Do-Si-Do Your (Land) Parcel

I'm going to guess that not all of you grew up in the country where you were taught to square dance in second grade (because it's an important social skill in the country).

As part of your school program. 

And then you had a Barn Dance at the end of the year.  

And you really wanted to ask Jason Bodine to be your partner because you thought he was cute but asked Miles Gillette instead because you didn't want to get teased about finding Jason cute, and Miles was acceptable to you.  Also, it never occurred to you that the traditional gendered dance roles are crap and that you were being indoctrinated into a world that wasn't going to fit a lot of folks later.  

If you've guessed that I did grow up in this world however, you'd be correct.

So right, you may not know what a do-si-do is even though it's a common enough phrase to hear around dancing.  Basically, you face your dance partner and you each step around each other so that first your sides are in line, then you're back to back, then your other sides are in line and then you're facing each other again.  It all happens with each of you facing the same direction the entire time if that helps.  Or... know what?  I bet there's a gif out there for this...  Ah, here we go.

Do you know that I've never looked up a gif before and only had three images appear on the website?  Maybe 1000 gifs that are all wrong show up but never only three!  Well, anyway, this is a do-si-do and no, I didn't look like that in second grade but I'm sure I'll look like that sometime in the next 20 years except I'll have blue hair.

So, "what," you ask, "does this have to do with land and such?"  Good question.  Lemme' 'splain.  No, is too long.  Lemme' sum up.  

Good land.  We like.  Plan making offer.  Fouled by the Dread Pirate Fire Marshall and his small band of bylaws.  Beat a hasty retreat.

Let's start at the beginning.  

On Monday I had a conversation with a friend about land, homes, and finances.  He made a number of interesting suggestions.  We vetoed the one that involved Chris getting his helicopter license and commuting to work that way, but we didn't immediately veto the idea of just buying a home with land, living in the home while we build our house, then converting the house into the guest house.  You know... that makes some sense.  We have been wondering how we're going to deal with paying rent and paying on a loan at the same time.  This way, we'd just pay a loan.  Well, a mortgage.  And mortgages are way easier to get than land lot loans.

So I did some searching.  The sad news is that 1. while we don't need a very good house for this, not very good homes don't appear to be so available nor are they discounted much and 2. even a low price for this area would be more per month as a mortgage than what we pay in rent right now.  And then we'd cease to even live in the house and we'd still be paying the mortgage for most of the rest of our lives.  It's not to say that it's impossible, but our initial searches left a lot to be desired.

The good news is that, while I was on our favorite realtor's website, I saw some land listed that we'd really liked way back.  It was the plot at 15944 Skyline Truck Trail.  We'd asked Adam about it maybe three times.  The third time he said something about how it was pending sale and well, poop.  So when I contacted the real estate agents from this site, I fully expected them to say "Whoops.  Our bad.  Yeah, that land is gone."  

They didn't.  It's back on the market.  Happy dances were shared all around.  Really, we liked this land a lot.  Heh, get it?  A lot?  Sorry.  It was one of the first parcels we saw, and it was way more money than we wanted to spend.  But you can not get what we want here without spending that amount of money, which was what led us to thinking about getting a loan, etc.  If we'd known at the time that that was basically the best deal we'd see, we would have jumped on it.  But you can't know what you don't know, right?

We decided to go out and look at it once more to make sure we remembered wanting it for good reasons.  I emailed Adam a heads up.

Yesterday was cloudy but warm, which was good.  You'd want to see what the land looks like when the weather is eh.  Off we drove.  This property is on the very smooth and not terribly curvy Skyline Truck Trail, a name that I first thought weird but now accept as we learned to do with those weird 90s troll dolls.

*Shudder*

This land has driveways that go around the mountain in opposing directions.  They're like the swirls on a soft serve ice cream cone.  I love this as I figure we can have a different drive way for the guest house than ours.

One went up one side of hill, the other the other side.  Just lop off the top and you have a pad.

We went up the short direction the first time, so I said we should go up the other drive this time.  The drive has some issues that would need addressing.  Like, we wouldn't be able to get our car up.

