# Up for sale in 2015: 14 acres+house in rural Northern Virginia



## Mulegirl (Oct 6, 2010)

A heads-up for anyone who's thinking about buying land in Virginia at some point in the next couple of years:

At some point in the next year and a half, we will be putting our house and land on the market. It's a 3-bedroom, 2 full bath ranch (about 1300 sq ft) on 14.3 acres in southernmost northern Virginia in Orange County. It's on a private road off a secondary road, but is quite close to two of the major roads running through the county (Rt. 522 and Rt. 20). Our neighbors are nice people in general, and live far enough away not to be peering in your windows, but close enough to come check if something seems not right. There don't seem to be any real &#8220;troublemaker&#8221; neighbors, and no one has had any complaints about our livestock (poultry and pigs) so far.

The house was re-done before we bought it; it had gone into foreclosure, and a development company bought it, renovated (new kitchen, bath, flooring, roof, propane furnace), and sold it to us. We added new siding and new windows almost immediately after buying the house, and a woodstove was installed the fall after we moved in. 

The land has potential, but most of it is cut-over woodland; the last owner sold the timber, probably about 5-6 years ago, and then didn't do anything to re-plant or maintain what was left, so it is essentially a large bramble patch that is starting to turn back into forest (pine, maple, poplar, some oak). The area immediately around the house was cleared, it seems, by simply bulldozing the encroaching shrubbery back, and though it was mud when we got here, we've got grass starting to grow in the front and a good big garden space in the back. We'll be putting in some apple trees and blueberry bushes this summer, and we'll be creating some gravel pathways in the garden, but that's about the extent of the pending improvements to the land. There are two outbuildings already: a small workshop with electricity (and a ceiling fan!) and a gazebo which was strangely placed right in the middle of the driveway that we use as a toolshed/chick brooder shelter.

Odd little extras that we could bundle in with the sale for the right folks: a small mixed flock of chickens, some Bourbon Red turkeys, the poultry housing, a full poultry electronet setup, and enough hog panels and t-posts to create a 2 x 1 panel hog pen. There will also likely be a gravel pile still present, since I doubt DH will manage to use all of it to make the gravel paths.

Pricewise, we need to consult with our realtor, but I think it will probably be somewhere between $185,000-200,000. Taxes in this area are pretty low&#8212;we pay around $1200/year&#8212;and it's a good location if you want to do a market garden for a city, since we're about 45 minutes to Fredericksburg, an hour to Charlottesville, just over an hour to Richmond, and about 2 hours to Washington DC, depending on traffic. Our timeline is flexible; we're planning to move back up to Rochester, NY in spring or summer 2015, so we would want to close sometime between April and September of 2015 (there is NO WAY we are moving back to western New York in the late fall or winter!), and would be happy to work out a time that is best for both parties.

Anyways, if anyone is interested, PM me--we'll be happy to arrange visits for someone who's interested. As I said, it's going to be a year or so before we're ready to move (we need to save up the money to cover our moving costs!), but if anyone here on HT was thinking about Virginia, we wanted to let you know that this is coming up. I'll put some pictures up once our latest round of snow clears out and we start getting some spring growth.


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