Reading Survey Measurements
 

On our property survey a measurement from the rear property line to the
house is displayed as 40.42' any one know how to read this number
One friend said it is 40 feet 42 inches which I am not sure that is correct if that was the case I would think it would read 43.6'

I think you will find that is a decimal measurement. Without more context from the survey it sounds like it is 40 and .42 of a foot. or 40 feet 5.04 inches.

GH85 is correct.

PS:Hey Joe! Taking good care of the 911. Hope all is well.

Surveyors use a measurement of a foot divided into ten parts, .42 would be just a little over 5"

Ben
Thanks.... great to hear u are enjoying the 911
Hopefully spring will arrive soon now that March is here it decided to snow :confused:

Yep, 40.42' is 40 feet 5 inches. In your case, it would typically be considered a "tie dimension" from say a corner of a structure to the property line between 2 corners or monuments on the boundary of the property and measured at a right angle to that property line, hence the shortest distance.

Angles are measured and denoted in Degrees-Minutes-Seconds.
So if you see 87°-34'-52" that's going to be 87 Degrees-34 Minutes-52 Seconds
and NOT 87 Degrees-34 Feet-52 Inches like some deeds even to this day will state.

Land Surveyors measure distances in feet and decimals of feet. We left feet and inches to the Architects, Carpenters and Prostitutes.

Regards,
A Professional Land Surveyor

Thanks everyone for the clarification I knew I could find the answer here lots of knowledge

40 feet and 42 inches. Now that's funny. I'll have to use that next time I call out a length to be cut on a stick of lumber. "Hey, gimme 14 feet, 29 inches!" ;)

awesome response. nails it!!

smart question OP..well done everyone.

back in the day..survey guy might have said it was, 0.612 Chain. (short for Gunter's chain, i think)

:D

Or 2.56 rods out here in farm country.

That's if they were measuring with a 4 Pole Chain of 66 Feet, which was never officially accepted by the U.S. Government General Land Office or Bureau of Land Management as an accepted unit of measure. The Standard was a 2 Pole Chain of 33 feet, however the original township plats could be denoted with the measurement of a 4 Pole Chain, i.e. 80 chains= 1 mile.

hahah..true.

but that wasnt the "spirit" of my post. i was just trying to be a smart ass..not smart.

I have had customers bring us old surveyors notes from when Oklahoma was first platted into township, range and sections. Those guys were tough!

Imagine going out into Indian territory long before statehood, where the only lawman was a US Marshall from Arkansas. that you like never see. No place to stop and get supplies. Outlaws and Indians happy to kill the crew and take their belongings.

Some of the old notes even have "we lost two crew today to outlaws" and spending a day or two hunting for some deer to eat. And they went all over the state, with a chain. It is easy to see the "correction lines" where errors crept in. No GPS, no electricity. nothing but what they brought with them.

Now days we work with many land surveyors. They put down some ground targets, and we fly over and do aerial mapping. Process the data, and hand it back to the land surveyor. We can map an area full of poison ivy, ticks, and mosquitoes and steep drop offs and terrain that is a real pain to get to from an airplane. They hand back the data to the client and look like heroes.

Glen pretty much described this short film. Worth the 25 minutes.


<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K7jSkZHw65A" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I am not a surveyor, and we don't offer surveys to clients, except certified land surveyors and they put their stamp on it and sell it to their clients.

Just for fun and to learn more, I had access to a new Trimble G-10 to play with. I shot in some targets at my house, and we flew it with silly high resolution of one inch resolution. I then punched in the survey points, and made a cool 3D map of my house, and did a planimetric drawing of my house. All of that was so I could calculate the amount of edging I have to do. I can measure the length of ever wall, the pitch of the roof, or whatever while sitting at my computer.

It would have been easier to just step it off, but that is no fun. Now I have a full 3D point cloud that is 100 MB and would make a cool 3D model if I had a 3D printer.

It is not a real survey, just a learning experience for me.

As already covered the places after the decimal point at tenths of a foot, I like to call it our land surveyor retarded metric system. But that is not PC to say.


This might help you visualize it.

https://photos.smugmug.com/General-P...BsvSHnn-XL.jpg

It is really easy to convert the .42 feet to inches.

.42 x 12 = 5.04 and it is really unlikely the surveyor was measuring down to four hundredths of an inch so round it up to 5. No building or survey point is accurate to under 1/10th of in inch much less a few hundredths. Your neighbor will never complain or be able to prove you are a few hundredths of an inch over the property line.

Obviously the 12 is the number of inches in a foot.

Actually as a 'user' I think it makes things easier. Like calculating the cuts& fills for our excavator, from the engineers benchmarks.

Totally agree, those in the biz all get it. It is the customer that struggles with it. Plus, architects will not use it. So a dimension like 34 feet 11 13/16 inches is always fun. ( I have seen this)

We should just go metric. We should have 40 years ago.

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