In The Beginning… Land Purchase

In the beginning…

After three years of searching for our “perfect property”, we finally found it. We had looked at so many different acreage that to have finally found it was a dream come true. The search had begun with a list of everything we wanted for our “perfect” land. That list included how much acreage, price, location, how close to neighbors, nearest town to our existing location, lay of the land (hilltop, valley, wooded, level, sloping), access (paved, gravel, dirt), rights-of-way, how close to a main road, water (creek, springs, cistern, wells), utilities (natural gas, electric, septic, internet), fencing, outbuildings, house (condition, currently occupied), mineral rights (though, most rights have been sold off years ago), surveyed, and reason for selling.

If you have ever searched for land, you probably have come across some truly humorous listings as have we: a house so close to the road you can literally step out of your vehicle on to the front porch; access to the house involved driving through a creek; there was no water on the property, so the sellers trucked in water in a large water tank on the back of their pick-up truck and included the tank and truck in the sale; land with no real house sites that included a legal walking right-of-way for the neighbors to access their water well on your land; had a phone line underground running right in the middle of the only usable land; had trash and rubbish buried all over the property. We actually did place offers on two properties and then withdrew from both. After we really thought about it we realized neither parcel was what we really wanted. Both of us agreed that we were actually trying to make the properties meet our wants, not the other way around.

The whole land search process was truly an interesting endeavor. Though our list of wants was rather long, we never really compromised on very many things. Our main desire was that it was enough land to live and raise food on, hunt, and would afford us our privacy.

Our property had just been listed the day before, kinda like it had waited for us. We named our 70 acres of woods the Home Place. The land had five areas that extended out like fingers, so we named them: 1. Crop Circles 2. Bark Mulch 3. Park Platz 4. Home Place 5. Penta.

The land was badly overgrown of young pine trees and weeds, mostly Lespedeza that grew to 3 to 4 feet high. “Lespedeza cuneata is an extremely aggressive invader of open areas and out competes native vegetation. Once established, Lespedeza cuneata is very difficult to remove due to the seed bank which may remain viable for decades. Native to Asia and introduced into the United States in the late 1800s, it has been widely planted for erosion control, mine reclamation and wildlife habitat.” (ref: invasive.org, center for invasive species and ecosystem health). The overgrowth on the few usable acres was more than we could handle by hand ourselves, so we hired someone to brush hog.

What a difference a piece of equipment could make in short time. We saw a tractor in our future.

Decisions: Purchasing the land was just the first of many, many decisions that now needed to be made.

If we wanted a working homestead, every decision is major in itself: where to put roads, size of gravel for roads, house site, type, and size, gardens, compost pile, solar panels, wind turbine, chicken coop, fencing (electric, woven wire, privacy), gates, and the list goes on and on. The one decision that was easy was the fact that we really liked the land and believed it was what we wanted.