Choices – Starting With Buying Land

Reader Contribution by Bruce Mcelmurray
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It is hard to decide if the next choice would be to choose a piece of ground to put a home on or to choose a home  and then find a piece of land that would suit that home. Actually it probably doesn’t matter very much either way. I think most people do much like we did and buy the land and then later decide on the home you want to put on that land. Making the decision on which home choice takes much more consideration than buying raw land.  I’ll cover our home choice and the thought process we went through in another upcoming blog.   

Our purchase of land was done in 1978 sight unseen.  I would not recommend that anyone purchase land without giving it a good look first.  We were able to do this because the developer gave us a written guarantee that when we saw our property if we did not like it we could exchange it for equal property elsewhere in the development. At that time less than half the community was developed.  As it turned out it was exactly as represented to us and we loved it.  A few years later the adjoining property was defaulted on by the purchaser and the developer offered it to us if we were interested.  We were very interested and soon had two adjoining 5.5 acre lots.  

When we first visited the property we immediately realized that this raw piece of land was going to require a lot of work.  There were dead trees, tangled trees, under growth, large rocks and not much in the way of flat to build on since it was high up on the side of a mountain.   Since we then lived in Florida we knew that building would not be a problem as a house could be built on cement pilings like they do along the coast line for protection from tidal surges.  That grading a home site was also possible. We also liked the idea that no development could take place behind us as it backed up to the developers property and there was a large designated green belt between us and him. 

As we looked at our new property it was important to see beyond the jumble of trees and imagine instead  the home site potential.  Having acquired the land it was now time to make long range plans for turning that land into our future home and clearly a lot of work was required.  The property had springs that formed creeks which then ran on down the mountain. Those were not good places for a home to be built.  There were plenty of aspen trees which would be excellent for firewood.  There were spruce, fir and   pine trees.  It was a very thick and heavy stand of healthy trees and once the under growth and dead and dying trees were removed it would improve greatly. 

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