Leah and I have found four potential building sites in this general area. Two are on Lavender Mountain within an easy walk of our current house, one is about a mile and a half away at the bottom of Lavender Mountain in Little Texas Valley, and the fourth is about five miles away in Big Texas Valley. Each of these sites has advantages and disadvantages. We have managed to winnow the choices down.
The first we rejected is the land on Big Texas Valley Road. It looks buildable, but the road it faces is not pedestrian friendly. Is it ridiculous to reject a potential home site because I can’t walk dogs on the road it faces? That’s what we did.
The second we rejected is the land at the bottom of the hill. Its biggest problem is that it slopes gently from each end to the middle, where there is a drainage ditch. We would want the house roughly centered on the lot, but that wouldn’t be possible here. It’s also generally kind of ugly land and it would have no view at all.
That leaves two possibilities. The one we prefer is the closest. It’s roughly square, it has some nice, mature trees, and it might have a view, depending on how high the house site would be compared to some tall trees across the road from the lot. The biggest drawback for this one is that it’s too expensive. We have set a limit on what to spend for the lot, and this one exceeds it by a good margin. We asked the real estate agent, who lives up the street from us and who handled the sale of my mother’s house, to ask the owners if they would consider an offer. We haven’t heard back yet, but we don’t expect good news.
The other issue is that this land slopes enough that a house would have to have a basement. That’s OK with me, but Leah prefers no basement, and, of course, a basement adds to the cost.
That leaves the other lot on the mountain. This one is a close second. It has a good building site and, again, potentially a view if enough trees are cut. This site is actually three lots offered separately or as a group. Any one of them is well within out budget, but the three of them together are slightly over, although that might be negotiable. The building site here is on a rounded hillock that slopes gently away in all directions.
The biggest problem with this site is that my cell signal goes from LTE (Verizon’s 4G), to 3G, to 1X as you approach the site along Fouche Gap Road. That might be a big “so what?” for making voice calls, but we have to use Verizon’s cellular service for our internet access, and 1X is essentially unusable for data. That would mean switching to satellite internet service, because there is no other way to access the internet up on the mountain.
Both of the rejected lots have access to DSL (Verizon’s LTE service is about as fast as the fastest DSL service that AT&T offers, as far as I can tell). Here’s why DSL isn’t available on top of the mountain.
That “Bell cable” lying in the ditch is our telephone line. It’s mostly buried but is right out on the open in other places. The cable was marked to make sure a county crew didn’t cut it when they did their annual weed mowing.
Cable television is, of course, out of the question.
DSL is fairly slow, but as far as I can tell, the data limits for most DSL plans is about 30 times higher than our cell data limit or a reasonably-priced satellite plan (150 G vs 5 G for our current plan).
So right now we are waiting to hear back from the real estate agent, and expect the news to be negative. If it is, we’ll make an offer on the second choice, and I’m pretty sure we can manage one or possibly two of those lots.
Assuming we end up buying a lot, we’ll probably use what’s left from our land budget, if there is any, plus whatever we end up getting after the sale of my mother’s house to start construction. We should be able to get a good bit done. I think we could get the site preparation done, a well drilled, and a septic system installed. Depending on how much we have, I hope we could get at least the foundation completed. At that point, we will need to sell our house. Our current plan is to live in our travel trailer on the building site until the house is done. That might end up being kind of stressful unless I can really expedite the process.
In the meantime, I am doing all the work on the house that convinced me we needed to move in the first place. Once I’m finished with the outside I’ll have to complete the basement by installing floors, bathroom fixtures, doors and trim. I don’t look forward to it, but I’ve done most of that before.
And now for something else. When we took the dogs for a late walk Wednesday night, a state patrol car drove past us up Lavender Trail, and then down Wildlife Trail. When it came back by us, it stopped and the trooper talked to us for a while. It turns out that he recently moved up to Rome from the Atlanta area and was looking for some land for sale on Lavender Mountain. He specifically asked us about the land that is our second and mostly likely choice. We learned that his wife has cancer, and they have a daughter. And we learned that he makes about $35,000 a year. That’s the standard for a state trooper after finishing trooper school. Leah and I both felt sorry for him, and I personally feel a little ashamed that the state of Georgia can’t do better by its employees.
It’s so interesting how many variables go into buying land or a house. A speedy internet connection has become quite important, a truly must-have utility. When we bought the place in Grass Valley, we discovered that we were within the last few feet of ATT’s DSL lines. Our neighbors did not have DSL. While the connection wasn’t all that fast, it was fast enough that I didn’t have to wait a discernible amount of time for a page to load. We had Verizon’s jetpack with a 5GB monthly limit for when we were at the beach house in Capitola. We discovered we go through GBs pretty quickly. I think Verizon has a few new plans on smart phones that will do 10GBs monthly, but you’ll need more than the 1 bar to make it worthwhile. Truly a dilemma. I wish you luck working through this.
A very sad story about the patrol officer. Yes, Georgia can and should do better. Sigh.
You and Leah certainly have the motivation to do this. Your analysis seems good as to the needs. I remember your earlier post vaguely – is your current house too large and you want a smaller one?
Robin — We’ve had no choice but to get used to limited internet access. I do have a relatively new iPhone with I think 6GB of data, and I end up using that about as much as our computer with 5GB to look up things. A neighbor has satellite with 10 GB a month, but 5 of those are restricted to sometime in the very early morning, so they’re essentially useless.
Wayne — Our house is much too large for us, and unfortunately, its design also makes it hard to maintain. Painting and staining involve climbing up high on a ladder, which I don’t want to do now and really won’t want to do in 10 years. We have two large decks that we rarely use, and they are fully exposed to the weather so they need a lot of maintenance. We hope to get a smaller house with easy and limited maintenance requirements. It should be significantly smaller and will hopefully have smaller heating and cooling costs. And, we hope, we might even have at least a small net gain from selling our house and building a smaller one. Leah really doesn’t want to move, but she agrees that from a purely rational point of view, we should. She worries about moving the cats to a new place and maybe having them run away and get lost.