Today we are talking about a topic which has immense ramifications on the ability to execute on our grand dreams – i.e., Planning
We are not just building a cob house on the land. We are also putting down a vegetable and fruit garden, installing bee-hives and composting garden waste. We only have 3 months in 2016 and that will be spent on clearing the land; making tool purchases, collecting rocks from the land, understanding the building codes, getting the well dug and simply getting into the swing of regular documentation (the bane of every engineer!) and physical activity on the land over weekends. 2017 will be spent on building and planting the vegetable garden (including flowering plants and herbs), planting fruit trees, installing bee-hives, learning through the county extension programs and the Forest Stewardship programs, design and construction of a test house, detailed design of the main house, submission and hopefully approval of the building plans/permits. Whew! That’s a lot of work! 2018 is when the real action begins where we get the foundation of the house done, septic installed and get the cob walls of the house built. Further plans would depend on how the building proceeds in 2018 and we will work on those details as the project progresses.
We have used a Google calendar to carve out times for different activities. Our project is no doubt complicated, difficult and lengthy. Breaking down the project into individual activities and assigning a rough timeline achieves a number of things.
One really starts to understand the scale of the project and the large number of tasks involved
Monitoring progress against the plan helps us understand our progress
This plan helps us to tie in to our budget and indirectly gives us a good idea about our spending patterns
It can also help us understand the times of higher activity and building which in turn would help us schedule vacation time for the same
Breaking the project into individual tasks makes the prospect of execution less daunting
The process of planning and thinking aloud helps us understand any dependencies or pre-requisites and helps us order interdependent tasks in the right sequence
It helps us understand the kind of flexibility that our schedule permits including tasks that can be juggled around
The more detailed the plan; the less the chance for failure. Additional time spent on intelligent planning and detailed design will save us a lot of time and heartbreak in the future once the actual construction starts
We have recorded a small talk on our thinking process for outlining this plan. Ignore my comment about the talk being relatively short! We seem to end up jabbering away for at least 15 minutes in most of our videos.
That’s not code language. These are just some of the records you need to learn to pull up and read when you are buying land. We learnt the hard way that land listings; unlike house listings have fairly vague wording. The actual boundary markings on the land are often even more confusing; assuming they are marked at all! Real estate agents who are good at selling land are few and far between. Besides; when you walk into a house, you know for the most part what you are walking into. Land is not that cut and dry.
Whether you can build on a land at all and what you can build, are governed by the rules from multiple entities.
Health Department: This department is in charge of well and septic. I have addressed ‘Well&Septic‘ in detail in a separate blog post. The Health Department holds the keys to giving you a permit to install the well and septic. Obtain the results of any perc tests done on the land from the health department. If the perc was successful; check if the perc results have expired. If a well is already present, ask for results of the water flow test done on the well. If no perc testing has been done, enquire with the health department about the land – very often they will tell you right off the bat that the land will not pass perc tests (flood plain/existence of a stream/being downhill from other land are all potential red flags for perc tests).
Planning and Zoning Department: This department is responsible for regulating zoning. For e.g., if the area is zoned Agricultural, you will only be allowed to build agricultural sheds/silos/barns. If the area is zoned Restricted Conservation, there will be strict rules about the land that can be cleared for construction. If the area is zoned RDT, there is a density restriction like one house per 25 acres. If a 5 acre plot being sold is in an RDT zone, you may or may not be able to build on that lot. These are just examples – check the description of zoning codes for your county.
HOA rules/covenants: If the land is part of an HOA or private subdivision, there can be strict rules about the type and size of houses that you can build. We found one with a requirement that the house should be a minimum of 3000+ square feet! You will be given access to the HOA documents only after you submit your written offer for the land. You will then have a window of a few days to take back your offer if you find any clause in the documents that you cannot meet. Do not buy land hoping you can change the HOA rules. Technically you can fight it; but it typically takes years and life is too short.
Note that you need a green light from all 3 of the entities above. One doesn’t really care about what the other states. So a land that passes perc and has no HOA covenants could still be unbuildable if it is zoned Agricultural Reserve.
