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Half acre minimum — preferably .75+. I don’t like anything bigger than an acre due to maintenance/won’t use it all.
With established shrubs and trees I believe this is just enough space for privacy and a small buffer against hearing every pin drop from neighbors. There’s a huge difference between neighborhoods with .5 acre spacing and say those with 0.15 acre spacing. Too much land concerns me in regards to safety due to no one being able to keep an eye out.
When I’ve lived on half+ lots, weeks could pass where all I have is a passing glance of neighbors mowing the lawn or something.
I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach when I looked at homes with lots listed in square footage. At one home, I even saw a few neighbors arguing in the street - in what was a solidly middle class ‘hood in a good area.
So how do you folks on postage stamp lots deal with it? Do you just mentally train yourself to not notice your neighbors so much? I’d feel like 10 people could be watching me every time I go outside. Maybe 20 if I cut grass with my shirt off.
We are retired, so when we work in the yard during the weekdays, it is like a ghost town on our cul-de-sac after 0730. My wife and I could have a dance party and no one would notice/see. On the weekends, we stay in most of the time, so we do not see the neighbors when they are out working in their yards.
In theory, I would be fine with a tiny house on a tiny lot....plenty enough for me.
Well, if it were not for the screechy, loud, largely unchecked vulgarity that seems to have overtaken many areas of the country.......I feel I need at least an acre as a buffer.
As a bonus, it seems that those very loud animals, that many people seems to worship in the USA, have an unchecked right to bark their heads off all day and night long.
Aloha Steiconi! Your House #2 sounds like Hawaiian Acres. I noticed the same things when I lived there way back when.
We moved into town and it's been wonderful. Having easy access to groceries and entertainment as well as everything else is a life changer. It's surprisingly quieter, too. Since everyone knows that everyone else is fairly close by, they make much more of an effort to be quiet.
Road 1, brah. 40 minutes from everything.
Now we have groceries and restaurants less than 10 minutes away. Civilization!
I'm getting tired of having 3/4 an acre with mature trees. I spend several hours each week mowing then (if I get it done) another couple hours trimming. When it isn't mowing it is collecting leaves and pine needles Right now I am looking out at the yard knowing that I need to do leaves again next week. (Oaks drop leaves until mid January).
On top of that there is the cost of tree maintenance. About $1500 a year just in spray and feed and average about $1000 a year in trimming and pruning ( that comes in chunks every few years when I get a $3-5000 bill when the tree company takes over my yard for 3-5 days.
I'm looking at replacing fences now. My current fencing ranges from 16-30 years in age and I know I should bite the bullet and replace it all but am dreading the cost.
Don't get me wrong I love my house and yard but it does require work and investment.
That's crazy. I have 4 acres with lots of trees and I never spray or feed any of them, and they survive just fine. Native trees do not need "feeding".
I'm getting tired of having 3/4 an acre with mature trees. I spend several hours each week mowing then (if I get it done) another couple hours trimming. When it isn't mowing it is collecting leaves and pine needles Right now I am looking out at the yard knowing that I need to do leaves again next week. (Oaks drop leaves until mid January).
On top of that there is the cost of tree maintenance. About $1500 a year just in spray and feed and average about $1000 a year in trimming and pruning ( that comes in chunks every few years when I get a $3-5000 bill when the tree company takes over my yard for 3-5 days.
I'm looking at replacing fences now. My current fencing ranges from 16-30 years in age and I know I should bite the bullet and replace it all but am dreading the cost.
Don't get me wrong I love my house and yard but it does require work and investment.
You sound obsessed about your trees. Unless something is seriously wrong with them, they don't need near the maintenance you are describing. What are you trimming and pruning? The only pruning trees need is taking out an occasional dead branch unless they are growing up against you house with the potential of doing damage. Spraying? I've lived with trees of various types on my properties for many years. Never had them sprayed for anything. Your tree company is making a killing.
BTW, in my younger days I was a certified arborist in the state of CA.
Last edited by marino760; 12-23-2019 at 06:58 AM..
I grew up in a house with 1/3 an acre and live on half an acre now.
My 1/2 acre house has a dozen trees, all but one are oaks. I'd like to thin the herd but at $1000 a tree to remove them, it's not happening. If I could do that I'd get a mulching blade for the mower and dispense with leaf removal altogether.
