The previous owners left us a gift...

So if you’re following the story, you know that my family … well, extended family … has ended up with a slew of land. Honestly speaking it’s more land than we need. So what is the point of all of this, and why did we buy as much as we did?

The obvious reasons

Well, for one, it was available at the right price. It was hard to pass it up. As they say, land is the one thing they’re not making any more of. So considering that it was there, picking it up was pretty much a no brainer.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we didn’t buy it all at once. We bought it in more than one step and each purchase had a specific reason. It was fantastic how we got the opportunity to pick up contiguous land in more than one chunk like that.

The real reason

But the real reason why we bought as much as we did was to provide a future blessing to our families. This bears a bit more explanation I think.

While we all aren’t necessarily of the same mind preparedness wise, we all certainly have some commonly held beliefs and goals. One of those is to provide our children with a specific kind of life style that can’t come from a city or a suburban area.

We certainly can’t guarantee how our kids will grow up and what they’ll believe or want for their families but one of the key things we want to allow for is to be able to split off parcels of the land for our kids to have if they so desire. I can speak for all of my family when I say that we would love to have our kids and grand kids decide to follow in our footsteps.

Some people say this sounds like a compound or something, which I guess it technically could be. But more than anything, it is a family coming together and choosing to live near each other. Independent yet together.

Summing it all up

I personally can’t see a better situation for my kids than to be living close enough to walk to their grandparents and their cousins, aunts, and uncles. What could be better than that?

The family disperses…

Fast forward several (ok, quite a few) years. My folks and my sisters now live geographically dispersed. The level of preparedness-mindedness (is that even a word?) varies widely, though myself and one of my sisters are relatively like minded, and one of my other sisters practices many preparedness skills without actually knowing about it.

Independent of one another, though we talked about it somewhat loosely, my sister, my parents, and I began looking for property for ourselves. Slowly but surely after talking a bit more with the entire family, we realized that what we REALLY wanted, preparedness mindset or not, was to have the entire family together on one large plot of land.

The search for the perfect land begins…

We all continued the search for the perfect land. The problem was that our vision of perfect differed somewhat significantly. Nonetheless, we continued to search. Our search was constrained generally to the North Western States.

We searched pretty hard, and really beat the pavement looking for the perfect land that met all of our common criteria.

What were the criteria used for the search?

Like I said, some of the criteria we used were wildly different. We all agreed upon the following though:

Water: Having some sort of water available was a necessity. It could be well based, but having some form of surface water was important.

Mixed Timber and Meadow: Ideally we wanted a mix of timber and meadow or pasture land. Some of us wanted to have livestock, others wanted the woodsy lifestyle. We wanted something that made both realistic.

Utilities Available: While being self sufficient is a great thing, having grid power and telephone was a necessity. If needed, we could pay to bring it in, but it had to be available

Seclusion: We didn’t want to be really close to town, but we wanted to be close enough to neighbors and not incredibly far out. 20-30 minutes drive to the nearest town seemed reasonable.

Off the Beaten Path: Like the last criteria, we didn’t want to be on a main road, or in a really visible location.

What was the result of the search?

Find out tomorrow! While you wait, tell me about what you would look for … or what you’ve already found!