> > Yes, at $5,000 an acre, that means the uncertainty is +/-0.005 acres or $25. What's the problem?
> >
>
> No problem, really, it just is a conflict in relative reporting precisions.
Well, the entire reason for reporting the area of the tracts is satisfied by two places, i.e. for purposes of appraisal. If you want to know what the accuracy of the survey is, look at the explicit statement as to the standard errors of the coordinates.
> > Those are all uses for coordinates, but the even more valuable use is to help some surveyor working on an adjoining parcel reconstruct the boundaries of some other tract in a real world system. For example, giving the coordinates of the 1961 surveyor's pipes on the adjoining tract means that I could sit in the office and calculate NAD83 positions for the rest of that tracts corners and go out and find them with high efficiency.
>
> Yes that is of value, but....is that more important than my reasons?
I'd say that it is equally important. One point of cadastral use of geodetic coordinates is to facilitate the identification and resolution of large-scale confusions. In a metes and bounds system, that is important. In the PLSS where you're working within relatively small monumented boxes, that may be considerably less of a consideration.
