Clearing A Road to our Homesite

Choosing our homesite was pretty easy, in fact it is the reason why we chose to buy this land in the first place (read more here). However, a road, well thats a different story. With 30 acres of land I can honestly say we have yet to venture through all of it. There is much that we have yet to see, but the more we hike around the happier we are! Recently we were hiking around and found what appeared to be roads even though they had some trees fallen onto them. We realize now that these are old logging roads from many, many years ago. And believe it or not one of them goes right to the homesite we chose! This was so perfect a find that it solidified for us that we chose the perfect spot for our home. All we had to do was some general clearing so we bought a chainsaw and started clearing all the fallen trees and debris on the old road to the homesite!  The road is wide enough to drive in with our 4 wheel drive jeep and truck. The only thing left to do is remove a few rocks and make a better 'bridge' over our somewhat seasonal stream! For now, however, it is the perfect rough road for our ATV!

I really wish we did before and after pictures, but we just weren't thinking since we were so excited to get started!  Anyway, you can see the cleared road pretty well below. The flags are there so we could keep track of how wide we want it and a few rocks or stumps that we still need to remove. We also made a temporary bridge of some of the cut logs so the ATV could easily cross the seasonal stream. The first 300 feet was basically cleared already and just needed to be weed wacked (yes we used a handheld one and swung it back and forth) and we worked our #4@# off to clear another 400 feet beyond that and up the hill so now we have a driveway of about 700 feet to our homesite.  It was a lot of work for the two of us over the course of a two day weekend so hopefully next time our adult kids will come along to help! After all, they are each getting 5 acres of their own :-)

Some of the tools we used:

• Weed wacker
• Pole saw
• Hand saw
• Shovels
• Chainsaw
• Tree pruner

If you look straight ahead in front of our ATV you can see the beginning of the road we cleared. It goes up-hill so we can't wait to see how that will be in the winters. The road itself curves around to the left and continues for quite a bit before getting to the homesite.

This is a view of the road from where we would be parking at the homesite. We did make a small turn around that is to the left as well as a nice big learning for my husband to launch his drone from.

A few words on chainsaw safety:  Take the time and spend the money to do it right!  Here is the equipment we purchased for my husband (or myself) when using the chainsaw:

Interested in reading more?
Then check out our homesteading dreams.
Sincerely,