Ouch.

Yanno, there's a reason there are six zillion books out there on buying a house, or land or whatever.

It's because it's incredibly confusing and will make your head blow up if you're not careful.

John and I are looking to buy land. Not a ranch, really, more of a ranchito or a rancho not so grande. You know, between five and 10 acres, with some trees and neighbors who aren't right on top of us. Folx who we can see if we want to walk up the drive, turn right or left on the road and walk a bit, but not when we look out the window. A place where we can leave the blinds open all the time, because there's no one else around and we don't have to live as a prisoner to my slight paranoia. A place that doesn't look like all that and a box of Twinkies from the road, maybe, but one that is a bit nicer when you go down the road and around that bend and see the house itself.

Ideally, this is our retirement place, the place that we'll head to when the Army is through abusing us both and we decide that it's time to be bums together. It's the place we'd like to be able to throw the kids out the door with the admonishment "Don't get lost, don't screw with the scorpions and don't drown each other!" and then have them come straggling back in six hours later, hot and sweaty, but having conquered all the Indians in the local area, chased horny toads down little rocky crevices, and been kids in the country.

Ideally, we'd like to be able to live there sooner rather than later. You know, put a nice little modular home on a concrete slab and live there until we're ready to put the dream house on the dream build site.

That's the ideal.

The reality is going to end up a bit differently, I think. A lot of the places we're looking have some pretty good restrictions WRT to modulars/manufactured/mobile homes, and I understand why. I really do. That doesn't mean that I'm not smacking my head against the wall in frustration.

Most of these places are outside of city water and sewer and so, we'd need to do a well, septic system and a driveway along with running electicity to the build site. God alone only knows about internet access and cell phone coverage and all that, but I'm sure that as fast as this part of Texas is growing, it won't be long before they're all available even in the boonies, which is a good thing.

That being said...

I just don't think we can swing a bit of land in a nice place, along with a small custom home. Just don't think we can do it.

We can do a land payment, with no problems at all. That's not a big deal. Once you add in septic, well and the other site improvements...it gets problematical.

Toss in the fact that John wants to do a stint on the drill trail and it gets even more interesting, as we have to plan on finding someone to lease the house. There are some other things, but that would be the biggest problem, and my folx did have some issues when they owned a rental house.

So, now I get to try and communicate all this to John. God. It's not that he's unreasonable or anything, or that I'm scared, it's just hard when there's a second long lag between when I say something and he hears it, or just trying to do all of this while he's so far away.

It's exciting and scary and wonderful, all at the same time.

Wheeeeee!

Hey John!

I love you!