A few years ago we discovered there might be a problem with where the property boundary lines lie between our parcels here. One clue was a survey we had to have done for our land across the river; it shows our bridge nowhere near where we think it is with relation to our houses.

The result of this displacement is that two of our houses are theoretically on the same parcel, so if something happened to one of them, the county wouldn't let us rebuild it. As you can imagine, this seriously affects the value of our property, and if we wanted to sell one of the houses down the line something would have to be done to redraw the property lines.

We have two options: do nothing and let our heirs deal with it or hire a surveyor to help us come up with new legal descriptions.

The surveyor told me the survey would cost somewhere between $4000 and $8000, depending on whether they can find the section corner monuments. These monuments are placed there in the course of some government-sanctioned survey at some time in the past. Our legal descriptions date back to 1910, and read thusly: 228 feet south from mound of stone to cross on rock thence east 438 feet to centerline of creek...

There was a huge flash flood here 33 years ago, and it carried away the pile of rocks, the rock with the cross is nowhere to be found, and the course of the creek was changed. So we have to start over and use today's technology to come up with new legal descriptions to match how our buildings are oriented on the lots.

The first step was to have the surveyor review all the old deeds to see if he agrees that there is a problem. Unfortunately, he does. Today he came up here and spent from 9 am to 4 pm hiking around in these mountains locating the section monuments and marking them so his survey crew can use them for the actual survey. I really admire him for doing this, locating the unlocatable in weeds and on rocky crags. He wore hiking boots but otherwise was dressed for the office - hawaiian shirt and khaki pants.

I'm sure so far we have run up a good-sized bill; as the owner of the company his time isn't cheap, but having him pre-locate the corners saves us paying for his survey team to wander aimlessly around in the wilderness.

It will be good to get this done because the completed survey is not the end, it's the beginning. Once we have it, we have to get my real estate attorney to draw up deeds with the new legal descriptions and apply to the county for the redrawing of our parcel boundaries.

We need some good luck to get through this without a lot of complications and additional expense once we get into the county process, but I'm keeping a good thought that it'll go smoothly.