Build Small, Take Your Time, Answer to Nobody

The Kind of Ground You Can Actually Start On

You’ve been saying “one of these days” about land for a while now. The wanting was never the problem. It was the price, or the rulebook that came with it.

This one is flat and open, about as easy to build on as ground gets. The county allows a house as small as three hundred square feet, a modular, or a tiny home set on a foundation, and it puts no deadline on when you put one up (a novelty, if you have ever owned in a subdivision with opinions). Buy it on terms and you camp on it while you pay it down, then the building starts once the deed is in your name. No HOA either way.

It sits about five minutes from the town of Sprague River, up at 4,596 feet, with the river running a little over half a mile south. Half an hour up the road in Chiloquin, a volunteer club has laid better than twenty-five miles of seven-and-a-half-inch gauge track through the woods at a place called Train Mountain. Guinness named it the longest miniature railroad in the world in 2004, and they have not stopped building since.

Here’s what you need to know before you put a stake in the ground: this is sage brush and dry grass, not a postcard. The good view is from the bluff just off the northwest corner, not the middle of the lot (the sort of detail a glossy listing tends to lose). Flat and plain is the trade, and the upside is you won’t spend a season clearing it.

A place doesn’t have to be spectacular to be yours. It just has to be ground you can stand on knowing nobody’s coming to tell you what to do with it. 

• Flat, open 1.53 acres with nothing to clear before you start
• No HOA and no build clock, so you set the pace
• County allows houses from 300 square feet up, tiny homes included
• Camp on it from day one, build once the deed is yours
• Power lines about 150 yards off, or go solar instead
• About five minutes to the town of Sprague River, Oregon
• Klamath Falls is roughly 45 miles out for a big-box run
• Well or hauled water plus septic, the standard setup out here
• Decent 4G LTE, three to five bars right on the lot
• Easy access, two minutes off a paved two-lane highway