They built 14 cabins on my shoreline. 14 full foundations, private boat launches, bronze address plaques, the whole thing. Three years of construction, $4.2 million. And the entire time I sat on a piece of paper that made every single one of them illegal. I didn’t say a word.
See, Diane, the HOA president who green lit this whole project. She assumed my silence meant I didn’t know. That I was just some quiet guy who inherited land and didn’t understand what he had. She never asked, never checked, never pulled the original deed from 1963 that my grandfather recorded with the county clerk, the one with the shoreline easement that explicitly bans exactly what she built.
So, I let her finish. Let her sell memberships at $78,000 a piece. Let her take out a $2.1 million construction loan. Let her throw a ribbon cutting ceremony. And then on closing day for the final two cabins, I walked into that title office with one piece of paper. I’ve been reading property deeds since I was 18 years old.
My father handed me a manila folder on my 18th birthday. Original land deed easement documentation, two survey plats, one handwritten note from my grandfather. I spent 22 years after that as a contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers surveying land rights for federal waterway projects. I know what a repairarian easement is.
