Properly Prepared Property

 

Our lot is located off of Church Neck Road in Southampton County, VA.  Most of the county is farmland and a lot of that dates back to the early 1600’s.  This particular property has never been built on and I’m pretty sure it is original old growth forest.  Most times driving down Church Neck Rd you might see only one other car in 20 minutes.  The closest big town (big town > 500 residents) is Cape Charles, about a 40 minute drive.  Also about that to the nearest grocery store.  Internet and phone service is sketchy.  Power is sketchy.  People are friendly but keep mostly to themselves.  As far as I’m concerned this place is perfect.

After the survey, the next step towards construction is clearing the lot.  We were given the name of a local guy, Major Jones, who does most of the “land disturbance” in this area.  Major (that’s his real name) is in his early 40’s, self reliant, very easy going and knows pretty much everyone in the county on a personal basis.  I told Cheri that he had recently torn his rotator cuff and she said that he’d probably sew it up himself.  That’s the kind of guy he is.

To get the clearing done we needed a county permit.  In January we were still living in Florida and I was driving back and forth every week or two, staying at a friends house down the road from our lot.  On one of these trips I swung by the county zoning office in Eastville and filled out the 14 page application for the permit.  Since I didn’t know 90% of the information being asked for, the clerk spent about an hour going over it with me, explaining things in detail and highlighting areas that needed to be filled in.  Where in the real world are you going to get that kind of assistance?  I mean, I couldn’t have gotten that much assistance when I was in elementary school.

I took the application back to Major and we filled it out together.  He mentioned that he went to high school with the head of zoning but said that wasn’t necessarily an advantage.  When I turned in the completed paperwork I was told it could take 30 to 60 days to get approved.  I said something about there only being 10,000 residents in the whole county and how come it takes twice as long to get a permit as it does in a county with a population of 275,000?  I got this peculiar smile in return.  You’d think after 70 years I would have learned to keep my thoughts to myself.

During that 30 to 60 day wait we were contacted by Virginia’s department of transportation (VDOT).  The Eastern Shore is almost completely flat so all the roads have ditches for rainwater runoff.  Homeowners have to put in an 18” pipe and bury it in stone (called a culvert) to connect their driveway to the road.  VDOT has a nice drawing showing you exactly how they want it.  The previous owner of the lot had put in a culvert roughly at the midpoint of the road frontage.  Seemed like a good spot to me but the guy from VDOT said it was unsafe because it was too close to a nearby curve in the road.  We would have to put in a new culvert as close to the eastern edge of the lot as possible and remove the old culvert, all to the tune of about $2500.  Uhm, why didn’t you suggest that to the previous owner when he put it in 20 years ago?  In the end I was able to convince the VDOT guy that the culvert should go in about 25’ west of where they first said so that we could save two large pines.  This put the new culvert about 50’ away from the old one, which seemed like a ridiculous waste of time and money to me but I managed to keep that thought to myself this time.  We played the game and now we have a lovely new culvert.  In the photo you can see the new culvert at center and at the left edge you can see the old one.  I certainly feel much safer now.

After 30 days I found myself going through Eastville and decided to stop in the zoning office.  I found that my application had been signed just that morning.  Woohooo!  Timing is everything.

With the new culvert completed and the permit in hand we were able to commence clearing for construction.  I spent a lot of time figuring how to get the house on the lot to best take advantage of the view.  At the same time I wanted to preserve the “untouched forest” look as much as possible.  It seems that about 2 out of 3 people around here buy property and cut down all the trees, build their home and then plant grass all over the place.  The County actually requires you to plant grass.  I hate grass.  You have to fertilize it 3 to 4 times a year and then spend hours every week cutting it.  What a waste of the little time I have left in this life.  I told the County people that nature had very conveniently covered the entire lot with 5” of pine straw which seemed to be working very well to prevent erosion.  The clerk gave me that peculiar smile again and told me to just plant the grass and within a year the pine straw would kill it all off.  OK, I’ll play the game but don’t expect me to cut no stinkin’ grass.

The location for the house, driveway and septic tank and its drain-field required that 7 of the best, biggest, most beautiful trees on the lot had to be removed.  At first I wanted them to be cut into beams for the house but they require about two years to dry out to the point that they could be used.  I was told the best thing to do was burn them on site with all the other debris from clearing the lot.  These are Loblolly Pines.  They grow straight as a flag pole to 90’ and about 30” across at the ground with few branches until you get to the top.  On many of the cut timbers I counted over 85 closely spaced rings.  For some reason everyone turns up their nose at Loblolly Pines and only want White Pines.  Major found a nearby sawmill that would take them if they were free.  I was just glad to see them put to use.

As sad as it was to lose those big trees it was pretty amazing to see how Major brought them down.  I pictured Major and his crew going up the tree with their saws and bringing them down a piece at a time.  What they actually did was bring in an excavator with a bucket on a 40’ arm.  They dig a 3’ deep trench around the base of the tree and then raise the bucket up and push the tree over.  Once down they cut the branches off and cut the trunk into 20’ lengths.

While they were knocking down trees I used a small 16” chainsaw to clear lower branches and saplings in the RPA zone to improve the view of Westerhouse Creek.  The RPA rules won’t let you build there but they allow you to remove trees that are under 6” in diameter and there were a lot of small Holly trees growing under the high canopy of those pines.  I wanted to get as much clearing as possible finished before Major burned his debris pile because I don’t have a truck to haul out debris.  I spent almost every day for two weeks cutting and dragging saplings and branches up to the pile.  There’s also a number of fallen trees in the RPA area and I’ll probably be cutting on those for years.  For now I’ll cut off the branches and leave the trunks for another time.  Looks like I’ll be investing in a pick up truck before too long.  I think I’d like to get a nice old tractor for dragging out sections of fallen trees as that looks like it’s going to be an ongoing project.

Once the clearing for the house was done Major chose a rainy day to burn off the debris.  The fire was set in the area cleared for the septic tank and drainfied, just to the south of the actual site for the house.  I was told you don’t want to burn on the construction site because it dries out the soil too much to support the foundation.  They started the fire at 5pm and used the excavator to feed bucket loads of debris as the flames died down.  After four days it was still burning.

The next step is to get the well, septic and electricity in.  We had a meeting with the builder to finalize the drawings (again) and it was suggested that he take over coordination.  Hopefully now things will start to pick up.