While the house will be rustic, we are planning to equip it with modern amenities including electricity, water, high speed internet, and indoor plumbing. The first three don’t pose a problem. Indoor plumbing, however, requires us to look outside, at the dirt.

As we described in “The Lot”, the house will be built on a slight grade, very near a much steeper grade. You may also have noticed some rocks on the ground in some of the pictures. Both of these things, the grade and the rocks, make it challenging, or impossible, to install a septic field. No septic means no house, so let’s figure this out.

There’s a few types of soil on the lot:

Evard-this is good soil for septic

Ashe-this is too rocky

Chestnut-there’s not much of this, but it’s not suitable for septic either, and it’s too close to the stream.

Thunder-this is the bottom of the valley, where there’s a small stream, so we obviously can’t do anything there, but it’s a cool name.

The lot is outlined in green above, and the house site is marked by a grey rectangle. If you look closely, you can see the types of soil. Our challenges are: everything below the house is too steep. The septic field requires evard soil, which is only present near the top of the lot adjacent to the road, and right next to the house along the property line. To have enough space, the septic has to be by the road, so will be significantly more expensive than it normally would be. You can see an ideal scenario on the lot to the right, where the house site sits right in the middle of a nice big chunk of evard soil. We worked with the developer to offset some of this cost, as the challenges would be present for anyone that buys the lot.

You can also get a good idea of the topography of the lot with the elevation lines on this survey. The driveway follows right along the edge of the area labeled as ashe soil.

We were fortunate that all of the soil work for the lots in the subdivision was already completed and filed with the county (Gilmer). Within 10 minutes of calling, I had everything from the county that was filed. This somewhat makes up for the fact that they’re only open 2 hours a day. Once you know when to call, they’re quite helpful!