  It's really steep

See the rocks?

We found a detour off this drive we hadn't seen the first time so we went to explore it.  This was when we found the well!

And a well house too

The lines leading from the well were not attached, but it was reasonable to assume that at least some lines had been laid.  Why?  Because there are spigots further up the hill.

We continued up and found another detour.  This one was really nice and at first, I thought it would make a good site for a deck, but we consulted Chris's plot lines app and it seemed like it was butting up hard against the next property.

So we thought it might make a good site for a fire pit instead

The highest pad wasn't as wide as we'd remembered in the east/west direction.  We'd have to build the much more time consuming and difficult two layer earthship.  And while I do like that idea... well, more work, more time.  

It's very big in the north/south direction

The view though... amazing!

A small privacy wall and we wouldn't even see our neighbors!

There was an odd berm-like thing on the edge of the pad.  It didn't make a lot of sense for the pad to stop there.  We determined that it seemed to be the edge of the property, which would make it a weird place to build our home (incase later neighbors built their home right there too).  But, we still really like the property.

Horses have visited

We headed over to the lower pad.  It's a lovely view from the upper pad.  And less steep than I recalled.

The lower pad was actually larger than we thought and turned out to be a few feet longer in the east/west direction.  For the first time we considered that this pad might be the best one for our home.  Between the two pads, we found this exciting detail.

It's a water tank.  It's on its side but... it could be stood up.  We planned to ask if it was included.

There's an attractive cement bench in a lovely cleared area just in front of the lower pad.  We sat for a while contemplating the amazingness of the land and how we'd need to modify our expectations for our build.

Here we decided definitively to make an offer.  The dog decided to dig himself a nest.

We headed down the other driveway.  The other driveway isn't any better than the first, sadly, but it does have some beautiful reddish rocks/dirt.

Ouch

I have a thing about red earth.  The first time I saw really read earth was at Devil's Tower in Wyoming.  It was redder than this and I just wanted to roll in it like a dog rolling in dead squirrel.  I don't know why, it just feels like it needs to be part of me.  Maybe the iron in my blood sees some kinship to the iron in the soil...

Another diversion was found off the drive that I swear hadn't been there before... but if this was going to be our land, we wanted to know what it was.  So we headed down this detour off this drive and found...

Is this a third pad?  It was actually facing the right direction and was long enough for us to build what we've thought about... But it was much lower on the hill and we'd be pretty close to the road noise and... I just wasn't into that idea.  Chris decided it would make a brilliant archery range.  And on the side?

Rock climbing anyone?

So, generally a very nice and overwhelming time was had.  We drove home contemplatively, our minds reeling with changing from land searching to land buying and about how to best finance this purchase.  It's listed at $199.9K so we couldn't expect it to go much below $190K.  That's more than is really feasible to part with all at once if we're going to build too.

When we got home, I had an email back from Adam saying he was available to talk that evening or in the morning.  I ignored him because 1. I was trying to make dinner, 2. I was tired, and 3. seems he's ignored us a few times and waiting until the morning seemed perfectly reasonable.

This morning he texted me: "I spoke to the Skyline Truck Trail realtor.  The property is still available but the fire truck access remains the biggest issue.  They have received rough estimates of $95-$200K for the fire road.  That factor ruined the last deal and has kept other buyers away.  We can likely have them come down from their $199K price but not much."

Apparently road ways and drives here need to be 12' wide and not more than a 20% grade.  And also there needs to be a turnaround for a firetruck.  This confirmed Chris's suspicion that a flatbed truck might not make it onto the property either.  And really, we do want fire trucks to be able to access our land.  Especially in CA.

I realize that if the deal we knew about fell through there was likely a good reason, but I wanted to believe the good reason wasn't one that would affect us.  This is sadly untrue.  We really can't swing another $95-200K.  So... retreat!  Retreat!  The good thing is that we know before we go down some road with an offer only to find out months from now, after expenses, that we can't do what we want.

Back to the drawing board!