Our lot now is longer than it is wide, not quite in the proportions of a football field but roughly 115x175. We seem closer to our neighbors than my parents did on a smaller lot with a similar size footprint, but some of that could be the landscape as well.
I'm not sure that conflict with neighbors is more or less notable in a house on .15 acres or 1.5 acres. It has more to do with manners, HOA's, personalities, etc...Plenty folks on acreage have neighbor disputes too. I also can't say that I've noticed hearing or seeing neighbors when I lived closer, the exception being some apartments.
The first thing I did when I started reading this thread was laugh to myself. I am an older guy and I have lived in a less than 1,000 sq foot home that I bought in 2014. The reason I was laughing when I first started reading this thread is because NOW at 70+ I think my corner lot of maybe 5000 square feet is to big for me to manage. What is funny to me is that I grew up on a farm/ranch where the nearest neighbors were to the South 1-1/2 mi, North three mi, East 3 miles and West 1-1/2 miles and I thought that was crowded LOL. However since I get around in a wheelchair smaller is nicer. I guess it is just what meets your needs LOL.
My husband and I are pretty typical suburbanites: Late 30's with 2 younger kids and a dog. We live in a suburb where homes must sit on 1-acre lots. We are in New England where homes are not cookie cutter and there are plenty of trees. So about a half an acre of our property is forested (we live on about 1.5 acres)
Pros:
obviously the privacy. I like not seeing neighbors and having trees between us.
we use our yard. Kids play in it, dog plays in it. It's nice to have the space.
Cons:
upkeep for 3 seasons:
Summer--we mow ourselves and with riding mower it only takes about an hour. We priced out having it done and it would be $75 per mow.
Fall--the leaves. So many leaves. We do about three rounds of leaf cleanup starting in October and ending in November. Our gutters are very full when we clean them out every November.
Winter--not much in winter, it's a nice break. But usually bigger yards = longer driveways, so you spend that time snowblowing the driveway instead of taking care of the lawn
Spring--mulching and edging. We have a lot of landscaping in our yard. I'm trying to get more groundcover plants to cover the mulched areas, but for the past 10 years we've spent about $1K every spring having our yard mulched and edged.
We also do year-round lawn treatments and have to sometimes have areas overseeded. We don't have a sprinkler system.
We also do year-round tick treatments since we live in a lyme-heavy area.
We love our yard FOR NOW since we use it so much. But when we're older, I don't know if the work will be worth it for us. We'll still want our privacy, so we'll have to figure out a way to have privacy without yard maintenance!
Our first home was a townhouse. No outside maintenance other than a little 10x10 fenced in area in the back. I did plant flowers there every year and a couple of bushes. For the small space, it looked nice.
Next house was on .21 acre. We had a dozen+ trees on that lot, so really no grass to speak of. I had a plug in lawn mower for the 10 minutes of lawn mowing I did every week. We had nice neighbors overall, other than a couple. But you seriously knew who was up to what in that neighborhood because the houses were pretty close together (not by new subdivision standards, though),
Next house was 3 1/2 acres on a mountain, so only about 3/4 acres was usable. I refused to mow it other than the areas I could get with my push mower. It was way too steep for me on a riding mower.
Now we have just under 2 acres with about 1.25-1.5 of it usable. While we were looking, a house we were seriously considering was on 10 acres with 5 of it grass that would need to be mowed. That house was also 3,000 square feet with 1500 more in an unfinished basement. The house we bought is 2300 square feet. I had decided that between the size of the house and the property, if something were to happen to my husband and he was unable to help me maintain it, it would be entirely too much for me to handle. So we bought this house instead. The lot is flat, so I could easily mow it if needed. I like it because there are no houses behind us, the next door house is fairly close by parcel size, but we can't see their house unless we are in our driveway and we can't see any of the other houses in our neighborhood. So to me it's the perfect size!
I would prefer to live on 25 acres in the country with a few pet cows, goats, and feral cats. my spouse lived in manhattan his whole life. a half acre in a texas city of a million people and three pet dogs was the best deal I could negotiate. LOL.
Last edited by texan2yankee; 12-23-2019 at 04:51 PM..
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