William Reid: [00:00:00] All right, here we are in the outdoor studio, and I apologize—you may hear a little bit of wildlife in the background or maybe a few kids screaming on the lake, but it's much better than being inside. So today we're going to be talking about land surveyors and why they are so important to a project, and probably the first design consultant that you will engage with.

So we're back in the world of the Design series of the Awakened Homeowner Podcast, and we're going to be diving into design consultants. These are the consultants that support your architect. Usually your architect is the person who is coordinating all of the design consultants that he or she may need to design the project properly.

A land surveyor is like a legal documentation expert, and they are the people who will determine exactly your [00:01:00] property lines and all of the variables that go into it. Think of a land surveyor as like a property detective, and they really uncover the truth about your property.

One of the first things that they'll want to look at is a title report that you received when you purchased the property. Or you may have to obtain a title report in order to get some of the legal declarations that have been made on your property that you may not even be aware of. This will be one of the first things that you do.

In fact, when you go to purchase a property, you may even ask, "Do you have a survey? Have you ever done a survey?" And if the owner has done a survey, it's their obligation to disclose that to you and provide that information to you. Because a survey can expose a lot of things about a property, and some of them may not be so good.

So think about a land surveyor as the very first person that you engage with on a [00:02:00] project that your architect will engage with. If you're thinking about doing a project and you haven't even hired an architect or designer yet, you may on your own want to hire a land surveyor to do some of the early work so that you can get a sense of the property, where the property lines are, and so on.

So let's talk about what a surveyor does on your property and why it's so important to you. One of the first things a surveyor does is determine where your property lines and corners are. It sounds simple, but I'm going to tell you that there have been many times in my experience where you walk out your back door, you look at the back fence, you look at the left fence, you look at the right fence, you walk along the front of your property, you see your sidewalk in front of your property, and you think that's probably the property line, and you just assume that.

You measure it off [00:03:00] the fences, off the sidewalk, or even worse, design professionals do that—and that happens all the time where design professionals actually use what they visually see as their parameters to design around, when in reality it may not be the case. If you're living in a suburban neighborhood, for example, or even a rural neighborhood or even an urban neighborhood for that matter, fences have been put in year after year.

As fence contractors come in, or as homeowners put up fences themselves, they just put them where the last fence was, or they move them over a foot or two. It's not uncommon for the fence line to not be your property line. So a surveyor will go out and measure the site based on the coordinates that they've researched, and they will document on the actual site and on their drawings [00:04:00] what they'll do is drive stakes—metal stakes into the corners if the metal stakes aren't already there—and determine precisely where your property corners are, which will then determine your property line.

Now, when the suburban neighborhoods were developed—when any kind of neighborhood really was developed—the original surveyor drove metal stakes likely into the ground to the corners. So you also may see a surveyor with a metal detector. Their idea is to locate the existing metal stakes and then verify if those are accurate based on the coordinates that they have. I don't want to get into the too technical aspect of this because as a homeowner, what you really care about is: where the heck are my corners? Where the heck are my property lines?

Then your surveyor will put on the drawings that they provide—they will show a fence line and then they will show your property line. I've [00:05:00] had some cases where the fence line was seven feet off of the property line, in the favor of the client and not in the favor of the client.

Once this becomes apparent, things can get unusual and strange where now the neighbor wants their property back, or you want your property back, and it gets scary. So this is the benchmark. This is the foundation. This is the baseline of what you need to know in order to design your project accurately.

I'm going to get into the details of why this is so important. If you're considering a new home, if you're considering a remodel or renovation where you're expanding the home, if you're in an area where you are getting close to the property lines or want to get close to your property lines with your new proposed project—this is the perfect example of knowing exactly where your property lines are.

I've had situations where we've measured [00:06:00] across the front of the property and it was 60 feet wide, which is a pretty common suburban lot width. Then we went to the back of the property line and it was 57 feet, which was strange from fence to fence, and that's a clear indicator that the fences probably aren't on the property line.

