The lot.

What’s kind of wild about where we’re at with the house project now is that, while the lot is empty and we JUST officially closed last week, we’ve already put about 4 months of work (and many several dollars) into the effort. So what have we been doing in all that time? Well, let me tell you: we have been learning things. Some of those lessons were expensive! Some took us longer than they should have. Some of them were par for the course because, as you’ll see, this was not the least complicated land purchase. As our broker said, “I went to the University of Stapleton this year.” Unfortunately, we are not a degree-issuing institution. Fortunately, we can share some of what we did and learned here so that if, perhaps, you find yourself in a similar situation, you might be saved a little legwork and a little expense. 

Do you think boundary line adjustments, easements, encumbrances, surveys, soil tests, critical areas designations, and special exceptions on title reports sound boring? Me too! Read on. 

So to start, the background. Our parcel is lot 6 of 13 in a small planned development on the west side of Vashon Island. The development is called Madrona Cove, and it’s had—shall we say—some hiccups and permutations since work first started on it back in 2007. The original concept for the development was a 50-acre plot consisting of 14 lots with shared ownership of about 35 acres of forest and tidelands, including several miles of trails, beach access with a dock and kayak storage, and—notably—a community garden. The garden was planned for the area on the communal property that housed the communal well, a smart (outdoor, permeable) use of the space designated for the water utility since nothing can be built within a 100-foot radius of the wellhead.

The original concept for the development, with the community garden.

Fast forward several years. The development has stalled, with ownership of the lots split between a few different parties. Why? According to our broker, it’s likely a combination of timing—2008 being a little rough financially—and an anti-development mentality on the island (see: independent spirit, ordinances to preserve large lots and a rural feel stuff from the last post). The majority of the lots go into receivership, with the exception of the upper lots, which are still owned by two of the original developers and encompass the well site and the area that was going to be a garden. The parcel that was going to be the garden is now—you guessed it! Did you guess it?—lot 6. That’s our lot!

So, because lot 6 was originally designed to house the community’s water utility, it came with (wait for it) water utility stuff. 

Here’s the first drawing we saw of the lot. That circle in the middle is the 100-foot radius around the well (that’s a circle 200 feet in diameter, so, a fairly large chunk of the lot). You can see that it shows a potential homesite (on the western slope), a possible septic design (there’s a pump by the homesite with a pipe that runs around the well radius up to a drain field on the eastern, upper part of the lot), and… all these mysterious boxes. Worth noting here that because this is an island, a lot of common city utilities like water and sewage and gas aren’t available, so most properties operate off of a well with a septic system and a propane tank.

Here, I’ll annotate. This nice large font and my great design acumen should make this a lot more legible.

Better?

This drawing left us with a few open questions. Our vision for the lot was a one-story rambler, that sat back on the flat, sunny, upper portion of the lot near the road and opened up to the view, with the well radius sitting in what would be the backyard. We didn’t want to build on a slope, or build the kind of multi-level house that the steep slope would have necessitated. The septic pump system seemed complicated. Basically, we wanted to know if we could flip the homesite on this preliminary design from the western slope to the northeast corner and still be left with enough space in the flat portion of the lot, outside of the well radius, for a septic design that could support a 3- or 4-bedroom home (septic systems are designed for a number of possible occupants, defined in the code as 2 per bedroom). 

A quick call to the engineer who did the original design work told us that those mysterious boxes were planter beds (remember this was going to be a community garden way back when), and that the soils were good throughout the lot for a septic system—or at least they had been when he’d done his work 10 or so years ago. Since it was unlikely that the soil would have changed in the interim, and since the planter boxes were no longer a consideration, this was a good initial sign that we’d be able to put a house where we wanted, provided it would fit.  

But this was just one (incomplete, outdated) piece of the puzzle. The engineer said he’d be able to help us with a new septic design if we could give him the shape and square footage of the house we wanted to build. But we didn’t have a shape or square footage yet, and in our minds, those things would be impacted (if not fully defined) by the shape and limitations of the lot—including the footprint of the septic drain field. It was a bit of a chicken and egg situation, and we needed a lot more information before we could be sure a house like the house we want could fit. 

One thing that was notably missing from the various drawings we had was the pump house for the well. We knew this existed because it is physically on the lot. But we couldn’t find any drawings that showed it, or indicated what kind of access easements or setbacks existed around it. 

Aside from being a bit of an eyesore (okay, a lot of an eyesore—I’m not super jazzed that this is there, but I have been convinced that “there are things we can do” to disguise or improve it so time will tell), the pump house and well opened up a whole slew of questions about, well, water. If this is the community well for all 14 lots, but it’s on our private property, what does that mean in terms of access, maintenance, and operations?

But wait! There’s more. The lot also had a critical areas designation, not uncommon for properties in this region and especially not uncommon for the island. Critical areas are defined by the county and come with various use restrictions, including building setbacks. Fortunately it looked like the critical area was limited to just the steep slope on the western side of the property, which wasn’t where we wanted to build anyway, and any building setback from that would sit comfortably within the well radius, which was already a no-build zone. The CAD (critical area designation) had been done in 2019, and they’re valid for 5 years, so we were in good shape on that front. 

