Brettski, man o man I like your site! Very informative and you guys sound like my wife and I. We too looked for a couple of years for a piece of property that was a reasonable drive one way from Chicago.

Since we work and live in Chicago I wanted something I could drive to on the weekends without losing a whole day to driving. I mean propert is sure affordable in upper Wisconsin but then you're only going to visit it a couple of times a year since driving is 5-7 hours one way!

Obviously the cost of land is more expensive the closer to Chicago you are. We first stared to look at 10 acre lots then after walking that it didn't seem big enough and we switched to minimum 20 acre. We didn't want a house on it so as we could buy more land. Two years later I found 2 parcels next to each other a 20 and a 25 within our price range. It was not wooded liked we hoped but had some tree lines and and an adjacent forst and lot of overgrowth due to it was not farmed for 30-40 years. But I was able to see it how it will look in 5 years then 10 years and then 20years down the road. I decided that this was it!

It was pain at first to get a mortgage on a vacant parcel since the bank concidered that by not having a house on the property there wasn't any equitty. They wanted a huge down payment! After going around a bit "finding" some more money and getting a decent lender the seller dropped his price a little more and as it turns out the property was appraised at 15 grand over what the original asking price which added to the down payment, yeah! We closed on it December of 2004.

The week after we closed I met up with the NRCS to walk the propery and started to draw up plans. Since then I bought a trailcutter for the atv and made some nice paths everywhere. Put up no hunting signs. My excating neigbor told me about a driveway that existed to the property with a pipe under it. So he came by with the backhoe and cleared it out so you don't have to pay 200 bucks for permits and 1500 for the gravel and scraping to put one in since it's grandfathered.

Bought a Massey Ferguson 65 with a loader and 3pt hitch for the potential 3pt farm implaments that I need to prep parts of the land for the warm season grasses and tree plantings.

Funny, I tell this to people and they're like, "Boy, you got a lot of work to do! Is it worth that? I mean you just don't go there to relax but you're working on it all the time." My answer to that is a big fat YES! I'll tell you, nothing like the feeling of working your own land to get it to be the dream place of yours. I the happiest when I'm brush hogging and cutting out trails and assisting the deer paths to an adjacent farming field for feed.

I printed out an aireal map with plastic sheets on it with overlays for different parts of the project to be completed. Everytime I do something to the property I'm one step closer!

The ponds are my biggest project and the ones that are going to take the longest but it's worth it. I get all excited talking about this and wish winter wasn't here so I can do some work on the land. Heck, how korny is this? My wife and I are trying think up names to call our pice of property.. Right now we say we're going to "the 45".