So there are all these little things you can do as a homeowner just to figure out if they really are. Let's move into the next thing that a surveyor often does—they will establish the setbacks, especially if you ask them to. In the city or county municipal code, you have a requirement to keep your structures so many feet away from the property lines, so you can't build right up to your property lines. In some cases it's five feet, some cases it's 10 feet. Some cases it's different on one side than the other, in the front and the back.

So visualize a rectangular lot and then visualize a dashed line on the inside [00:07:00] perimeter of that, showing the setbacks so that you know where you can build. Some people call it the building envelope where you can actually put your structures. This is paramount to designing anything.

Say your current home is five feet away from the property line and your home was built in the 1960s, and you want to add on to the back of the home, and you've just assumed that the setback is still five feet. You could get into trouble where maybe it's been changed over the last 60 or 70 years. So you need to understand where your property lines are, your property corners are, and your property setbacks. Now you've got a good foundation.

Let's move into the next thing. There's a term in the city and county municipal code, rules and regulations, directly related to the zoning of your property. We're getting into zoning in another episode, but [00:08:00] zoning means these are the rules specifically related to your type of lot. In your case, if you have a lot that's 6,000 square feet—50 or 60 by 100—you're in that particular zoning category of lots up to 6,000 square feet.

There's a term called "floor area ratio" in the world of county and building departments, and that is simply how many square feet of living area can you build relative to the square footage of the lot. In some cases it may be 50%. So if you have a 6,000 square foot lot, you can build a 3,000 square foot home. It gets more complicated than that, but that's all we're going to be talking about at this particular moment.

Knowing exactly how many square feet your lot is—another crucial element to deciding how big of a home that the city or county will allow you to build. When you have very irregular shaped [00:09:00] lots or very large parcels or very compact parcels, even knowing exactly how many square feet you are working with will help you design a project and meet your expectations and goals without causing any compliance problems when you get way down the line submitting for permits.

I am going to be talking about easements in a little bit, but if you don't know what an easement is, you may want to look that up. An easement is a particular part of your land that rights have been given to others to access your property or use your property. It could be a utility company, it could be a neighboring property, it could be a lot behind you. You may not even be aware of these easements that are on your property, and this can affect your net site area.

Some cities and counties [00:10:00] will reduce the square footage of your lot by any easements, and this is important when you go to the floor area ratio calculation. So a surveyor documents the easements—we'll get into that.

Another thing that a surveyor will do is they will do what's called a topographic map. This measures all of the slopes and angulations in your property to determine slope percentages and to help your architect and other design consultants such as the civil engineer—we'll talk about that in the next episode—but if you have a sloping lot, even the very slightest slope, a land surveyor, if you request a topographic map... Now, if you just request boundaries and corners, they will not do a topographic map.

But if you visualize that rectangular 60 by 100 shaped lot, you're going to see little curvature lines every so often on the plan. This is indicating the [00:11:00] slope and the increments. Every little sloping line within your rectangular box is going to be maybe one foot apart or two feet apart in scale. This tells everybody which way the lot's sloping, how much it's sloping, and in 10 feet is it sloping one foot or 10 feet.

This is really crucial. This is imperative to know when you're designing a home and placing a home on the lot. It's imperative to know when the structural engineer goes to design the foundation and the architect goes to design the home along with the foundation. So a topographic map is really important if you have any kind of sloping lot.

Another thing that is tied directly to the topographic map is how your city or county measures the height of your structure. Many cities have height limitations. It could be 25 feet, 30 feet. [00:12:00] You'll have to look that up in your own zoning regulations, or your architect will help you understand that.

But where the height is measured from is important. I had a project in Mountain View, California, where it appeared to be a flat city lot—we'll use the 60 by 100 example for right now. The city rules can get really complicated and can be interpreted different ways.

