Searching for our Homestead: Property number 4

If you haven't already been following my wife's and my journey to buy our own homestead, you may want to catch up by checking out the initial post. In the first and second post, I explain a lot about what we are looking for and the process that we use to evaluate a property as a good fit for us.

The Property

Property number 4. This gem had a lot of great things going for it from the gitgo for us. It was indeed in the middle of nowhere, and yet still only 40 minutes or so from San Antonio! It was 17 acres of genuine hill country land nestled just northwest of Medina Lake near a crossroads of a town called Mico, Texas. If you read the last post on property number 3, you will have noted that at that point we had dropped our filter from 30 acres to 20. Well, at this point in order to give us more to choose from, we dropped our filter yet again to 15 acres.

Upon trying to get TO the property, we were misdirected by our GPS which was mightily confused about how to find it. To us, this was a good sign! We don't necessarily WANT to live at a documented location...we like a bit of incognito and just "being lost". We eventually did deduce that the GPS was off by the last turn's direction, and found the entry gate to the property (Hard to miss a 'FOR SALE' sign along a remote narrow road!). Me personally, I was immediately impressed by the bright red of the newly painted electric gate...it was my grandma's favorite color, and she had everything on her farm painted either that same bright red or a contrasting bright white.

Arrival

The driveway wasn't a long one, and the house sat just about 200 yards from the road. Not a huge deal out here in the middle of nowhere where any traffic that did pass by is likely someone you'll eventually get to know. And what a gorgeous house it was!

This was a 2100 square foot log house with a full wrap around porch.

The roof was shingles and looked like it could do with a replacement soon, but the design of the structure was absolutely wonderful. Parked in front of the house, and without exiting the vehicle, you could see a wonderful vista of a hill country valley full of random wild flower-filled meadows dotted among thick groves of Live Oaks and Cedar trees.

To our left was a good sized horse barn and a few stalls, occupied by several horses.

Between the horse barn and the house was a large wooden workshop.

To our right was a wooden barn-shaped shed and a large concrete pad with RV hookups.

Me, the wife, and the kids all got out and began to explore. While our realtor unlocked the door to the house, the kids and I meandered around and just took it all in. I have to say that at this point, though there was so much beautiful about it all, there was an overwhelming theme of mild neglect and general unkemptness about the place...the owners didn't seem to really care much for the details of the property. There were rusted pieces of machinery here and there, as though they had been left there with some future intention of putting them away, but nobody ever did. To the left of the house was a large chicken coop...a large shed or workshop, really...that had a storage area within as well as access to the area the chickens used for shelter and laying their eggs.

The attached pen was fully enclosed with a net over the top to keep out flying predators. But the poor birds! Their pen was long ago made bare by their foraging and their food containers were empty. One of my first projects would be to vanquish the squalor of this chicken ghetto, if this was the place we settled on!

I wandered by myself to the back of the house and the fence that was fifty yards behind it. From that fence and the gate that was there I could look out and over the majority of this property's 17 acres. To me, it was so beautiful!

The house was perched atop a large hill country rocky hill, and so the land itself began as a downward sloping mix of rubble and meadow. Down below were thickets of trees. I would definitely be exploring this after a tour of the house.

The Interior

And so we began the tour of the house. It was as gorgeous on the inside as the outside. Very roomy and spacious, with a single large living area downstairs, a side office, and a kitchen.

Upstairs were the three bedrooms. I didn't like the fact that it was all carpeted upstairs, and it seemed unusual to me the sheer number of closets there were.

But, no show stoppers there. Back outside now....

I've Gotta Vent...

The seller's realtor was not there with us. Let me rant on this for a second. How on EARTH can you expect to sell a place in the boondocks if you are not there to answer prospective buyers' questions???? For instance, I asked my realtor, "so where is the property line here?" Her reply: "I don't know, I will find the answer and get back to you with it". Not her fault for not knowing, but really? So then sometime later when the answer to that and other questions are finally given to us, THEN we have to try and remember and imagine what we had seen with respect to the answers? It's just stupid for a seller's realtor to NOT be present when buyers are looking! C'mon folks! If you ARE a realtor, please don't be "that guy"; BE PRESENT when someone is looking at your listing! Sheesh!

The Land

Okay, so the other realtor was not there, and I wanted to know about the property line itself, so...the boys and I took off down the hill, looking for fence lines and following them the entire perimeter.

Let me just say, if 17 acres doesn't sound like a lot to you, go and walk the perimeter of it on the side of a hill country hill! Talk about a great workout! And, everything we saw on our exploration was just gorgeous.

There was a dry creek bed running down the hill that had the potential for us to dam up if we wanted to create a small watering pond. There were beautiful little hidden openings in the trees if we wanted to build rental cabins.

And lots of signs of wildlife there...deer, turkey, and we saw some fresh fox tracks in the mud, too.

Conclusion

We finally got back up to the house and our one hour viewing had expired, so we left. Both Jen and I loved the place, with the exception of the general "messiness" of the property that we both had noticed. But though this property was definitely in the running, it wasn't time to make any kind of decision yet, because we actually had another viewing lined up right after this one, this time near a little town called Quihi, Texas which was only 20 more minutes from where we were. On to Property number 5!