The 1987 Deed That Nearly Killed Our $4,800 Cottage Split
My mother is 82 and lives in our 620-square-foot cottage. We split our Greenville lot so her cottage would sit on its own parcel. The survey cost $4,800. A 1987 deed error left nine feet unresolved. A corrective quitclaim from the original owner's son fixed it for $24.
Nine feet of grass, one photocopied plat from 1987, and a surveyor's pencil tapping my picnic table twice, right where my east property line should have run. Tim Perrin has surveyed for 31 years. He found the iron pin in March without much trouble, read the deed call against it three times, looked up, and said the quietest bad sentence I have ever heard on my own property: your line has been wrong since Reagan.
Here is what the nine feet was for. Mom is 82 and lives in the 620-square-foot cottage behind our fence in Greenville, South Carolina, and the plan was simple and not cheap: split our lot into a 0.31-acre parcel under the house and a 0.14-acre parcel under the cottage, so her four walls sit on her own deed with her own name while she is alive to enjoy the paperwork. Perrin's quote for the minor subdivision survey was $4,800. The county side we could navigate. What nobody could navigate was a piece of paper recorded when I was eleven years old.
the cottage behind the fence
her own four walls
Mom has been in the cottage since 2021, after the fall on the stairs in her apartment on Wade Hampton made the decision for us. The plan was hers. The cottage has its own septic tank from 1963, its own power meter, its own water tap, and one gate in the fence line that she keeps locked against solicitors and grandchildren equally. She said she wanted her name on her own four walls, and she said it the way she says most things, once. The septic lateral from the cottage runs under the east strip, which is the nine feet, remember that, because everyone else in this story forgot it in 1987.
what the 1987 plat said
The original tract was 0.45 acres, and the plat recorded in 1987, Plat Book 42, page 117 at the Greenville County Register of Deeds, shows exactly that, in black ink. The deed the same owner signed the same year, Deed Book 1287, page 214, describes the tract by metes and bounds as 0.52. Nine feet, on paper, still his. Seven-tenths of an acre of discrepancy, or about nine feet of east line, drafted wrong, recorded wrong, and then photocopied forward. Every deed since has repeated the same metes and bounds like scripture: the Kesslers in 1987, the Blairs in 1994, us in 2011. On paper, nine feet of the east strip never left the original owner. The cottage's own lateral crossed ground our chain of title did not cleanly hold.
the strip with the septic lateral
Perrin laid it out with the pencil and the photocopy and did not dramatize any of it, which is why we trusted him when the news was bad and the math was simple. Title could be cured two ways, the attorney we consulted said. Two ways out. A quiet title action thru the circuit court: $3,500, six to nine months, a hearing, a judge. Or a corrective quitclaim signed by the 1987 grantor, or his heirs, reciting the error and conveying the nine feet into the chain, one signature, two pages, and no courtroom. The grantor was a man named Halloran, who sold the tract in 1987 and, per the probate index, died in 2003 with one son.
a hardware man in Easley
Finding Dan Halloran took one afternoon and two phone calls. He is 71, and he has run Halloran Hardware in Easley for most of his working life, and when I told him a photocopied plat from the year he sold our tract had a nine-foot drafting miss in it, he laughed and said his father's surveyor drank. He drove down April 14 with the original file copy of his 1987 closing, we signed a two-page corrective quitclaim at my picnic table, the same table the pencil tapped, and a notary from his bank witnessed it for $10. He refused money. He asked, instead, for a picture of Mom on the cottage steps. The quitclaim went into the record April 21, filing fee $24.
$4,800, then $119 of paper
The full column, because this is how I keep my blood pressure. Survey, three visits and the plats: $4,800. Corrective quitclaim recording: $24. Title company endorsement for Parcel B: $95. Notary: $10, plus a honey ham from the smokehouse on Poinsett Highway, $95, which Dan Halloran did not ask for, did not expect, and ate anyways across the following two weeks. All in: $5,014, and $119 of it is paper. The quiet title route would have started at $3,500 and ended whenever a judge's calendar said so. One afternoon and a hardware man beat it.
two parcels, one gate
The county planning office approved the minor subdivision May 19, with the septic lateral shown on the plat the way the state environmental office insisted, and the final plats recorded June 9. Parcel A, 0.31 acres, our house. Parcel B, 0.14 acres, the cottage, clean title, east line finally where the pin says it is. Mom's deed came back from the Register of Deeds on June 23, Dolores Beasley, and she taped the copy inside the cabinet above her stove, next to a photo of Dan Halloran standing on her steps in April, grinning, holding the ham. The gate stays locked. That is the whole split.