But in this particular case, we designed an addition to a home and they had a height limitation, and the existing home was higher than the height limitation. This older home was higher than the current height limitation. So we could not design the structure to meet the existing height. To compound the problem: where do you measure the height from? Is it from the dirt right next to the house? Where is it?

In this particular city, it is measured from the height of the curb at the [00:13:00] sidewalk at the street. That happened to be two and a half feet lower than the actual dirt around the house. We had to measure from the street, the top of the curb at the street, up to determine how high we could design the addition.

Unfortunately, we had assumed—and there's that bad word again—but we had assumed that you could match the existing structure, and we had already conceptualized the whole design and had to backtrack. So understanding the height of your lot, the slope of your lot, and where to measure the height from is important, and the data that the surveyor can provide you is what you need.

Now, if you have a sloping lot—let's say you have a 25% slope or somewhat of a steeper slope—many cities and counties reduce the size and mass of the home that you can build by what's called a slope percentage [00:14:00] reduction, and this gets really detailed. Just because you have a 25 or 30-foot height limitation written in the zoning, if you look closer and deeper, you're going to find that there's a reduction. It could be 10%, it could be 15% reduction. What they're trying to do is reduce the mass of your structure on a hillside lot.

Again, the land surveyor's data will provide your architect and your design team the information needed so that they can calculate the slope percentage. That is a really important one too.

You can see that we've gone through—I've already gone through in these first couple of minutes of this episode—a few things that can make or break a project if none of this stuff is done prior to you designing the project, if none of this understanding comes about on what the rules and regulations are.

You could be in trouble where you've [00:15:00] gone way down the design path and have to revert back. Some people take a project all the way through design, get into the city planning and building department application process, only to be denied because somebody did not understand the rules and regulations. A survey and topographic map was not provided and assumptions were made, and this is what I'm trying to help you avoid.

Let's move on. The next one that's really important is called lot coverage and impervious coverage. You have a property and you have a house, and you have a detached garage, and maybe you have an accessory dwelling unit, or you want an accessory dwelling unit like an in-law quarters or granny home.

There are also rules and regulations for how much of the lot you can cover and how much impervious coverage you can have. Impervious coverage is any of the patios, [00:16:00] walkways, covered patios, covered roof elements, all the accessory structures. All of this is contributing to lot coverage and impervious coverage.

If you're working on an existing home and you're planning to expand or do landscaping, build onto the home and add additional accessory structures and landscaping hardscape, it's really important for you to know how much impervious coverage you have to what buildings you're planning to add. This will help you calculate to make sure that you are in compliance with these regulations.

If you're not, and you don't know these rules, again, you could very well get denied on the project.

All right, let's move into a few other elements that can really help you in a project. One of the things we're trying to do is use these design consultants and what they deliver—their plans and [00:17:00] specifications—in order for you to engage with contractors and designers, and to be able to document the scope of work for the project so that you can obtain dependable and accurate costs.

If you don't provide some of this information, this is a good example of the basis of change order work that everybody is scared to death of. If you're doing a remodel, an addition, or if you have an existing parcel that you're planning to demolish structures on and rebuild, a survey documents, as I mentioned earlier, all of the buildings that are on the property and all of the hardscape, the pavement, the asphalt on the existing site as it sits today.

This is a really great tool for you to be able to use to document the scope of work when it comes to demolition, when it comes to the excavation of the project. [00:18:00] A contractor will be able to use this information, do his calculations on how much it's going to cost to remove all of these structures based off of actual data. You've really narrowed down the opportunity for missed expectations or misunderstandings of what is to be done. This is really important.

The structures, the hardscape, and knowing that you have this tool at hand, you can just point to it and say, "We're removing all these structures. We want this site clear," and it's pretty clear. It's hard to argue what we're doing once the contractor sees the site, takes his pictures, has the drawings.

