Four Hills Ranch
"A meeting place for neighbors"
Graphic Design
Preparation
House has Arrived!!!
Our modular 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 Mixen 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 create a 12-acre parcel (for the house).
E-mail address: mlsinc@safeaccess.com
Phone: 928-526-0270
Contact Coconino County:
Coconino County Community Development Office
2500 N. Fort Valley Road, Building 1
Flagstaff, AZ 86001
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 modular 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 your septic system approved by Coconino County.
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. Or figured out that the Septic Designer and the Norweco Dealer were partners and not communicating with the Solar Designer.
We had absolutley NO idea what a power hog the Norweco system 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.
So, we made some changes.... and we always get a clean bill of health from our annual septic service. 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 strongly recommend that you or someone you trust be around to supervise the set-up crew and the sub-contractors. Make sure someone is in charge of coordinating the whole job which includes making sure there is good communication between the various vendors. This will help you avoid these types of problems: 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, yard surrounding the house was left with piles of rock rubble and it looked like a landscape you might see on the moon, sub-contractors would arrive and depart unannounced, and the house skirting was painted a color that doesn't match the house color.
We also had a problem with our wood stove installation initially. Wrong color hearth, crooked chimney and the stove was set too far out from the wall. The good news is that they made it right and we love our wood stove! 