House on an acreage near Lewiston (Idaho Falls, Moscow: schools, subdivisions, income)

[Parnassia]

Originally Posted by ejisme

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From my experience and the in-laws, often rural HOAs are just for local road maintenance and maybe well maintenance if the property gets its water from a shared well. These aren't suburban HOAs where they dictate the color of your house, what type of trees you plant, whether you build a new shed or barn, etc. Just private road maintenance (maybe to include snow plowing), and the possibility of a shared well maintenance.

This has been my experience with HOAs (more rural or outside some city's limits). I've owned homes in 3 rural HOAs. Covenants didn't extend beyond basics like managing wastewater, approved wells, road maintenance, maybe restrictions on home businesses or land use that would impact property values (landfills, gravel pits, commercial lumberyards, maybe limiting livestock, dead RVs, boats and other junk, producing obnoxious noise, dust, smoke, or odors, weird lot subdivisions). Other than roads, the HOAs didn't maintain any grounds or facilities. Consequently, HOA dues were very low (my last one was about $120 per year). They didn't impose anything very draconian. Unless you prefer living like a slob or in constant conflict with your neighbors who probably prefer to live in relative peace just like you do .

[M3 Mitch]

Originally Posted by NW Crow

Orofino, no HOA, 11 acres. Might want a different color of exterior paint. Paved road access.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4...12006195_zpid/

Much smaller, cheaper, further out. Fireplace. 10 acres.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/7...27137155_zpid/

Maybe something "in-between" exists / will be offered

The first house has been HGTV'd to death. Otherwise it's pretty close to what I'm looking for.

The second house is gorgeous, but turns out there is 2 miles of gravel road before you hit pavement, and oddly enough has no well or septic - how common is this? Asking, I was told that typical wells in this area are up to 300' deep, which would be expensive to drill and then expensive if I ever had any problem with the downhole pump. Strange to me that someone lived in this house/cabin at least part time for several years with no well.

All those conifer trees are great to look at, but I do wonder about wildfire danger.

[Parnassia]

Originally Posted by M3 Mitch

The first house has been HGTV'd to death. Otherwise it's pretty close to what I'm looking for.

The second house is gorgeous, but turns out there is 2 miles of gravel road before you hit pavement, and oddly enough has no well or septic - how common is this? Asking, I was told that typical wells in this area are up to 300' deep, which would be expensive to drill and then expensive if I ever had any problem with the downhole pump. Strange to me that someone lived in this house/cabin at least part time for several years with no well.

All those conifer trees are great to look at, but I do wonder about wildfire danger.

If they didn't live there year round, instead of spending all that $ hoping they'd hit water, they may have opted to have it delivered and run the house off a cistern. FWIW, two of my year round residence homes (one within town limits) built less than 10 years ago have had cisterns instead of a well or municipal water. There might be a rain catchment. As for septic, once again if they didn't live there full time they opted for an outhouse, composting toilet, greywater system, or holding tank/pump out service. It's also possible they never bothered perc testing the property.

As for the conifers, look into maintaining defensible space.

[Clark Fork Fantast]

Originally Posted by Parnassia

If they didn't live there year round, instead of spending all that $ hoping they'd hit water, they may have opted to have it delivered and run the house off a cistern. FWIW, two of my year round residence homes (one within town limits) built less than 10 years ago have had cisterns instead of a well or municipal water. There might be a rain catchment. As for septic, once again if they didn't live there full time they opted for an outhouse, composting toilet, greywater system, or holding tank/pump out service. It's also possible they never bothered perc testing the property.

As for the conifers, look into maintaining defensible space.

Exactly: Well drilling can be prohibitively expensive since you may have to go several hundred feet through bedrock.We're still part-time residents at our NID place in the woods, and we don't have a well yet (we had to make some financial choices), and we're fortunate that our neighbors let us access their well and fill our 20 gal. tank as needed.

As for the septic, at least in NID you can't get a building permit unless you have your property perc tested by the county. That doesn't entail that you have to actually install septic, of course. A seasonal cabin can definitely be used for years by hauling water and managing the septic situation (such as an outhouse, a composting toilet, or simply renting a port-a-potty) without a well or a septic tank.

[M3 Mitch]

Originally Posted by ejisme

[/b]

From my experience and the in-laws, often rural HOAs are just for local road maintenance and maybe well maintenance if the property gets its water from a shared well. These aren't suburban HOAs where they dictate the color of your house, what type of trees you plant, whether you build a new shed or barn, etc. Just private road maintenance (maybe to include snow plowing), and the possibility of a shared well maintenance. If you find the right spot I probably wouldn't exclude it based on an HOA that wants, say $100 per year to have the road graded, oiled and maybe new gravel once or twice a year. Even if it's a paved private road you may have to pay for pothole filling and snow plowing via an HOA. Good Luck finding your dream home.

OK I will take that under advisement. What I do not want is the meddlesome, busybody type of HOA.