Another one that's really important that a land surveyor does is they locate all of the utility locations for the project. For example, many lots have underground power or overhead power, [00:19:00] water, sewer, communications, and the like. On the drawing, the surveyor typically locates all of the points of entry to the lot, and you are able to use that to reference when you are engaging with your general contractor, plumbers, electricians, communication specialists, excavation contractors for sewer.

If these people know where the actual entry point is, they're going to be able to calculate their trenches and all of the costs associated with getting power to the building. This is really important because if it's not known and there are assumptions that are made and things change, it's very possible they could come back to you and say, "It wasn't on your drawings, and now we see that it's another hundred feet over in the corner here."

Understanding that a typical land surveyor will place the utility [00:20:00] locations on the lot—all right. The next one is easements. Easements are extremely important. Like I mentioned earlier, easements are an area or portion or swath of your land that has been given rights to others to access.

A very common one are utility companies. It could be the overhead power lines along the back of your property. It could be the underground water main serving other parts of the neighborhood. It could be underground power and cable TV, and all kinds of things that are either under the ground or that a potential neighboring property has access to.

For example, there's a thing called flag lots, and that's where there's a part of your property that's been given access to the people behind you so they can drive down a driveway to get behind the [00:21:00] lot. That's an example of an easement. It could be in the back of your property—you have a 10-foot wide piece of land all the way across the back of your property that the utility company technically needs to be able to get their equipment to and to service the overhead power lines.

I've had many projects where easements have been a surprise. Before you purchase your lot or even an existing home, understanding the easements is really important. There's going to be a whole episode on easements, but here's the thing: surveyors identify the easements on their documentation, and they usually do this by researching the recorded files at the county and the city, and they review your title report, which are required to document the easements.

It's usually in this text format that's very confusing for everybody, but a land surveyor's mind can just read those and document those within the plans. I had a [00:22:00] project—my most recent challenge with easements was a two and a half acre parcel that had a very steep slope on one side. You can see that by all the little squiggly lines on the survey. Then on the right-hand side of the parcel, I'll call it, there was a 20-foot wide piece of land dissecting the lot into thirds. One-third of the lot was cut off by this 20-foot wide swath of land that went right through it that we could not build on, and isolated the other side of that easement that we really couldn't build on very easily.

Turns out this was underground power that was servicing a transformer on somebody else's property to service other homes. Now, if an owner purchases a property like that and is not aware of an easement like that, this is [00:23:00] where you can get into real trouble because your expectations are blown up when you meet with your architect and say, "Hey, I want to build a home."

Now, in this particular case, we were able to work around it and it wasn't that detrimental. But it sure would have been nice if it wasn't there—it would have given us a lot more flexibility, especially since we were constrained. In this two and a half acre parcel, by the time we considered the steep hillside and we considered the easement, we were down to a one-acre parcel that we were working with, roughly speaking.

That's just one example. A surveyor will document this, and ideally you find this out before you purchase the property so that at least you know what you're doing going in. Also, be aware that easements can reduce the amount of allowable floor area or site area—net site area. It reduces the net site area, how many structures that you can have on it.

Each county handles that a little bit [00:24:00] differently, but it's important for you to know so that you can ask your architect. And there we go with that—you don't know what you don't know. Now you know something that you didn't know. That's the objective here.

The cities control your project through six major restrictions that we've talked about already: How big can you build? The floor area ratio. How tall can you build? The height restriction. How much of the lot you can cover? How much impervious surface that you can have—sidewalks and driveways and roads. How close to the property lines can you build? Setbacks. And what areas can't you build on? Easements.

These are like the main things that you really want to be thinking about, and this is where the surveyor helps you. They run all of these calculations for you and document it in the drawing. They actually provide you a drawing of your site that you can then hand off to [00:25:00] the architect.

Let's move into the next segment now, and we're going to be talking about when do you think you need a land surveyor? Almost 100%, you need a land surveyor if you're building a new home, even if you're building on a 100% flat lot. It's very important that you, at very minimum, establish the corners and therefore the property lines and all four sides. Unless you have more than four sides, it's important that you understand where your property lines are.

