Larimer site plans need real parcel dimensions

With a new shed, garage, or addition, it is tempting to draw it where it looks right in the yard. A permit site plan asks for something stricter than that: a complete, scaled drawing built on the real dimensions of your legal parcel, the numbers that come from assessor parcel information, not from pacing off the lawn.

The reason is that the yard you see and the parcel you own are not always the same shape. Fences rarely sit exactly on the line. Roads, irrigation ditches, and easements can cut across what feels like your space, and decades of “it’s always been there” can hide where the boundary actually runs. A drawing that matches the lawn instead of the deed can place a structure over a setback or an easement without anyone noticing until review.

Setbacks are part of why the dimensions have to be honest. Unincorporated zoning rules set minimum lot sizes, required setbacks from property lines, and limits on building height, and a reviewer checks the plan against all of them. Those distances only mean something if they are measured from the true parcel lines.

The cleaner path is to start with the county’s parcel information and zoning map before you draw anything, then scale the structure onto the real boundaries. A site plan built that way does two jobs at once: it gives the county what it needs to review the project, and it surfaces a placement problem while it is still an eraser fix rather than a built-and-must-move one.