12x16 shed in Northern Wisconsin

[WoodTick]

After reading the adventures of many here, I thought I would start a thread on the building of our Sekrit Base in Wisconsin.  We were fortunate to have a little bit of savings (mostly due to the Chief getting sent on long assignments that deigned to pay overtime-unusual-the overtime pay, that is, not the long hours).  We looked for a couple years, then finally dropped the hammer on a property in Lincoln County, WI.  I took the time to research the land usage and septic codes BEFORE we purchased, which helped in property selection-one of the counties would have required a full-on POWTS (septic system/holding tank) before we could do much of anything useful for sleeping between hunting sessions. Where we purchased allows privies if the site has suitable soil, so we coughed up the money to have a soil pit dug and profiled, all good (one of our only purchase contingencies).  We also paid to have a certified survey done, and the parcel lines and corners marked.

The land is 40 acres on a county road, half a mile deep and 1/8 mile of road frontage, wooded except for an existing drive and clearing with a fire pit for camping.  A little less than half is wetland, at the back of the property.  The surrounding properties are forest and wetland, too.  It hasn't been hunted in years, so the deer are quite curious. (Let's see if I can get the link right here)

[WoodTick]

Here's the septic guy determining the soil types in one of the pits they dug with the backhoe. It's all sandy loam of various sorts, but no water or dark soil, so it can be used for a drain field-mound type.  He tells me it will be in the ballpark of $20K, but suggested that a holding tank could be pumped a lot of times for that price.  For now, since we will probably only be up May to December, and only a couple times a month on weekends, I think an outhouse will meet our needs. 


Our goofy Lab tearing down the driveway. This was right before Christmas, we got one more visit in January before the snow was too deep to drive in.  Fortunately, the drive is only 300 feet, and snowshoes and an icefishing sled let us pull the chainsaw in to do some tidying up of windthrows.  You can see that we have a lot of balsam firs. They smell awesome! And a limb is great for starting fires, no "Boy Scout water" (as my husband calls it) needed to get split aspen started. 


Where the surveyors cleared the lot line, the flagging made it a nice Christmas picture