But wait! There’s…. still more. Once we’d gotten the title report for the property, we saw that it came with 38 special exceptions. Thirty eight. For the uninitiated (you lucky souls), a special exception is essentially anything that impacts the legal description of a piece of property. If you want to own a piece of land outright and know that every square inch of it is yours to do what you want with, you want zero special exceptions. We knew that was not going to be the case for us given the well and the critical area, but 38 exceptions seemed like… too many. 

We got overwhelmed. We almost walked away. We hired a real estate lawyer (hot tip: lawyers are expensive). Working with him and the title company, we found out that 22 of the special exceptions had to do with taxes and ownership that were the seller’s responsibility to resolve and would be gone by closing. We felt better about things! We kept working with the lawyer and found that the remaining special exceptions were complicated and, in some cases, impossible to map. Why? Why would something that clearly impacts a specifically defined geographical location be impossible to map? We felt bad about things again. 

Well, it turns out that at a previous stage in the development, the lot lines were redefined a bit. The developers did what’s called a boundary line adjustment; instead of doing a separate plat survey for each lot, they looked at the entire 50-acre development and tweaked some lots and the location of some roads and utilities. Because various easements encumbered the full 50-acre space (naturally), and all the lots were included in the single boundary line adjustment, any special exception that applied anywhere on the whole development automatically encumbered the title of every lot within the development. But! Just because they encumbered the title didn’t mean they actually encumbered the lot. We just needed to figure out what did, so we weren’t surprised by, say, a 50-foot access easement for the utility company that cut through the middle of our home site.

See our lot? Five and six both have a circle showing a well radius (the well on 5 was decommissioned once the higher-capacity well on 6 was up and running); 6 is the one on top. All that text under the header “Schedule B items?” Those are the special exceptions, easements that apply broadly to this whole development and, because this was recorded as a boundary line adjustment, are inherited as encumbrances on the title of each lot within it.

I’m going to skip over the details of many weeks of emails and document reviews and phone calls with lawyers and conversations with title officers and chats with surveyors because I don’t want to relive that tedium and neither should you! I will just tell you that ultimately what got us to a good place with this, where we felt like we understood all of the special exceptions and were confident that they wouldn’t cause us problems, was doing two things. 

First: printing out the title report and every supporting document, cross-referencing the boundary line adjustment documents, and taking a highlighter to a map to try and draw everything that we could. When we did this, we saw that most of the special exceptions were easements for the utility company. Not only were most of the easements totally standard (right alongside the road), they were also for utilities like electricity that were already in place. 

Next: hiring a surveyor! This was basically a desk exercise for a professional surveyor, who in a matter of days was able to review the title report, the boundary line adjustment, and the other documents connected to the special exceptions and give us an official document that showed everything that physically encumbered lot 6. I almost cried when we saw his neat and tidy final survey, it was such a thing of beauty. He’s also going to map out the topography of the lot for us, which is key for the next (much more fun) step of starting design work for the house.

We ended up getting our survey at the 11th hour. If I were to do this over again, I would hire a pro to do the survey on day one. It was a relatively small investment that, had we done it sooner, would have saved us hours of document review, hours of physically staking out boundaries on the property, hours of billable time from an attorney, and hours of back and forth with the sellers in a complicated game of real estate agent telephone. We had stipulated in our purchase and sale agreement (PSA) that the sellers would provide a survey. They provided us with a boundary line adjustment and various other documents that basically gave us all the information that would have been on a survey. In retrospect, we probably also should have made it more clear in the PSA that we meant we wanted a new, professional survey that showed all the special exceptions on the title. As it was, we kept waiting on that, and waiting on it, and waiting on it… and it was never going to come, because the sellers felt (not incorrectly) that they’d given us everything we needed for our feasibility assessment. By the time we went to hire someone, we were in the middle of the Christmas holidays and just 2 weeks from the end of our due diligence period, and every surveying company we talked to was months out in terms of availability. We ended up lucking out with a surveyor that Tim knew through work who was able to fit us in, but, it really came down to the wire. 

Bottom line: just suck it up and pay for a survey if your property is anything more complicated than a perfectly flat square with nothing on it and nothing around it.

Here’s what we started with. Look at this cute little naked polygon!

And here’s the final thing, the result of four months of feasibility:

So what this survey tells us is that the area outlined below is where the house (and the septic drain field) can sit. It abuts the road, so the access to the house will also be from that side. Everything from the well radius to the left (west) will be yard. The whole lot is a little over an acre and a half, with this usable space coming in at around 10,000 square feet (which lol is not the size of house we’ll be building).

We had a couple other formalities to do as part of our due diligence, like a new septic feasibility study (soil’s still cool), a water test for the well (no killer bacteria). Our friend and architect communicated with the county planning department to review our site, and at a high level, there was nothing to indicate anything that would prevent us from building what we want to build, where we want to build it. So things look good! We feel good! Good enough to close, and good enough to get started now on the fun stuff (design!) that will precede more boring stuff (permits!) and some of the scary stuff (financing!). 

Next time, we’ll talk about some of our inspiration for the house. Spoiler alert: it’s nothing like our current house. It’s gonna be goooood.