A good suggestion, but there aren't many suburbs in New Hampshire. Around Manchester and Portsmouth, sure, but through most of the state, houses get built one at a time, with no two being alike.
My first lot in New Hampshire straddles the border between towns 'A' and 'B', but is officially in town 'B'. I liked the lot for many reasons, but one was because town 'A' has a high class reputation but almost no buildable lots! There's plenty of land, but very few roads. It's not unusual to find a 20 acre parcel that only has a tiny outcropping that hits a street. Thus, it only has enough road frontage to permit a single dwelling. Or sometimes NO dwellings. (You've heard me describe something similar on my new lot in town 'C' - nearly a hundred acres, but I had to get a special authorization to erect even one house.)
The city council for town 'A' is reluctant to approve new roads. I guess they don't want the town to grow. It's a funny place, controlled by a bunch of wealthy liberals. (Ken Burns, the PBS filmmaker who did 'The Civil War,' lives there.) It's a very desirable place with lots of history, so it's not uncommon to find older homes being snapped up and torn down to make way for newer places. That's Town 'A's idea of growth, I guess.
I liked my lot because, although it's not in Town 'A', it was one of the nearest buildable parcels. Since it was in town 'B,' it was less expensive than what I might have bought in town 'A.'
A drawback was that town 'B' had far higher property tax rates. But in the 12 years that have passed since then, it's changed! My cousin, who lives there, now grouses that Town 'A' has the higher tax rate and he doesn't know why he's still living there. Such is the liberal way.
But I digress. There's no place in the area where a lot of houses are being erected. Even if there were, I'm not interested in scrap lumber. I'd like to be able to cut my own boards just to better use the trees. Right now, for instance, I've got a GIGANTIC tree that fell onto the field three years ago and is rotting away.
It's either a sugar maple or an oak, with perhaps a five foot trunk. Either way, what a waste. That's two years worth of firewood, but I'd much rather build something out of such a beautiful tree.
There are probably four or five trees like this one coming down on the land each year. One way or another, I'm going to have to cut them up just to keep the land cleared, so why not turn them into something nice? I'll use the crappy pine trees for firewood. The maples and oaks deserve better.
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