Property Plot Map

In finished form, the property plot map pictured above looks so simple. I've been wanting to craft that rascal for years....definitely since 2012, when I really got serious about landscaping around the house. I just had to take the time to make it and the quarantine/stay-at-home coronavirus shut-down gave me both opportunity and incentive to accomplish it. It helped that I could start with a full property survey that was done back in 2006, although I only had the paper copy of it (shown below). The first step was scanning it.

When I first started working on landscaping the yard, I pulled out my dependable Mead legal pad and hand-drew the different parts of the yard, and labeled what I was planting in their approximate locations (photo above). Of course, the next year, there were changes, additions, revisions, replantings, and replacements...so I had to basically hand draw the yard maps all over again:

I've got some rough digital copies of my architect's plans for that addition on the rear of the house but without the whole property layout:

I'd been wanting to combine them and clean them up so that I could have a digital document, allowing me to produce copies of the full property layout when that's what was needed, or to be able to produce sections to be able to record landscaping and planting and such in certain areas, like just the front yard, all the while knowing that there are likely to be changes from year to year.

That's part of the reason why so many of my plants still have the identifying tags on them, even if they've been in the ground for years. I've been waiting until I had a proper record-keeping system for tracking it all. I confess that I'm pretty thrilled with how this full property outline map turned out. I'm delighted by all kinds of small and inconsequential things. I also love checking things off the list, especially when they are as old and out-of-reach as this one has seemed.