We have a neighbor across the lower pond who came by a few weeks ago asking about the property line, since there were some big trees that needed to come down before they fell down and potentially damaged their house. Then in the storm here one night this week, one of them DID come down, thankfully missing all important structures. But we both needed to determine where the property line was for some additional trees, as well as a small shed he wanted to put up which is technically supposed to be a certain distance from the property line.
I contacted one of the realtors who helped us get this property, who specializes in agriculture things as well. He was amazing and came right over with a plat map, a metal detector, and a compass with a mirror to figure it out.
I walked through the very small section of woods between our houses and ended up in my neighbor’s back yard to help. As I emerged from the trees both my neighbor and the realtor asked if I was ok? Was I sure? I answered of course, but why were they asking? They replied I absolutely MUST wear orange or neon hunting gear if I’m going to be in the woods, so I don’t get shot!
I said that we’re in a neighborhood, it’s a tiny section of trees, and we have no trespassing and no hunting signs up all over. They replied it doesn’t matter, and people don’t read. Later another acquaintance confirmed to me that indeed people will drive around and even just shoot out their car windows into the woods if they think they might see a deer. I knew we were in a rural area, but being 3 minutes from the grocery store and with neighborhoods and culdesacs all over it never occurred to me that people would just drive through and shoot into the trees.
Now that I knew I needed to don all my neon orange hunting gear (which fortunately I already have for myself, the horses, and my dogs from trail riding in the mountains in CO), we moved on to the task at hand- locating the property line. Our realtor (talk about a full service realtor!) also dabbles in forestry and some surveying so he was going to be able to find it as long as we could find a marker from which to start. The plat map was from 1953. According to that, the corner was delineated by a rock, off of which all the other measurements were based. Noting that we were standing at the edge of the woods, I asked what kind of rock, to which he responded that we’d know it when we saw it.
This left me feeling somewhat skeptical… here the three of us were, stomping around in the fallen leaves looking for The Rock off of which we’d determine latitude and longitude and the direction of the property boundaries. I dutifully looked with them for The Rock for perhaps 20 minutes with no luck.
However, eventually we did literally stumble upon a 2” diameter rusty metal pipe sticking perhaps six inches out of the ground. This made everyone quite excited because apparently in the 1970s a switch was made from using The Rock to using these pipes driven into the ground. Having found this, our realtor stood directly over it, sighting with his compass and mirror in the specified direction from the plat map, and sent me walking in the general direction of where we should find the next pipe.
Some judicious use of a metal detector in the indicated direction led to the discovery of a second lead pipe sticking very slightly out of the ground. Now we were really getting somewhere. After accidentally digging up some old buried metal fencing, and then accidentally locating the septic tank pipes, we did eventually find all the pertinent pipes and thus the property line. As it turned out, all the trees that were likely to come down and potentially hit my neighbors house were on his side, so he could dispose of them as he saw fit. We all chatted a bit and then dispersed to the various other tasks we had on our schedules for the day.
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