For quite a while now, Sara and I have been interested in buying a piece of land somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with the intention of setting ourselves up as feudal land barons and seceding from the union to run our own kingdom.

Pursuant to this end, we have been socking away cash and doing all sorts of research into the topic. Both Sara and I are sort of compulsive researches/organizers/spreadsheet makers, so, in a situation like this, we tend to assemble and sort a lot of data in order to be informed or prepared. Finally, we passed the research period, and got to the point where we actually contacted a realtor and started looking at properties.

Sort of the point of all of this is to get some green space somewhere outside of the city where the kids can play and generally enjoy nature. When I was a kid, we owned a little piece of land with a house trailer on it up by Wisconsin Dells, and I have a lot of really good memories of spending time up there. Although we did go into the Dells a lot, the things I really remember are hiking on the land across the street, exploring in the woods, playing with the grasshoppers on the path to my Great Aunt’s property (she had a much nicer outhouse!), visiting the horses next door (and playing with the electric fence!), hearing the bobcats that lived nearby, etc. Basically, just enjoying the experience of being out there. So I think it would be cool if my kids had the same sort of experience.

Perhaps double so, since we didn’t live in a city like Chicago, and we actually had a yard to play in (unlike our kids). In addition, we have gotten into the gardening thing in the past few years, and we’d like to continue that except on a larger scale. Specifically, we would like to have some fruit trees: apples and cherries, perhaps blueberries or raspberries, or other things that we have resorted to going to u-pick places in the past. In fact, Sara has even floated the idea of keeping bees.

The other aspect of this is that we’re taking the extremely long view of things. This is liberating for a couple of reasons. For starters, we are looking at several phases of use for the land: initially camping, followed by some sort of permanent or semi-permanent structure, and ultimately perhaps retiring there. So we want to get a lot of use out of the purchase. Second off, we have time to arrange things to our liking. If we want to plant trees, we can plan to have them grow by the time we want to build something there. If we want fruit trees, we can plant them now, even though we wouldn’t get fruit for a few years.

We do have a few other requirements on the property (did I mention we’ve thought about this a lot?), the main one being we want it to be no more than 2 hours from our house. Basically, we don’t want to create incentive for ourselves not to go. I know how important this is from my experience with the property up at the Dells: when it was only 2 hours away, we went there frequently; when we moved and it was 7 hours away, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to get there.

Okay, so finally it was time to go see some properties. I sort of imagined that we would look at a property and know right away whether we liked it or not. I figured the vast majority of them would be ruled out immediately. Instead what I found was that I liked most of the properties, and it was hard to rule any of them out. It’s like any major purchase, such as a car or a house: there are so many variables, that you can’t really compare things. One might be bigger, while another is better located, while another has better trees, while another is cheaper, etc. How do you rank these things against each other?

I have a concrete example of this. We have seen about 6 properties so far, with many more to see. However, we have seen most of the top of our priority list, so it is likely that we’ve seen some of the best matches already. Of these properties, there are 2 that really separate themselves out, and Sara and I have no idea how you could chose between them (and we both kind of favor opposites!)

Property 1

Pros:

• This property is absolutely gorgeous. Lots of very old pines, very shady. The soil is very sandy, and if you walk the large cleared trail to the back of the property, it turns into a sand dune. Yes, we could own a sand dune! It would be perfect for camping.
• It is completely screened from the road, and is pretty much free of underbrush.
• It is less than 2 miles to lake Michigan.
• It borders a 40-acre nature preserve on one side, meaning you have no chance of having neighbors on that side, and your property is going to feel 4 times bigger than it is.

Cons:

• The sandy soil and copious amounts of shade would mean that our apple and cherry trees and big, tomato-filled garden are out of the question. This was one of, if not THE reason we wanted to do this in the first place.
• On the non-forest preserve side, there is a very, very close neighbor (the property itself is long and narrow).
• We picked up 2 wood ticks in the very short time we were there. Yikes!

Property 2

Pros:

• This property is exactly what we had imagined. The front is screened from the road with denser trees, while the back opens up a little and is somewhat free of undergrowth. The property on one side is a horse pasture. They had a pony.
• It looks perfect for growing fruit trees, etc.
• One corner of the property borders a 14-mile, state-operated hiking trail.
• The property is half the price of the other. Depending on negotiation, we might be able to pay cash for it, which is pretty huge, considering how everybody keeps telling us how difficult it is going to be to get a loan for vacant land right now.

Cons:

• There is no way to get a car onto the land, so we’d have to clear a driveway immediately. I don’t know how much this would cost. Could we rent equipment and do it ourselves? Could we do something temporary, or should we go ahead and get a real driveway put in? Lots of questions.
• The property is located just outside of a small town that really doesn’t have much going on. Not even a grocery store. Let’s just say this is not the kind of horse you’d want to hitch your cart to.

So, as you can see, it’s sort of hard to compare the two, much less decide which one is better. And of course, there are other considerations, such as the availability of water/electric/perc test, restrictions as to what you can do on the land (i.e. no camping, you have to build within 2 years of buying the land, only giant 2 car garage McMansions allowed, etc.), etc.

So, any suggestions? Advice? For those of you that live in the country, is there anything we haven’t considered? Anybody want to buy one of the two and let us use it occasionally? 🙂