On the front of the property, you may assume it's right here at the edge of the street, or it's the edge of the sidewalk—which sidewalk, which edge of the sidewalk? In some cases, it's not the sidewalk. In some cases the property line stops into your lot another five feet. Understanding your property lines is really important.

At a minimum, doing a slope analysis—a topographic map is even better—but you may not need that if you have a flat lot. [00:26:00] You definitely will need it if you have a sloping lot. This will help determine, like I said earlier, the size of the foundation, the placement of the structures on the site, and you'll get accurate costs on foundations and excavation and grading. That is where you would definitely need one.

Now, major renovations and additions. You don't really necessarily need as much for renovations where a renovation, meaning you're not really expanding the home, you're just working on the interior of the space. But if you get into the remodel category, which means you're changing things, you're adding on, you're putting new roof lines on, you're adding onto the side of the house, the back of the house—having a survey done is really important because you need to understand how big of a home you really can build. You need to understand where your property lines are so that you know where you can stop your easements, all these kinds of things.

I would [00:27:00] recommend you definitely get a survey and maybe a topographic map for the sloping, even if you're doing a remodel or an addition. This is especially important if you live in a neighborhood where you have neighbors on all sides of you. Once walls start getting put up, questions start coming up. The neighbors are the ones that initiate the problems by raising a red flag or asking questions either to you or, worse, to the city.

When you have a project that is really tight to the property lines and therefore the setbacks—so if you have a five-foot setback on each side and you want to max out, absolutely max out to obtain your goals and the largest home that you want, or whatever your goals are—having the property lines is paramount to make sure that you are protected from a liability standpoint, and we'll get into the [00:28:00] procedures with that.

Those are the ones that you really definitely want to get surveys done, and you may want to get topo. That's the teetering point there—you may not need a topographic map, which increases the cost of a survey because there's a lot more time that goes into that. That is the typical projects that you would want to use surveys for.

There are a lot of people out there that are trying to cut corners and not even really realizing they're cutting corners. They're trying to find the least expensive designers. They're trying to guide the design as much as possible to save money. There are all kinds of things that people are doing and really are cutting their own throat, per se.

Let's talk a little bit about why the value of a survey is important, and you may spend anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000, maybe $5,000 to $8,000 on a survey, but it could [00:29:00] save you hundreds of thousands of dollars if problems arise. It could compromise your design and your expectations.

If you don't hire a surveyor and you make a lot of assumptions, one of the first things that a surveyor will help you do is put the buildings on the right part of the lot. It sounds dumb, but there have been situations where foundations have had to be moved six inches after they were put in because they encroached into the setback.

Can you imagine that? After the contractor pours the whole foundation, a wall has to move over six inches—this happens. You could probably Google it and find all kinds of stories about it. Surveyors prevent that.

For a new home project, the survey establishes the property lines, and this can also apply to an addition. They establish the setbacks. This is documented within the plans. The architect has taken [00:30:00] those and incorporated those into the construction documents, and then what the proper procedure is: to excavate and form the foundation, but before you pour the concrete, you have the surveyor come back out to the site and they do a certification.

What they do is they come back out with their equipment—and this costs money, but saves you thousands, maybe even more—and they will certify that the forms are in the correct location. This protects the contractor, the architect, you. It protects everybody, and they will provide a letter of certification for you to put in your file if anything should occur.

Some cities even require this, so this is a really important aspect of what a surveyor does after the drawings are done. Accurate placement—you may be able to maximize to the setback, especially if you're on a small lot, and the foundation [00:31:00] efficiency. If an architect has all of the proper slopes and angulations into their design software because they've been provided the file from the surveyor, they're going to be able to move that structure and embed that structure into the lot to maximize the efficiency of the foundation.

