When the Neighbor Moves Your Stakes

There are plenty of things you can move during construction.

A wall. An outlet. The closing date, but try not to. It's not a very good look.

Moving an entire house that's already built gets a little more complicated.

There are some mistakes in construction that can come with costly resolutions.

The Good News: The foundation is square.

The Bad News: That wasn't the only thing we needed to check.

As a superintendent, you're one of the last lines of defense against a mistake becoming a much more expensive mistake.

Sometimes that means checking where the house is going before you start building it.

Which sounds fairly obvious.

I have personally tested the alternative.

On one of my builds, the right property line was fairly straight, but the left angled in. The surveyor set the house box. We dug the footing. We built the foundation.

There have been plenty of times I've raised an eyebrow at a house box looking too close to a setback or easement. Took a day to confirm, then rolled on.

This time, I didn't check the placement along the way.

I did order a foundation survey before framing.

That's when we found the encroachment.

Whether the original layout was wrong or something shifted when the footing was dug, I couldn't tell you. We never established exactly where it went wrong.

But I could tell you where I should have checked.

Fortunately, we were also building the adjoining lots in the cul-de-sac. We worked with the surveyor to get the property line adjusted and the revised map recorded.

I got lucky.

That is not a construction procedure I recommend.

An adjoining lot you can work with won't always be available. Neither will a variance that solves your particular problem.

Doesn't matter if it's 2' or 2", the problem is the same.

When you've spent years building in the same areas, it's easy to get comfortable with how things usually lay out.

But review the subdivision maps along with your individual plats.

I'm currently building in a neighborhood where the cul-de-sacs are 10' wider in overall diameter than what I'm used to. The fire marshal and municipality wanted more room for firetrucks to turn around.

The setback requirements didn't change. But the larger cul-de-sac ate into the front yards.

The houses still met the setbacks. They just sat closer to the road than we wanted.

Out in the countryside, people generally expect a little breathing room in front of their house.

Catching that beforehand gave us time to work with the surveyor and check the septic layouts to see whether we could push the houses farther back.

Meeting the setback is one thing. Making the house look like it belongs on the lot deserves attention, too.

Years ago, I was told a story about a builder getting ready to dig a footing beside an occupied home.

Another neighbor came over and said he'd seen the homeowner next door move the house-box stakes late one afternoon.

Apparently, the proposed house was too close to his.

That was his opinion.

So he relocated it.

About two feet into another empty lot.

A little unauthorized site planning.

Fortunately, someone spoke up before digging started. Imagine nobody had, and the builder followed those stakes all the way to a finished house.

The surveyor could have set everything correctly. The footing crew could have followed the layout exactly.

And the house could still have ended up in the wrong place.

Square houses don't always sit on square lots.

On pie-shaped lots or lots with angled property lines, one corner can get closer to a setback than you realize.

Before digging, review the plat, applicable setbacks, easements, and staked house location. Pull a tape from known survey references and check what you can.

Your tape doesn't replace the surveyor. It gives you a chance to spot something that needs their attention.

Check again when the footing is dug. Check the foundation afterward.

And my recommendation: get the surveyor back for a foundation survey before framing starts. Confirm your lender's and municipality's requirements early, too.

Tearing out foundation work is not "easy."

But it gets considerably less easy once there's a house sitting on it.

See you next Friday.

When in doubt, call the surveyor.

— David