Sunday, August 29, 2010

choosing the site


Let's go back to the beginning.... when we sold our house in September 2009 and started an intensive search for our acreage.  Truthfully the search had been going on for a few years already by my mls-obsessed husband.  The advantage of all his weekend and evening searching was that he was really educated about what was available, and was well aware how few acreages had been listed recently.  We spent eight months looking at listings online, and every chance we could, we would drive to another part of the valley with a stack of printouts and prices.  We hadn't spent this much drive time together in years, and we got to see parts of the valley we hadn't seen before.  Many thanks to our parents for watching the wee ones while we road tripped. The couple of times the four of us went it was less than fun.  Much less.

It felt like we looked at every acreage in our price range between Lumby and Osoyoos.  Those we could find, that is... we discovered that directions to rural properties are poorly marked and often inaccurate.  Many a wild goose chase was had.  Thanks to our realtor who answered some confused phone calls from us while driving around on dirt roads(dave goertz - http://www.century21.ca/dave.goertz).

We seriously contemplated a twenty-eight acre parcel in Lavington for a while.  It was a great price, but it had a creek and we had doubts about managing the challenges that entailed.  In the end we found our 10 Acres for a much higher price than we thought we wanted to pay, but the bonus is we get a lake view and we are close to our family and work.  The land is thinned and has a large relatively level area at the top.  Oh yeah, and it has a southern exposure... which is critical to our building concept and surprisingly difficult to find.  So since this is a long-term investment for us, we decided to sacrifice on the house size to get the land we fell in love with.

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