Last year, since Tonya already had a house, I sold my house and took the profits and bought 5 acres of forest land in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in southwest Washington.
I have always dreamed of owning my own off-grid property far away from major populations. For the last several years I have searched for cheap, raw land around Washington State. What I found was mostly cheap land up in Okanogan County, near the northern border of Washington State. The land is cheap… but it’s mostly just sage brush and not a lot of mature trees or greenery. Plus, it was about a 9-hour drive to get there.
So, when I saw three 5-acre plots for sale in southwest Washington, I was very excited. By the time I had contacted the agent, two of the parcels were sold. Tonya and I went to check out the remaining parcel back in December. I liked the fact that the property was 8 miles up a logging road. We immediately fell in love with the property and made an offer. The sale finally went through in the end of December.
We immediately got to work on making some improvements. First, we hired an excavator contractor to improve a spur road that was already going through the property. It was just an old dirt road that was a bit overgrown so we had our contractor lay down crushed rock and built a proper crown on the road so water would drain properly. The property already had a perfect spot for a cabin or trailer. The spot was an old logging platform with a skid road that they used to remove logs from the timber stand downhill from our property. We had our contractor level out the spot, blow out a couple wood piles that were obstructing our view and remove this huge old-growth stump. We also installed a gate with an LTE camera pointing at it.
Our original plan was to put a Hickory Shed on our property and build it into a little cabin. I was a bit nervous that the little cabin out in the middle of a recreational forest would get vandalized or burglarized. I just wasn’t ready to put an $18,000 shed on the property. So instead, we opted to buy a used trailer and placed that on the property. Depending on how things go with the trailer, we’d still like to build a tiny cabin up there.
The views from our property are spectacular! We see Silver Star Mountain and Sturgeon Rock to the east and beautiful sunsets to the west. Our property also borders a state forest to the north and east.