Do not fall for MLS listings that are vaguely worded – ‘land with lots of potential’ or ‘the possibilities are endless’. We have found lands listed saying they haven’t been perc tested; only to pull up health department records saying that the land had fail multiple perc tests. Just because the adjacent lot has a house; doesn’t mean your land can necessarily support a house. Perc requirements and zoning codes change over time and land which was buildable 5 years ago; might not pass the criteria today.
Pull out the SDAT record and check if the acreage and primary structures on the land match the MLS listing. Check the land value and the value at which it last changed hands and the date that occured. You can pull out the Tax ID (account number), district, map, grid, parcel, lot and a host of other numbers from this record.
Pull out the GIS mapping from here by clicking on the link which says ‘Property Explorer’. Verify if the shape of the GIS mapping matches up to any land boundary information provided by the Seller. Download the plat and check on the size, shape, location and zoning stated on the plat. Check if any recommended areas are marked for the septic and well (if the land has passed perc). Read all the small writing on the Plat including any soil restrictions – these could restrict your buildable area; especially basements. Check for any marked flood plains/forest conservation sections/overhead power lines/streams/setbacks/common easements.
Interestingly, Google maps seems to have overlaid the GIS mapping on their maps – you will see it when you zoom in to the land under ‘Map View’. Definitely check street & satellite views on Googlemaps and Bing and Yahoo maps. Sometimes these are taken at different times and seasons. For e.g., we were able to see the satellite view during fall colors on Bing maps, during summer with full forest cover on Google maps and during fall on Yahoo maps (this is particularly useful). Our land had a small shop that was torn down. Google maps didn’t show it since it was taken recently; but Yahoo maps showed exactly where the little building stood on the land; so we were able to dig and check on the old foundation stones.
Note: I am providing links to Frederick county records. Needless to say, you will have to find the corresponding records in your county of interest.
Reading documents about how to read documents can be pretty boring stuff. So I’ve created a video where I have used a different approach to showing you the process. I have taken a couple of MLS listings for land and walked you through the process of pulling out the relevant information.
Like we had mentioned in our first post; it took us more than 3 years to find the land we liked. Needless to say, our requirements, budget and geographic area of search kept changing over that time period. The county offices have been surprisingly helpful and upfront with providing any information that we asked for.
Our experiences have covered the gamut – from watching solar installers waiting for permits in the county offices, to losing a land to another buyer just the day we put in our offer, to walking around for miles looking for markings for land boundaries, to measuring radiation on a land located next to a power line and even looking into US-DoT seized real property auctions. The search involved multiple calls/visits to excavating companies, driveway installers, land surveyors, power/septic/well companies, department of taxation, planning and zoning offices, county health departments, county permit departments and even knocking on doors of people living adjacent to the land listed for sale.
We tried to be as flexible as possible with our requirements. However, a few things were absolute musts – distance from our primary residence, safety. accessibility during winter storms and adequate cell phone coverage. We also wanted land with ‘character’ – a flat piece of open land was definitely out of the question. If it didn’t sing to us; it wasn’t worth pursuing.
We have talked about our experience with land hunting in the following videos. Hope you find it interesting…………..
The seller has accepted our offer 🙂 We just received the signed contract documents back from the seller . This is definitely a date we will not forget -September 6th 2016!!! The settlement will be on October 7th 2016. It’s been a long journey. We started looking for land in 2013 and had almost given up hope on being able to find land that would meet our needs. In fact; we had decided to pause our land search if we didn’t find anything by October and here we are! Success! Sweet Success!
The timing has worked out perfectly since we just returned from a 10 day cob building workshop at the Cob Cottage Company located in Coquille, Oregon. The people who attended the course were a diverse, interesting and eclectic bunch. It will easily remain one of our best vacation experiences. The workshop has definitely inspired us to seriously think about doing more physical labor amidst greenery and sunshine – just 2 weeks of working with mud has had a profound effect on our health, well being and outlook in general. Here’s hoping our life is filled with more immersive vacations in the future……………….well; once we are done building our cob cottage of course.
