A Change in our Plans

Ethan and I recently had a somewhat big change in our plans for the farm. We are still planning on getting the land (closing is on Friday!), and we are still planning on building the pole building. But we just changed our minds about where we are going to put it.

Since we saw the land, we had picked out a building spot near the bottom of the hill near the woods. We knew of two other spots we thought would work to build, but neither of them appealed to us right away. We had set our minds on that first spot by the woods from the start.

It wasn't until a few weeks ago when we were measuring for the land release, however, that we started thinking about changing building locations. Where we had first picked out seemed nice to put a pole building on, and we even had a place for a stick house to eventually build, but we were having trouble seeing where we could put any additional buildings - storage sheds, a garage, etc.

Ethan put up a post on his blog asking for opinions and showing another option we started thinking about. You can click here to see the post and the overhead view of the two sites. Saturday, we drove out to the property again and decided that the second location was our new building site.

Some of the reasons we didn't consider the second site at first are:
- It is on the top of the hill so it would get a lot of the cold winds in the winter.
- There are no trees anywhere close by.
- It is great ground for pasture.

Here are some of the reasons we decided to go with this spot:
- Being on the top of the hill will bring nice breezes in the summer. We won't have central air, so this will be much appreciated. In the winter, we can just throw in some extra logs into the wood burning stove.
- Being on the top of the hill will give us a great view of the whole farm compared to at the bottom. Although there are no trees on the top, they can be planted.
- The ground is nice and flat. It will save us money in that it won't need to be graded much at all, compared to the bottom of the land which is a bit more sloped.
- The flat area is nice and large so there are lots of building options for down the road.

And this last reason is more of a perk for me:
- Being at the top of the hill will give us a GREAT view of the night sky, storms clouds marching in, sunrises, and sunsets - all of which I love to watch.

I didn't get a picture of the view from our pole barn/house. It won't have quite the view of the trees, but hopefully that will come. Here is a view taken from where we hope to build the stick house down the road. It looks down the biggest valley on the property (where we might eventually put a pond at the bottom) and into the woods.

We also spent some time on Saturday walking around the land with the kids. I really like this picture that was taken in the woods.