I hope you have a coffee or tea for this one, or maybe you should just get something more stronger for this.
When we first purchased the land in September 2020 there was a small waterway running through the back quarter of the property next to good old mother nature — a granite out crop. We thought the rock would be interesting to develop with some flower boxes and fencing and the water would be a simple culvert and backfill. It got even better when in closing the purchase there was no easement against the waterway so we did not need to worry about issues with the municipality.
Come the spring we started moving forward with planning the lot so we asked our contractor about culvert pricing and what the cost would be for installation. Let’s stop here and take your first big gulp of the hard stuff before we proceed. We were informed during this conversation with he contractor that there was a need to communicate with the municipality as to the size and installation design before they would cost out such a project, so the call was made to the municipality and we found out that there was an error with the easement and we are not able to fill in the waterway.
To put this into perspective, this waterway is about six to seven feet below the level of the basement foundation and approximately 28 feet away from the back wall of the house like a giant “V” carving through our property. So when we heard the words “no you cannot do that,” all our hopes and dreams were dashed and now they wanted to put an easement on record with the Land Register Office which would give them control of about 2400 square feet of our land consisting of the waterway and the granite out crop. Well, this did not sit will with us and we proceeded to negotiate with the municipality.
More drinking is suggested here. We arranged a meeting with the Manager of Public Works to meet on site so he could understand what was being asked of us with this easement. The resulting conversation ended with a few ideas on how to proceed but after receiving a summary email from the manager that basically placed the cost burden on us to provide them full access to the whole of the back of the property. With a few days of stewing on this email, we contacted the CAO of the municipality to put forward our concerns about loosing a chunk of our property. This conversation was informative from both sides and resulted in the conclusion that the waterway was indeed on our property and with a few changes on the town’s side, there was no need to register an easement and therefore we were free to do as we pleased. In other words, a culvert is in our future which means more money out of our pocket.
Now, a few weeks have passed when all this has transpired and the ability to have big equipment moving about the lot is becoming harder to do especially with the house being placed on the foundation at the beginning of next week. This might make things harder to complete but we are in charge and our original plans can move forward.