A measured record of the house, the well and everything buried between them.
Permit drawings describe a plan. An as-built set describes the property you own: framing as it was cut, mechanical runs as they landed, and the septic, well and utility lines mapped where the machine put them.
The set covers five things a forested lot will make you ask about later.
Structure as built
Headers that grew, rafters that changed pitch to clear a ridge beam, posts added where a hillside foundation stepped. On a sloped Hill City lot the structure rarely comes out of the ground exactly as drawn, and knowing which lumber carries weight governs every future opening.
Well and pump
Where the casing sits, the depth the driller logged, how the line comes back to the house, and where the pressure equipment lives. This is the single most requested piece of a Hill City record and the one people most often cannot produce.
Septic and drainfield
Tank placement, line direction, and the footprint of the field. A drainfield you cannot locate becomes a no-build zone the size of your imagination. A mapped one lets you plan a shop with confidence.
Buried runs
Power, propane, water and any conduit crossing the lot between the house and the road. Forested acreage swallows trench evidence in one growing season. The record keeps the route visible afterward.
Open-wall scans
We scan the house with 3D Vista while framing and mechanical rough-ins are still exposed, so the record is walkable rather than filed. The full image and scan set is delivered at closeout.
A plan gets you approved. A record tells you what you own.
Every permit set is written before anything is true. It assumes a footing depth, a trench route, a clean rectangle of buildable ground. Then the excavator meets granite shallower than expected, the footing steps, the water line takes a different path around the ledge, and the stamped drawing stops describing reality by week two. Nobody did anything wrong. That is how building on a hillside goes.
Jason Pedersen worked as a mechanical engineer before starting iLevel in 2019. In that field, a drawing that no longer matches the machine is a defect to be corrected, not a piece of paperwork to be filed. We carry that habit onto Hill City jobsites. What changes in the field gets measured and written down while it is still visible, which means the set you receive at closeout describes your house rather than someone’s earlier intention.
The reason this matters more here than in a town lot is the lot itself. Hill City building inventory is largely hillside and forest-adjacent, with the Black Hills National Forest wrapped around the town, significant slope, pine cover, and granite present on many parcels. Almost everything you will want to do to that property later, clearing for defensible space, adding a shop, running a line to an outbuilding, starts with knowing exactly what is already under the duff and where it goes.
The second reason is distance. A large share of Hill City owners live somewhere else for part of the year. They cannot walk the lot on a Saturday to settle a question, so the documentation stands in for being there.
The people who need the record most are the ones who will not be standing there when the question comes up.
The record is the last step of a build that was run in the open.
Documentation only exists if somebody is in the house on the days the walls are open. That is the project manager’s job, and it is why the record gets captured rather than promised.
View servicePerc results, well siting and the utility route are decided long before a trench opens. Those preconstruction decisions become the first entries in the as-built set.
View serviceThe in-house design model is the baseline every field change gets measured against. Without a clean starting drawing there is nothing for the record to record against.
View serviceThe full build in the pines above town, from lot review through the last walkthrough.
View serviceHow the scanning works across every iLevel project, and what an owner does with a walkable set of open walls.
View serviceCabins that grew over forty years are the hardest houses to document, and the most worth documenting.
Three eras in one building
A cabin that got a bedroom in one decade and a great room in another has three framing approaches meeting at odd angles. Documenting it starts with reading which section carries what, because the original exterior wall is often now an interior partition doing structural work.
Utilities that moved twice
Every addition reroutes something. Supply lines get spliced around a new foundation, a panel gets a subpanel, an old septic line gets abandoned in place. We map what is live and note what looks abandoned.
What we mark as unknown
Anything that cannot be seen without opening a wall goes in the set as unverified rather than guessed. A confident record that is wrong in one place poisons trust in all of it.
The lot around it
On an older property the well and tank locations are frequently the only record, and they live in somebody’s memory. We locate what can be located and mark it before that memory becomes unavailable.
Six answers before you commit to a record.
How is an as-built set different from the permit drawings?
The permit set is a proposal. It shows what everyone intended before an excavator met granite and before a framer cut the first rafter. The as-built set is a measurement of the finished thing: where the footing actually stepped, where the trunk line actually runs, how far the tank actually sits from the house. One gets you approval to build. The other tells you what you own.
Our cabin was added onto twice since the seventies. Can it still be documented?
Yes, and those are the properties that gain the most from it. A phased Hill City cabin usually has three framing vocabularies stacked against each other and utilities that were rerouted every time somebody bumped out a wall. We document what is reachable, scan what is open, and mark clearly what is inferred rather than seen. A record with honest gaps beats a confident guess.
Why does the well and septic location matter so much on a forested lot?
Because everything you do later on that lot has to stay clear of them. A garage pad, a second driveway, a shop, added defensible space clearing, a buried propane run. Without a measured location you are working from memory, and memory on a wooded acreage is unreliable. With the set in hand, the machine operator knows the setbacks before the tracks come off the trailer.
Does the county want a copy of the record?
Pennington County reviews rural lots and Hill City handles municipal review in town, and each closes out inspections in its own way. We keep the documentation organized so anything a reviewer asks for can be pulled without a scramble. What we do not do is treat the county file as your file. Your set is more complete than anything a permit office keeps, and it stays with you.
We are planning an addition in a few years. What does the record save us?
It saves the discovery phase. Adding on starts with three questions: what is carrying load, what is inside the wall you want to open, and where can you dig without hitting something. A documented home answers all three from a laptop. An undocumented one answers them with exploratory demolition, which costs real money and produces drywall repair nobody planned for.
Who holds the file if we sell the place?
You do, and it transfers with the house if you want it to. The full image and scan set is delivered at closeout and it belongs to you. Out-of-state buyers in the central Hills tend to care about this more than local buyers do, because they cannot drop by and check things for themselves. Handing over a documented home shortens their questions considerably.
Ninety minutes from the shop, and worth the drive on open-wall days.
Hill City is about 90 minutes from Belle Fourche, the farthest regular reach in our service area. We compensate with comprehensive 3D Vista scanning, weekly Ressio updates, and a project manager who batches site visits when several area lots are active at once. Finished work sits in the gallery, the Hill City custom home page covers lots and permits, and the contact page is the fastest way to reach Jason. You can also call (605) 638-3040.
Pennington County overviewFind out what is already under your lot.
Tell us about the property, whether it is ground you are about to build on or a cabin that has been in the family long enough to keep secrets. Jason or someone on the team gets back within one business day. Reach us through the contact page or call the shop.
