Field notes
Guides and honest answers about buying raw land, living on it, and making the most of your acreage. No jargon, no pressure, just what we would tell a friend.
Articles tagged septic. 7 articles.
How a septic system actually works, what EPA says about maintaining one, and the separation distances that decide where it can go. Plus the one thing to do before you buy ground you intend to build on.
Legal access, addressing, septic and groundwater are the four things that decide whether a cheap Klamath County parcel is a bargain or a problem. Here is what the county actually requires.
Nobody publishes a national average for bringing utilities to raw land, and the figures that get quoted everywhere came from other blogs. Here is how to get a real number for your own parcel, using the tariffs and well logs your utility and your state already publish for free.
Two different things are called a soil test and confusing them costs real money. One tells you what to put on the garden. The other decides whether you can ever legally live on the parcel. Here is how to tell them apart and which to pay for first.
Almost every county separates recreational RV use from living in one, and the line is a number of days. That number runs from 21 in six months to 180 a year depending on where you are. Here are the actual ordinances, including the one county that bans generators and the one whose widely repeated limit is wrong.
The parcel price is the part everybody checks and the part that almost never decides anything. What decides it is the soil, the water, how far you are from a hospital that admits patients, and when the title actually lands in your name. Three of those four you can answer before you spend a dollar.
Most off-grid articles describe a feeling. The thing that actually stops people is a permit: in every state we sell in, occupying a dwelling is gated by an approved means of disposing of sewage. Water, waste, shelter and power, in the order the county cares about.
While you are here
Pima County, AZOcotillo, cholla and prickly pear crowd a raised, flat pad across the middle of this acre, the natural spot for a home with a view of the Tucson Mountains. It sits in Diamond Bell Ranch about 33 miles west of Tucson, at 3,297 feet where summers run a little milder. Cell service is strong, and the zoning lets you build when you're ready.
Putnam County, FLArea photosHoot Owl Road is paved and power runs right past the lot, which is more than most of this old Satsuma subdivision can say. It's a quarter acre in St. Johns River country, twelve minutes from Palatka and a short run to Dunn's Creek and Crescent Lake. The lot is mapped wetland and most of it sits in a FEMA flood zone, so it's priced for what it is today.
Hudspeth County, TXArea photosGuadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas, sits about a half hour east of this ground, and the salt flats that set off a war in 1877 are closer than that. It's open desert outside Salt Flat, Texas, with no zoning and no HOA, so you can pitch a tent this weekend and build off-grid whenever you get around to it.
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