Preparation

House has Arrived!!!

Our house was delivered October 11, 2005.  We had some trouble getting through the cattle guards -- they were too narrow for our 16 foot wide sections.  Thanks to Walt Robinson, who happened to be working on building a corral at Mixon Tank when we arrrived -- Walt used his bobcat and helped smooth the way around the cattle guards so the transports could get through!!! 

We moved in December 31, 2005.

Coconino County continues to make changes to our road names and addresses.  Eventually we will have to replace our current road signs with "fluorescent" signs to accommodate the county guidelines for emergency vehicles. 

Splitting your land:  The lender recommended we split our land. The bank was not interested in holding claim to the entire 36 acre parcel.

Hire a surveyor - we recommend Martin H. Martin, the original surveyor of 4 Hills. He helped us split our parcel into a 12-acre parcel (for the house) and a second parcel of 24-acares.

E-mail address:  mlsinc@safeaccess.com
Phone: 928-526-0270

Contact Coconino County: 

Assessor's Office  
110 E. Cherry 
Flagstaff, AZ 86001  
1-800-559-9289 or (928) 779-6502 
We dealt with a guy named Scott at the Assessor's office who helped us in gathering information on what all had to be done to record our land split.  Here is the link on land divisions/splits: http://www.co.coconino.az.us/assessor/split.asp

 

Coconino County Community Development Office

2500 N. Fort Valley Road, Building 1

Flagstaff, AZ 86001

Telephone: (928) 226-2700 or 1-800-559-9289; Fax (928) 226-2701

The Homesite

In choosing the location for your homesite, consider where your septic field will go as well as the views. 

Hire a septic designer who will help you pick out a good location. If working with a manufactured home dealer, you can reserve the right to use your own designer. Septic designers/excavators can be a great asset or a pain in the asset...

We ultimately let the dealer choose our septic designer, engineer and excavator.  We found this to be the path of least resistance.  MH dealers are very particular about who they work with on septics because of the excessively rigorous guidelines of Coconino County.

Brian Buzzell is the county environmental inspector for our section of the county. We recommend you contact him for information on the process for getting you septic system approved by Coconino County.

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In Hindsight

In retrospect, our biggest mistakes were lack of due diligence and oversight.

We should have gotten more information about our Norweco alternative septic system. We had absolutley NO idea what a power hog the thing is! We were told that it used minimal energy. Well, that turned out to be about 5kW per day!

Considering our solar power system generates about 10kW-12kW per day, that would mean that our septic is taking about half of our power. No way, we said.

We've since determined that since only two people generate black water we have gotten away with running the Norweco about 12 hours per week--instead of 24/7. Our annual service call presented no problems with running it as we do. It gets a bit odiferous around the ranch when we power up the septic, but at least we aren't slaves to the septic and can use our power for other things.

We also wish that we had been around more often to supervise the set-up crew and the sub-contractors. Our gas supply line was located too high above ground, the pump house looks like an outhouse built by a wino, the workers left piles of garbage all around the house, sub-contractors would arrive and depart unannounced, and the skirting was painted a color that doesn't match the house color.

Never--EVER--buy a house from Advantage Homes a.k.a. Marlette Homes!

Anyway . . . the wood stove installer botched the job (initially). Wrong color hearth, crooked chimney and located the stove too far out from the wall. The good news is that they made it right and we love our wood stove!