Building a Road on Raw Land for My Off-Grid AirBnb
It’s been a minute since I made an update on my land. You can read the first story about that here, but the TLDR is I bought some land to put my 1972 Airstream on with the eventual goal of renting it out on Airbnb.
It’s 5 acres, across the street from the ocean near Acadia National Park in Maine.
After all the paperwork was signed, the next step was site planning. We debated whether to build the road ourselves, my husband and I are handy, but have never operated an excavator and our woods are very thick.
We’ll do some of the site work ourselves, like building paths and small clearings, but we hired an excavation company to do the main road construction.
Finding a company and getting quotes only took about a week. Then we got on the waiting list. Our town is small and there aren’t many companies, so it took about seven weeks for them to get around to our project.
The process of road building is pretty straightforward. Mark out the road. Get rid of the trees. Build up a foundation for the road including drainage, then put down some gravel.
The whole lot is 5 acres, but we put the road closer to the back even though the front has potential ocean views. We’ll eventually build a cabin here, and the back is the highest, driest, and most septic-friendly. I don’t want to build another road later. That area also has mostly smaller balsam fir trees, so the impact on the birch and hardwoods was minimal.
Building the road only took four days, from initial marking to pouring the gravel. The heavy machinery was pretty rough around the edges, so we’ll do some landscaping and planting now, and it’ll look nice by next summer.
Overall, I’m glad we hired someone to do this because it would have taken us all summer. Next up is landscaping, building some forest paths and maybe some camping!
Read the entire Sweet Pine setup story here: https://medium.com/sweet-pine
