Picking our house location

We have a total of 37.5 acres of land with some flat areas, some draws or coulees, and lots of rock formations.

On Sunday, May 4th, 2014, we walked all over our property to find the perfect spot to build.  There were lots of things to take into consideration:

• The further away from the road, the more expensive the electrical lines will be (~$8-$11/foot with the first 100 ft being free).
• We need to take into consideration water drainage.
• The plan is to build onto our house in the future as our family grows, and also to build a garage near the house as well as a barn/shop too (maybe WAY into the future) - so we had to plan for that.
• Our views!!!  I want to position the house just right so we can see the sunset each night and view the entire mountain range.
• We must be able to get the concrete truck on our land to pour our foundation.  Our current driveway has some soft spots where the well digging truck sank in pretty deep. 

After discussing all of this, we found our spot!!  It is about 200-250 from the closest electric pole (~$1,650 is what we estimate for the electric) and the drive would be about 200-250 ft off the gravel road too.  This spot would be the south-west quarter of our property.

Our thinking is that once we build, we are close enough to the coulee (where the deer like to be in the mornings and evenings), that we can build a large deck and create a walking bridge to and over the coulee.  Eventually we talked about graveling a walking path along the coulee too.  I'm so full of ideas, but it will all happen in due time!

Here are some pictures we took:

 

Scott is never thrilled when I take his picture:)  When we walk our property, we try to always carry a gun with us just in case we encounter rattle snakes.  Our neighbors told us that they have had them on their property.  We haven't seen one yet!!

Here is the Horny Toad we saw today!!!  He scared me when he scurried in front of my feet. I have never seen one before. 

If you look closely above, you can see the stakes in the ground for our build area.  It will be 20x28' with an attached 8x12' (approx.) laundry/mud room. And if you see where toward the top of the picture the grass is a little greener - that is where our coulee is.

View from where we will be building. You can see have 3 neighbors on our gravel road between our house and the main highway.  Only one of them actually live here year round.  So we've only met Gordy and Lori. 

Above - this is the view northwest looking toward Red Lodge, MT.  These are the Beartooth Mtns.

Scott was walking to get an idea of how long our driveway will be to the house.

Here is our well!! Nothing fancy or exciting really.  It's capped right now but once we build we will have a well pump and plumbing added to it.

In this picture you can see that our build site is going to be much closer to our current campsite.  This will help save us close to 75% on our electrical budget, plus we won't have to worry about replacing the tile in the low spot quite yet. We are thinking about building our barn/shop area up where our campsite it (someday in the future of course!).