Preliminary Site Planning

My dad (whom I introduced you to in one of my first posts), being retired and all, is fortunate to have a lot of time to think about Futurehome. Because of this he has taken on somewhat of a project manager role. To that end, he stopped by the town hall a while ago to pick up some information on forms and permits that we will eventually have to complete, to help us get a sense of what to expect. From this it became clear that one of our first tasks will be to hire a surveyor to come out, analyze the land, and develop a site plan. Well, we figured we could help this along by doing a little site planning of our own, using what we know about general well and leach field requirements and our initial house design. Then, it should hopefully be a quick and painless process to have the surveyor come out.

Conveniently enough, there is a USGS benchmark on the property:

Whoever does the mowing along the road apparently is unaware of the fine
or imprisonment associated with disturbing benchmarks.

Unfortunately, it is a little mangled. Nonetheless, we used this as a control point with our little handheld GPS. First we measured the two nearest utility poles relative to the BM, as well as the distance to the current driveway.

We were originally estimating that Futurehome should be about 300' north of the BM, so we trudged into the field due north. However, this actually put us into a totally different part of the land than we were expecting, and we were a ways down the hill that we were planning to be on the crest of. It turns out that none of our visual cues from the ground were straight or lined up latitudinal or longitudinally - the road, the tree edge, the hill, nothing. So it was a good thing we were using a GPS for a guide. It was surprising to realize how disorienting the whole area was. Using a compass we headed due east to the crest of the hill for what turned out to be ~150', and marked that point on our GPS and in the ground with a stake as the south west corner of Futurehome.

From there we used a tape measure to go 32' north and mark the NW corner; then 64' east to mark the NE corner; and then 32' south again to mark the SE corner. From the NE corner we paced about 30' east and 20' north for an approximate well location. Now with an idea of where the house will most likely go, we had a chance to look around and get a feel for it all. We took a bunch of pictures all around us and used Photosynth to generate a 360º panorama of the current view. A keen eye will be able to spot my dad hidden in among the gone-to-seed goldenrod, and an even keener eye will be able to spot the car we used to drive in. Obviously the vegetation is quite tall, so we will probably go in with a tractor mower soon to clear away at least the house footprint.

The existing driveway ended up being mostly straight ahead but with a couple trees in the way, which blocks the view of the house from the road (all good things, in our opinion). The house is practically smack-dab in the middle of the field, with the woods and valley not too far behind. And as you can see from the Photsynth, there is not a neighbor in sight.

The current "driveway"...kinda

Using a level set to a measured angle, we were able to estimate where the sun will cross the sky in the winter and summer months, and confirmed that the house is far enough away from the tree line to get full southward facing sun year-round. All things seemed to be coming together quite nicely, so we decided we were very happy with the site we staked out.

The view exiting our property at the planned driveway location. I really hope
construction equipment can fit through here without having to take out trees,
because this is a beautiful sight.

Using our waypoints and measurements, we drew up a nice little preliminary site plan:

(I'm keeping all exact locations private for now,
hence the smudges.)

Hopefully we will be able to use all of this to smoothly get an official site plan drawn up, and then we can really get the ball rolling on things like making a driveway, drilling a well, etc. Either way, this was a very exciting visit to the site of Futurehome.