Let me tell you how we found our Forest

Securing our future homestead took some good luck, some great timing, and lots and lots of research

I n the spring of 2012, small scale homesteading and permaculture-inspired living on a piece of land was still firmly in the “we want to do that someday, probably when we retire” box. At that time, we lived in a nice urban house on a large city lot with a pretty koi pond and a productive edible-landscape-style yard (most of which we had planted ourselves over the years.) Both of us had regular jobs teaching at a local small university just a few very walk-able blocks from the house. We liked the climate, were friends with our neighbors, and loved the recreational opportunities we had available to us nearby. Then, as often happens, the universe threw some serious change our way and we were forced to completely re-evaluate our lives and plans for the future.

The most significant of those changes was the sudden loss of my teaching job. I am a senior programmer/software architect by training and vocation, but I had accepted a job at the university as an instructor and had been teaching aspiring programmers through a software development technology program for the previous four years. In 2012, state-wide budget woes resulted in the cancellation of most of our university’s computer training programs, including the one I taught in. I was worried about finding new employment because at the time, good jobs for programmers in Idaho were quite scarce. Jim’s job was still there, for the time being. However, because he was not at that point teaching within his field, he was more than willing to look at the possibility of moving to another university system if it meant going back to teaching the subjects he loved. In additon, I still had a year to go on my teaching contract before I was officially unemployed, so we had a little time to discuss what kind of life we wanted to live and where we wanted to live it. We decided to spend this time exploring the possibility of finding some land and moving to it before we reached retirement age.

At first, we concentrated our search for acreage within our state. However, several too-close-for-comfort wild fires that summer and a dawning realization that Idaho was likely to remain in an almost continual state of drought for the foreseeable future (seriously, sand dunes were beginning to form along the highways nearly everywhere you looked…) convinced us to cast our eyes further west. Jim is a native of western Washington state and has family living there as well, so we decided to see what opportunities we could find.

The tool we used for this research was an online MLS search engine, at the time provided by a real estate company, that was focused mainly on properties for sale on the western side of the state. This search engine allowed us to drop into any area and, within just a few minutes, get a good feel for the typical lot sizes and what the going prices were likely to be. We picked areas near, but not in, some of the larger cities (so I could have a decent chance of finding employment) and stalked the listings in those areas for the next few months. Most of the time, we checked the MLS listings every single day — but never less than several times per week—especially once we became completely convinced this was what we wanted to do and began to actually make plans to move.

At first, we used some rather narrow criteria for our search.

That fall, we took a quick trip to the Olympia area to look at some of the properties we had found that had piqued our interest, but none of them really clicked for us. Luckily, Jim decided to widen his search criteria after we returned from our trip, and he soon stumbled upon the bank listing for the property we now live on.

I say “stumbled upon” because at first the property didn’t seem to meet our needs at all. It was listed in the residential section of the MLS site, ostensibly because it had a house already on it, but a little research showed the house was actually a very old and dilapidated early 80’s vintage mobile home that would have to eventually be hauled off. It had also been logged within the past ten years. There was one very small, badly focused picture in the listing, showing some nondescript trees with absolutely no frame of reference for their size or where they were located on the property. It was a pretty rural parcel and we were not sure we could get Internet that far out. The final issue that concerned us was the lot was 70 acres in size.

We asked ourselves, “are we nuts to even consider buying such a large property?” By comparison, our yard in Idaho was a puny third of an acre and it certainly kept us both pretty busy. We were both middle-aged desk job kind of folks — not spring chickens any more, and certainly not getting any younger. Could we really handle that much work?

We needed more information on the place, and the sooner the better, as over the past few months we had watched a lot of properties listed and then quickly whisked off the market while offers were being consolidated. We were not able to take a long car trip during that time to look at it in person, but luckily Jim had family that lived near the area. His brother and nephew agreed to drive out to the parcel on Christmas Day and take some pictures for us.

When they returned home and emailed us the pictures, we were astounded. Most of the property appeared to be heavily wooded, despite having been logged. A fair portion of it was even showing older growth. The logged portions had already made a lot of new growth, with even the smaller trees at least 6" in diameter at chest level. (We didn’t realize it at the time, but this sort of phenomenal growth rate is pretty typical for this area. It’s amazing what 160 inches of rain a year can do…) As we had surmised, the mobile home was a complete wreck, having been vandalized by copper thieves and then colonized by wild animals and mold. It was also surrounded by a thicket of saplings and wickedly thorny invasive Himalayan blackberry vines up to 10 feet in height, which scrambled like a kind of blood-thirsty Kudzu over everything in sight.

The good news was there was a large garage/workshop next to the mobile home that appeared to still be in pretty good condition, as well as an already established and working water well and septic system. So, with the electric and phone utilities (and DSL Internet available through a local franchise) attached to the house and the workshop, we should have everything we needed to make this work once the moldering mobile home was removed. We would even be partially “off the grid” right from the start. Since resiliency and sustainability were high on our list of goals with this move, that prospect was very appealing.

We spent the next few days online, busily tracking down property tax and plat records for the parcel, and discussing how much we wanted to offer — and if our offer was accepted, how we wanted to proceed with getting a new house on it. We already had researched a modular home manufacturer with a floor plan we really liked, going so far as to visit their factory for a tour on one of our previous trips west, so that part was settled. We had never bought land before, so we had to educate ourselves on the differences between land loans, construction loans, and mortgages. We also compiled a short list of banks that offered loans for land and modular homes in that area of the state. It was a lot of work, but by the third week in January, we were pretty certain we wanted to proceed with an offer.

Before we made that offer, however, we wanted to look at the property with our own eyes, walk through it, and discuss this major change in our lives between just the two of us. We quickly made plans for a fast trip out to see the parcel and discuss it, in person, with the bank holding the title.

So during the first week of February, 2013, we entered the gate and drove into our future homestead for the very first time. The enormity of this undertaking struck us as we drove the west and north roads that bisected the parcel. This place just went on and on — at least it seemed that way for two people who had lived most of their lives in towns and cities. For the second time, we questioned our sanity for even considering this much land, this much work, this much responsibility. But then, we talked it over together and made our peace with it.

We were going to live in a real forest. It was never going to be a park, it was a wild place and most of it was going to continue to be a wild place. We would do our best to be good stewards of this wild place and all that lived within it, and we would work with this new climate and environment to also let it meet our needs for peace and for nourishment.

We drove back into town, met with the bankers, and made our offer.

Later, we discovered that another couple was just a week behind us, and if we hadn’t made our offer when we did, and had it almost immediately accepted, we would have lost our chance to live here. We are very glad we did the work beforehand that we needed to do in order to say yes to this place.

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