Not to mention the proper design solution to achieve your expectations. Foundation efficiency is important because if you don't pay attention to the survey when you're designing, you could end up with extremely tall foundation walls in certain elements that may not have been necessary, that cost you tens of thousands—$20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 more for your foundation.

Moving a structure into the hillside more, or over here more, can save you thousands of dollars. It always boils down to compromises. Foundation efficiency, avoiding violations is a big one. This happens [00:32:00] all the time where you actually are in violation that require teardowns and rebuilds.

There are really no surprises during construction in this particular aspect of it. This is how we're mitigating—minimizing the surprises that happen and also legal protection. With that certification letter, with all this documentation, you're now protected. That's part of our guiding principles, if you remember: enlighten and empower and protect.

We're doing all of those things here with a survey. Those are the main things. What happens with the surveyors, once they've completed their work, they take their files and it's usually done in AutoCAD or Revit or one of these applications that your architect works with, and they provide that file to the architect.

What this allows the architect to do is import it into their system and then begin 3D [00:33:00] modeling your home on the site, showing the slopes. What better value is that? The architect doesn't have to do any of that, although some of them are very capable of that, but now we're depending on a real accurate drawing and data so that we can then depend on that when we're looking at the architectural drawings.

The project I was talking to you about earlier, about the easement going through part of the property, the big hillside on the other—because we had the topographic map imported into the architectural software, in this particular case, it was Revit, our architect was able to place the lot, embed the lot, and then rotate 10 degrees, five degrees to maximize the view while also considering the foundation costs.

The next episode's going to be talking about civil engineering, but the civil engineer was able to take that data and say, "If we just set the house [00:34:00] about a foot deeper into the ground, put a little retaining wall here, all of the rest of this land over here will not require as much excavation."

These are really big decisions that could save you a ton of money.

All right. Let's talk a little bit about the process when you're working with a land surveyor. Your first step—it's more likely that you've already engaged with an architect, and you'll be depending on the architect to guide you in this direction. But what I'm giving you today is information so that you can maybe ask the questions that may be relevant to your lot.

It's often that an architect is your orchestrator, bringing all the consultants into the project. If in your case, you're orchestrating it on your own and you have a separate designer and civil engineer and structural engineer, you're doing it yourself. You can do that too. It just requires more knowledge, more time on your end.

But for the most part, think [00:35:00] of your architect as the person that's orchestrating that, and you'll first engage with your architect. You'll talk about all your wants and wishes and dreams and ideas and budget, and then it's very possible that one of the things they will say is, "I'd like to get a survey done first, a survey and a topo done."

They usually have somebody they've worked with in the past and they will request proposals for you to do the survey, and usually an architect will charge a fee to manage that process in different ways, which is another episode coming up about how architects work. But they may add a percentage, they may add their time and maybe roll it into their fixed fee.

But it's really good to have a professional, like an architect, involved because they know how to speak the language, how to talk the lingo, how to guide the particular surveyor consultant to get the data that they need. It's not a bad idea for you to listen in here and there. [00:36:00] Or if you're doing it yourself, then you'll be able to research your surveyors out there and hire one.

They'll send you a proposal and the first step is they will go out to the site and they will measure the site with all of their equipment. They're out there with their orange vests and all their transom, which is like a laser level, if you will, and pinpoint the coordinates of the corners.

They'll be driving stakes. They'll usually be driving wood stakes and they'll put the coordinates on there with a little orange flag or orange paint or something. If you show up after they've been there, you'll see your corners. Then that's all documented within the drawing.

They do go through the research phase, and that means they're looking at the county records, they're looking at the title reports, they're looking at the easement documentation that's publicly available for them to include on their drawings and then they will deliver digital files [00:37:00] to you or to your architect for them to import. Like I spoke of earlier, you may even see a few surveyors using drones, which is the new coming technology for surveyors. I haven't seen it yet. I think it really works well for big, complicated parcels, but maybe I'll get a surveyor on someday and we can talk to them about it.

