He told me the capped wellhead was buried beneath the grass in the back corner, about fifteen feet outside the boundary shown on the plans. He said it looked old, but the concrete cap had a county inspection stamp on it. I asked why that mattered, and he said a well that wasn’t on the survey could change everything about what could legally be built there. He also said the plans he’d been given appeared to stop several feet short of the actual rear boundary. I asked who had provided him with the measurements, and he said my son had. Then he added, “Ma’am, I don’t think your son knows what land he’s actually measuring.”
I called the county records office the next morning and requested the original survey for the property. The clerk found one from 1992 that showed the wellhead and a narrow strip of land behind it that wasn’t included in my son’s parcel. That strip was still listed under my name. My husband had apparently purchased it separately when we expanded the orchard, because the old well supplied irrigation water to every row. I had completely forgotten about the separate parcel because my husband had handled the paperwork thirty years ago. Then I realized why the landscaper’s laser measurements didn’t match my son’s plans. The pool and landscaping weren’t just going to remove my trees—they were going to cross onto land my son didn’t own.
I confronted my son with the survey, and he admitted his wife had hired the landscaper before they checked the property records. He said they assumed everything behind the house belonged to them because it had always been treated as one piece of land. I told him assumptions weren’t deeds. The contractor canceled the job, and I had the boundary markers restored before anyone could make another mistake. My son eventually apologized, but I told him the orchard wasn’t something he could measure around until it fit his wife’s plans. The landscaper thought he had found an old well—I discovered he had found the one piece of land my husband had deliberately kept in my name.
