[RADAR]

What you are looking for is asset management. search the web and you will find an abundant supply of knowledge and tools to help you.

Invest some time in learning how a GIS system works; start with ESRI and that should send you well on your way to a developing your map.

Remember; your map will be dynamic. Things will change; features will be added and things will be taken away. Be prepared to make these adjustments along the way and prepare to pass it along to the next generation.

Success is going beyond the point of giving up…

Good luck!

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I hope everyone has a great day; I know I will!

[holy-cow]

I would pay a surveyor to do it and do it right.  It’s just money.  But, getting in a bind with a property owner who wants to fight over something is when having the ability to state that the maps were produced by a professional is priceless.

 

Just in case you have missed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryqv9REMpsg

 

[bill93]

Check out the software suggestions. Check out your county’s GIS if they have it on line.  Many of them will give you state plane coordinates at the mouse position.  Note that SPC, if that’s what they have, are at the ellipsoid model of the earth and distances will be slightly different at actual ground level, but that will be a rather small distance factor at 500+ ft elevation and possibly negligible for your purposes over 9 acres.

I would think that you could get pretty close dimensions measured from sidewalks and building corners by transferring from aerials/Google Earth for buildings. Maybe even for trees if they aren’t close together.  Add taped measurements for flowerbeds, gas meters, etc..

Locating water valves might be more difficult if they are under sod.  A cheap treasure hunter metal detector and a trowel might help there, although a surveyor’s magnetic locator would be more efficient.  If your water department is cooperative, they may be able to give you measurements from the buildings to the valves.  I got those from my local water department, but they were highly suspicious and warned me not to tinker with it.  Their data wasn’t the best, as it gave measurements south and then east from a house corner, forcing you to try to hold the directions.  Giving the diagonals from two corners would be a whole lot better.

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[Wendell]

My first thought would be to ask the homeowners in the HOA if there are any surveyors, GIS professionals, cartographers or civil engineers that would be interested in putting something together. If there’s more than one, maybe they would be willing to collaborate. Seems to me like it would be a great gesture to show that you are supporting your community.

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Your friendly, virtual neighborhood Webmaster

[tickmagnet]

@wendell

[dave-karoly]

Alidade and plane table. Need a helper. Learn how to read a stadia rod.

[tickmagnet]

I bought my first robotic gun in 1997.

you might look for an outdated but working robot

$1500 does not seem impossible.

if your looking to map utilitiy boxes over 9 acres I think you need something close to survey grade equipment

 

[HOAPrez]

@dougie
What an awesome suggestion. This is a path I can definitely head down. Thank you!

[HOAPrez]

@tickmagnet
If I follow you, a “robotic gun” is a gadget that sits in one place on a tripod, you walk around with another gizmo on some sort of a stick, push some buttons, and the gadget can figure out where the gizmo is relative to the position of the gadget. If that is what that is, then I would LOVE to have one of those! I have enough well established landmarks and points of origin on my existing drawings I can make a lot of progress with relative positions.

I am curious why its called a robotic gun. 😉

[HOAPrez]

@holy-cow
I’ve just assumed we couldn’t afford to have the entire property surveyed. When we’ve had just portions of our outer boundary surveyed, those cost us thousands of dollars.

What I’m trying to “map” doesn’t involve anything in which an owner would enter into a dispute. A sprinkler valve and zone map for example. I have 9 controllers and 66 zones. Its a hot mess.

[HOAPrez]

@bill93
The aerials and the city were my first attempt at this. Sadly, the city’s GIS data is not very accurate and 80% of our property is under heavy tree canopy. We’ve rented a Greenlee valve and wire locator and found all 66 valves. That thing was awesome. Now, before they all get covered back up, I’d like to document where they are. 😉

[HOAPrez]

@dave-karoly
Awesome thanks for the words of the tools! Our property is long and skinny… this is what I need to make those measurements!

[Bruce Small]

President of our HOA here, and a land surveyor. I just did a similar survey for another HOA, which took a lot of negotiation to arrive on something reasonable they could use and afford. Basically, lots with several curves each, plenty of tall trees and hedges, nice homes, and walls right up to the lot line. No record of any surveys since the land was platted 40 years ago. 

I retraced the original boundary, set panels, and had it flown for photogrammetry. I had to survey and fill in some of the features obscured by trees. Some of the lot corners could not be set because they fell inside walls (and the walls were crumbly so I couldn’t set a monument on the wall); by agreement we skipped those. Interesting survey, and they had a map with lot lines they could use as a good guide to where things were. And I filed a record of survey. 

My advice is don’t be too ambitious and try to locate too much, hire a good boundary surveyor, and be careful of mission creep.

[a-harris]

In and addition with an HOA and a small budget, I would begin to get help within the neighborhood and seek out members to donate and/or provide their time and efforts to achieve your goal.

Neighbors helping neighbors.

