We’ve been in our new home since November 9, 2019 and loving every minute of it!!! We purchased our property in 2014 and there was a lot that needed to be accomplished before Oliver Homes could start building our dream home. The land we purchased was originally raw land. What does that mean? That means the land was a forest and when we walked on to the property I had to use my imagination to be able to see the future.
Things that needed to happen before we could build.
- Land needed to be surveyed for property lines
- Land needed to be perked (aka perc)
- We needed a road to get us to our house site
- We needed a Well for water
All of this took time, money, and patience. My husband was the contractor for all of this and worked very hard coordinating efforts to get things done. All this while working a full time job.
So the #1 question that I’m asked,
“What did you learn from the building of your homes that can help others?”
Here’s what I learned
- Be organized
- Visit property site often
- Ask questions if things don’t look right
I can’t stress the last lesson learned……SAY SOMETHING!!!! Even during this process there were so many times when work was being accomplished but not exactly to the specifications that were agreed upon. And you can save yourself a big headache if you communicate often. It took us about a year to put in our road. Now granted it’s 1500 feet and it was just about all forest except a thin logging road that was barely passable with a vehicle. The road needed to be put in first and it needed to be in good condition in order for the heavy equipment to be able to get to the building site.
After the road the second hurdle was getting a Well dug. This wasn’t an easy task since we are on the top of a mountain sitting on big rocks….yeah you can call them boulders. This process lasted a couple of weeks which caused a bit of stress since they had dug down 500 feet and still no water. My husband was on the property surveying the situation when he was told they would try to go down a little more but if they couldn’t reach water they’d have to do some serious blasting of the rocks beneath. It was a stressful time and we were weary on patience. If you didn’t know blasting rocks costs more $$ money $$. But it all worked out because they dug down about another 150 feet and hit water. The water pressure had to be checked and rechecked which added on more weeks to the process. But at the end, here we are with running water.
So now the road is in and we have water, we contracted with Oliver Homes and the house building began!!!!
Stay tuned for the next blog post to read more about lessons learned during the Home Building portion. Please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you. If there’s anything you’d like us to answer about building a homestead let us know.