Building the Hogan

After the warranty deed was recorded we made a few trips out to the land just to walk around and get a feel for the space.  The first trip, of course, involved a bit of champagne and was far less productive than otherwise might have been.  Still, we wanted to spend some time scouting the possible locations for the house.  On the next trip, slightly more serious-minded, we found the perfect place to put the house.

First, let me describe the lot.  Neither of us has ever owned more than half of an acre of land before, so to say that the lot looked big is an understatement.  In case you are new to the measures of real estate, an acre of land is equal to 43,560 square feet.  Our lot is 20 acres, so that means we have 871,200 square feet of land.  That’s the equivalent of 40 to 80 city lots and covers almost exactly the same area as two Manhattan City blocks and room enough for several Starbucks.  A walk from one end to the other covers nearly a third of a mile.

That’s a lot of land. 

Some might ask why we need so much land.  It’s a fair question with a simple answer: we don’t.  As we said in an earlier post we were actually looking for 5 to 10 acres and would have been happy with that.  The lot we purchased is in a sustainable community that requires a twenty acre minimum.  There are many reasons for this requirement, which I’ll go into in later posts, but suffice to say that for this area the lot size is consistent for a sustainable community.

But back to our “walk around”.  From a distance, the terrain of our land is almost completely flat.  It slopes gently from south to north, with the north end terminating in a seasonal creek.  The creek has been devoid of water since we got here, but a quick visit to our neighbors cleared up any doubts we might have.  In the past they’ve put kayaks into the currently non-existent creek.  We didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

The south end of the property is bordered by our road, as is the east, but the south side of the property sports an ominously large drainage ditch placed by the subdivision builders.  Since we’re in the path of a small mountain peek that rises another 500 to 1000 feet above our feet, we determined that snow melt could become a problem at that end.

With the north and south water issues driving us toward the middle, and a 100 foot setback keeping us hemmed in from the east and west, we focused our site search in the middle two acres of the lot.  The views were great in all directions, with no natural or artificial obstructions of the mountains - or the sun.

I should also mention that we had a couple of other factors steering us in this direction.  First, the previous owner had already constructed a nice little 8×12 foot adobe shed on one of the two middle acres.  We intended to keep the shed for our gardening tools.  Secondly, he had also cleared much of the land in this area from the sagebrush that rages throughout the rest of the land and subdivision.

We weren’t going to base our final decision on these conveniences, but in the end it turned out that he’d done similar analysis to what we’d done and came to the same conclusions.  The middle two acres were the best spot.  We walked the two acres and let our senses be our guide, circling the area like the two hawks that feed nearby on the fat and plentiful prairie dogs.

Since there is nothing higher than a sage bush on the land, and there are no distinct hills, we were able to avoid many of the traditional siting problems associated with foliage, solar insulation, slope, and runoff.  We were pretty much free to go with our feelings, within the confinements of what I’ve outlined above.  We already knew, for example, that the driveway would have to be over 100 feet long.

When we got to a certain spot in the southernmost of the two acres we both stopped.  There was a faint, but distinct outline in the vegetation that created a nearly perfect 40 foot circle.  Cecilia looked and me and smiled.  “This is the spot.”  I agreed immediately.