I’ve financed too many such endeavors that achieve the goal and left no mutual interest and felt no real part of the project as important an not worth a Saturday working and probably not understanding why the HOA needs this.

Be careful to not be feeling as being on a “whipping post” until it is over and everyone finally gets it.

good luck

[nate-the-surveyor]

If there is a HOA, it’s simply time to move, where there are more mobile homes, more fishing holes, and some woods to hunt. 🙂 

N

[holy-cow]

I’m with you, Nate.  I won’t even move into a town/city that has some sort of regulations.  Owned some houses in town and sold them after I got sick of everybody else trying to tell me what to do.  F’em and move on.

Breathe free!

[Mark Mayer]

Posted by: @hoaprez

If you were in my shoes (and didn’t own all the cool toys y’all have in your trucks), how would you tackle a project like this?

Mapping your HOA area is a great idea. You are a scientist and you first inclination when confronted with a problem is to gather data first. I whole heartedly approve.

But even as a DIY project the idea is D.O.A. due to the level of effort involved. If you were to give me the project of mapping in detail (down to the point of detailing locations of gardens and yard improvements) 53 homesites and the associated streets I would probably figure that I was looking at a half day to a day of field work per homesite, then about a half hour to an hour of data reduction and mapping in the office per hour of field time. So many weeks of solid work by professionals, who knows how long an amateur might need, or if it could even be done at all without an investment in equipment. At common rates, that would come into the $25k-50k area -completely blowing away your $1500 figure. And such a map would only be valid for the day it was produced. By the time you come to actually use any particular part of it conditions might have changed.  There would be an ongoing expense for maintenance of the mapping.

Supposing you had the money and wanted to proceed the first order of business would be to locate the utilities and mark their course on the ground with colored paint. Not a trivial effort. Then I’d establish survey control points in strategic location and perform aerial mapping using a drone. A base map would be produced from that photography. Areas obscured by trees and structures would have to be filled in by ground survey methods. We would need access to the curtilage of all 53 sites. Your HOA may have the legal right to such access, but exercising it can be a very different thing. 

For boundary, I’m thinking of finding and tying a few monuments and calculating the theoretical location of others from record data.  If the work of the original surveyor was as well done as it could have been this should be close enough for most purposes, but not definitive. Unfortunately survey work of this kind is all too often not done as well as it can be, and generally about 90% of the original monuments are destroyed and lost.   If you want a truly comprehensive  boundary survey, that’s a whole ‘nuther thing. Because of state licensing laws it is something you cannot do as a D.I.Y.’er. and have it be binding on anyone. 

It may be that your state has some LIDAR and/or stock aerial photography resources that may be of some use. But that won’t have anywhere the detail you are looking for. Simple Google Earth/Google Maps aerial views may be some use to you. But, again, will lack the detail and spatial precision you desire. 

[am95405]

Not a surveyor here .. but I think what you may find beneficial is a GIS map of your HOA. GIS is well-suited to display and organize the type of information you are looking. While fundamentally there is no reason GIS cannot be as accurate as CAD, its purpose is often not cm or even ft accuracy, but more a few ft. 

There are two GIS tools commonly used. ESRI’s ArcGIS and QGIS (a free software). I suggest ESRI’s ArcGIS. You can get a personal use license for $100 a year. The nice thing about the $100 license is it includes all of ESRI’s online training modules, which are very high quality. 

A suggestion I have for you is find a local college or community college that has a GIS program and see if a student would be interested in this project, as an internship. I know a student here where I lived that did exactly what you are asking for, for our professor’s HOA. You can offer the student a stipend, and perhaps contacts in your HOA for future job searches.

The student can get the basic structure set up, and then give you instructions on how to use or modify it. To get it set up, if you have any current files electronically (CAD) they can import then. Or they can scan the pdf, import that, or alternatively take a google earth image and digitize it and then modify for any corrections. Your city or county will also likely have a GIS file that is a good starting point. The student needs to be at least a second year student, have a minimum of one, if not two GIS classes under their belt. 

Also, for utilities, our water dept has GIS files for the city pipes, etc. Not perfect, but they have something. So whoever starts this project needs to spend time at the beginning figuring out what already exists. 

[david-livingstone]

What you are asking is like walking into a car dealer with a $1500 budget and wanting a brand new car.  I have the skill to do what you want with some pretty simple tools, a cloth tape, metal detector, maybe a compass?  That eats up your $1500 budget, or most of it.  Then you need the software to draw it all up.  Then you need the skill to do it.  Keep in mind a dome thingy cost several thousand dollars to do it correctly.  Then who locates all the utilities you want to show?  Iƒ??m not saying it canƒ??t be done for $1500 but itƒ??s going to take a lot of time.  

Just a wild guess but paying a professional to do it correctly would be at least $10,000 or more.

[HOAPrez]

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.