Highbeam
Super Member
At least the picture is dark so we can't feel the warmth of the sun through the photo.
I may as well throw my experience in. I bought 15 acres of land to probably build on. At the least I would improve it and enjoy it as a rec/investment piece. I bought a small bulldozer, loved it for about 1.5 years and sold it with a 1000$ loss. I put no less than 10,000$ of additional value into the property in the form of clearing and grading roads into and around the property. Then I hired the big boys, a logger, to come out and take the merchantable timber and the stumps it was connected to from about 1.5 acres. They also burned all their slash plus 1.5 years worth of bulldozer slash piles. I paid another 1800$ for that service but the property gained no less than 18,000$ in value. (See the trend) Now I have the tractor. This is to maintain those improvments and to finish them since as you know a logger is not a landscaper. Now comes the house. I will be moving gravel, trenching for utilities, backfilling foundation, finish grading, a million other things, and then maintenance forever. The tractor is the long term equipment for maintenance of all these improvements. Without the maintenance, the clearings would grow over with alder and other brush in short order.
The wife is not agreeing to the backhoe yet, the 6000$ tag scares us both. I can rent out a trackhoe for the trenching of utilities but I still think the long term investment in a backhoe is good since I have plenty stumps to pull and drain tiles to install over the next several years.
I may as well throw my experience in. I bought 15 acres of land to probably build on. At the least I would improve it and enjoy it as a rec/investment piece. I bought a small bulldozer, loved it for about 1.5 years and sold it with a 1000$ loss. I put no less than 10,000$ of additional value into the property in the form of clearing and grading roads into and around the property. Then I hired the big boys, a logger, to come out and take the merchantable timber and the stumps it was connected to from about 1.5 acres. They also burned all their slash plus 1.5 years worth of bulldozer slash piles. I paid another 1800$ for that service but the property gained no less than 18,000$ in value. (See the trend) Now I have the tractor. This is to maintain those improvments and to finish them since as you know a logger is not a landscaper. Now comes the house. I will be moving gravel, trenching for utilities, backfilling foundation, finish grading, a million other things, and then maintenance forever. The tractor is the long term equipment for maintenance of all these improvements. Without the maintenance, the clearings would grow over with alder and other brush in short order.
The wife is not agreeing to the backhoe yet, the 6000$ tag scares us both. I can rent out a trackhoe for the trenching of utilities but I still think the long term investment in a backhoe is good since I have plenty stumps to pull and drain tiles to install over the next several years.