Now, there's also another phase I alluded to earlier, and that's just because they've delivered a document to your architect, they don't always just disappear. They will mark the foundation for the builders. If you have a blank lot, a builder could request that the surveyor come out and mark with stakes where the foundation's going to go, where the home's going to go on the parcel.

One thing I forgot to mention is a surveyor doing a topographic map will mark somewhere on the lot that's the benchmark where all the heights are measured [00:38:00] from. You'll see a little symbol on the plans indicating the benchmark, or they'll declare something on the parcel the benchmark that your excavation contractor will use to dig the foundation, to do all of the site work, which incidentally is the contractor that's usually using the survey when it comes to actually performing the work.

They not only certify the setbacks, which I mentioned earlier, but they will actually help a builder place the house on the lot, especially if it's a large parcel, complicated parcel. Your surveyor doesn't disappear after they've done their work. They're involved in the process, not a lot, but enough to protect you.

That's what we're all about, right?

As I mentioned, the architect and the land surveyor collaborate with each other by communicating, meeting on site, and eventually getting the data from the [00:39:00] surveyor to the architect. Another one that's coming up next is civil engineer that we're going to talk about in the next episode, but that civil engineer will take all of that data and begin the grading and drainage design, planning out the utilities, deciding where retaining walls, where driveways can go in the best location. That's coming up next. That is a big part of the benefits of using a survey.

Some of the biggest mistakes that I've seen on projects is ordering the survey after the design's been done. I know this sounds crazy, but people do it all the time. It's either because they realized they needed it late in the process, or the city or county required it. What happens with this, the survey comes out and the reason usually it's coming about that we need it is because there are questions that have come up.

Here we go with a survey coming in. Now after everything's been designed, now we have to go [00:40:00] back. We don't have to redesign the whole project, but things have to move and change and shift and rise and fall and so on. That requires a lot more work to redo all that when that all could have been considered in the beginning.

Why not spend the $3,000 or $4,000, or $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 to get a comprehensive survey and topographic map so the architect going into the project can just design it once? This also—the biggest mistakes that we see without a survey is the construction surprises. People show up to their house and see how high it's sitting out of the ground, or the elevation change from the garage to the home.

I just heard a story recently from a colleague of mine where they literally had to raise the garage after it was built, I believe is what happened. The homeowner showed up, or the builder was out there and they went to see their new home under [00:41:00] construction, way under construction. The garage was not set at the right height. I think this had to do with a missing topographic map and assumptions were made, expectations were lost. That costs hundreds—that probably cost $50,000, $100,000. I don't know how much it costs, but it cost a ton of money.

Think about it this way. The survey is first, then the design, and then the permits. Don't try to miss those three simple steps because you may end up doing the design twice, the survey next, and going to permit two or three times because you didn't have the proper documentation and design criteria to make that a smooth running process.

That is really important.

All right. Let's wrap up the survey episode here because I'm anxious to get into the next one, which is all about civil engineering. Civil engineers handle all of [00:42:00] the design of a project outside of the boundaries of the structures. Although they're integrated into the structures, they're handling everything else, and I'll get into those details, but let's not discount the land survey.

There are two things happening here. One is, are we investing money to save money? For the most part, we are. Are we investing money to meet our expectations? Most certainly we are. Are we empowering our design professionals, like our architect, to represent the design to you as best as possible? Absolutely.

When you start looking at 3D renderings of your project and you see all of your structures on your home, on your property, of your home and buildings, and you can see and you say, "I don't want that to be that much higher or over here," and you see how the terrain and your landscape interacts with your structures, you are going to be a more decisive [00:43:00] client.

Your architect's going to provide a much better quality design to you to begin with, so don't discount the data that a land surveyor provides to you and your design professionals. That's what I have for you today, and this is Bill Reid with the Awakened Homeowner. We will see you on the next episode.