[M3 Mitch]

Originally Posted by Parnassia

If they didn't live there year round, instead of spending all that $ hoping they'd hit water, they may have opted to have it delivered and run the house off a cistern. FWIW, two of my year round residence homes (one within town limits) built less than 10 years ago have had cisterns instead of a well or municipal water. There might be a rain catchment. As for septic, once again if they didn't live there full time they opted for an outhouse, composting toilet, greywater system, or holding tank/pump out service. It's also possible they never bothered perc testing the property.

As for the conifers, look into maintaining defensible space.

Pictures of the bathroom seem to show a regular toilet. Although not in great detail. What does a water delivery cost, and how long did it usually last you?

You guys are making some interesting observations, please keep them coming.

[Parnassia]

Originally Posted by M3 Mitch

Pictures of the bathroom seem to show a regular toilet. Although not in great detail. What does a water delivery cost, and how long did it usually last you?

No idea these days for that area. You'd need to call local water delivery services for pricing. They may offer different types of delivery service: auto top off every month, on-call as needed, pro rating, different prices based on tank volume, if they have other customers along the route to you, distance surcharges, etc. This would be something to have the listing agent ask the current owner. Property disclosures often or are required to provide ballpark utility costs, but if the owners are already set up with a water delivery service they could tell you quite a bit.

As for how long a fill would last, how long is a piece of string? Family size, your daily water consumption habits: everyone taking daily showers, whether you have home laundry or take it elsewhere, gardening uses, dishwasher, livestock, whether you wash a bunch of cars, boats, or ATVs, whether you augment with a rain catchment, on and on.

FWIW, and that may not be much, I currently live just outside Homer AK and have a 1100 gal cistern in the crawlspace under my 2 bath house. It relies on an incorporated electric pump (no power, no water). I live alone, do laundry on site, don't irrigate anything, but I'm still pretty conservative with water. While water isn't scarce here, the cost of doing business, water treatment equipment, supplies, and fueling the tanker truck isn't cheap. If I request a fill of less than 500 gallons the service only charges me for the delivery, not the water itself. So, I schedule the fills based on that 500 gal volume, not 1100. With normal use, I end up getting the tank filled about once a month. Total cost hovers around $45 per fill. A similar service in Lewiston could be totally different.

[Parnassia]

Originally Posted by M3 Mitch

OK I will take that under advisement. What I do not want is the meddlesome, busybody type of HOA.

How "meddlesome/busybody" an HOA ends up being usually depends on the residents and how they interpret the covenants/bylaws. That's rather a moving target, but other residents can usually vote the more obnoxious types off the board...assuming those other residents bother to stay involved in managing the HOA they belong to. IMHO with HOAs, if you don't participate, you lose the luxury of whining about things you don't like. The listing agent should be able to provide a copy of current HOA covenants, bylaws, dues, etc. For the HOAs I've ended up living in, all that information was provided as part of the property listing. Before I even toured the house I had a very good idea what the HOA was all about. No surprises.

[banjomike]

One thought I had regarding the second cabin's lack of a well or septic system was the possibility the property might have a spring with a strong flow on it.
My family had 2 different cabins that both had no indoor plumbing, but with a continual supply of fresh spring water a single step outside the door.

The water was piped in both locations from springs that were uphill that delivered a lot of water. The pipes could have been set up inside both houses, but that would required the water to flow in the sink continually, as gravity fed the flow.
It was easier to just put a stand pipe next to the door and fetch the water as needed from it. The water was always headache-cold, around 35º out of the pipe, and it ran continually into a concrete catch basin connected to some concrete drain piping that carried the water off to a boggy spot where it eventually drained into a nearby creek.

The sites were different from each other, but were similar in their setup and usage. Nowadays, both those old cabins are long gone, but their standpipes are still there, still running water, now into troughs for the animals to drink.
But at the mouth of the pipe, the water is still plenty pure enough for humans to drink, and it's very fresh and tasty.
The flow runs year-round and never freezes over in the winters.

Both places used outhouses, well downhill from the water supply, for sanitary purposes.
The outhouse can be a secure, clean, and comfortable place to relieve oneself when it's placed in the right spot, equipped with the needed stuff to keep it sanitary, and built with some care and precision.

One thing most folks don't know anymore is how good quicklime is to break down human waste. A 50 lb. bag of lime with a soup-can cup to hold it can keep an outhouse odor and insect free when the stuff is sprinkled in and around the hole after every use. A bag will last for over a month for a family with 4-5 members using the outhouse daily- everyone soon learns how much needs to be sprinkled pretty quickly.

There's only one cabin we use now, a much newer one we built in the 1990s. We built it with an indoor bathroom and used the same system that was in the old cabin, but added some connections in case we decided to dig a well for water.

We didn't need the well for the next 20 years, but around 2008, after several years of extreme drought, that trusty old spring that had been reliable for 100 years began to falter. So we dug a well and hit the same source. The spring runs nearly dry now, but never goes completely dry.

[M3 Mitch]

On a slightly different tack, what about cell service and internet in this part of Idaho? I want a certain amount of "wilderness experience" but don't want to over-do it.