Mr. Laureth and I are in the middle of buying a home in an undisclosed rural location, which is sitting on several acres of woodland. The property lines are not marked in any way, and it’s visually impossible when hiking to tell where our land ends and the neighbor’s land begins. Since we plan to manage and utilize this land, the borders matter to us.

We could call out the surveyors and have them accurately measure and put their colorful little stakes through the woods, but we expect this to cost a few thousand dollars, which, since we’re buying a house, is not in the budget at this time.

We could ask the neighbors on either side to define the property line as we walk together through the borderless woods, but this seems ripe for trouble. “Suuure, our land ends…way over there!”

We could buy a handheld GPS sort of thing, but those have an accuracy of something like 30 feet. Since some of the jogs in the irregularly-shaped parcel are about 35 feet, this is not really enough granularity for our needs.

Short of crawling around 10+ acres of no-path forest with a tape measure and a can of spray paint, is there a way to accurately, cheaply, and easily figure out the boundaries, or is this one of those situations where I have to pick two of those three, but have to forego either the accuracy, the cheap, or the ease?

Topics: home improvement, real estate, measurements, GPS, neighbors, forests