Lake Lot

In July of 2012, My buddy Mike and I bought a pair of lots at Goose Creek Lake in Ste. Genevieve county, Missouri.  Some friends of ours have a nice lot there, and we were invited down for a weekend. We had such a good time that we started kicking around the idea of getting a lot ourselves. We kept an eye out on Craigslist, and eventually found a pair of adjoining lots on a quiet road at the lake. There was no major improvements on the lots at the time. Just a small fire pit, and an old derelict camper.

The Starting Point

We loved the location, the price was right, and there was electricity nearby. But it would need a lot of work.  Step one was clearing away all the underbrush, burning leafs, and generally getting the lot where we can get on it to work.

I know a gentleman who owns a large electrical company. I called him to see if he could put in an electric pole for me. He came out with a pole he had knocking around his yard complete and ready to go. He and one of his men had the pole set in place in about 2 hours. A couple days later, the local utility came out and hooked us up. We were electrified!

Setting the electric pole

The lot, after a little clearing and the electric lines installed.

Despite being 2 lots, we decided to treat them as one big lot, and share the costs of the upgrades together.  We had a pretty good ideas where we wanted our camper parking spots to go, so we needed to run electric to those spots. We rented a trencher and got the conduit and wires in the ground. That means we could go down and have a place to stay for the weekend, and not have to go home at night.

Fire. And lots of it!

The next step was getting the rest of the lot cleared, cutting down some trees that would have to go, and getting rid of the old camper. It's a shame that we couldn't do something with it, but it was in such poor shape that there was no way to save it. We may have gotten a tad carried away with the burning, as an ember somehow found the open seam between the roof and the wall of the old camper and started smoldering.

Damn.

Double Damn.

 We tried for quite some time to put it out, but we never could get it all the way out, and it kept smoldering and flaring back up. The last thing we wanted was for the little camper to fully catch fire in the middle of the night or something. In the end, we had to break out the sawzalls and filet the poor thing right there on the spot. It was a tough little bastard, but we eventually got it all cut up, and we burned everything that we could. We left the aluminum siding for some people at the lake who recycle, and kept the chassis. That part is still in working order, and we have a couple ideas what to do with it.


One other thing we had to do was get a culvert in so we could have a big circle driveway.  The first lot had a driveway, but the second lot really didn't.  I had a buddy of mine come down with his tractor and help us get the culvert in. It has been a while since he played with his tractor, so he was really getting into it.

  The tractor had a box blade on back and I never knew how much you could with one of those. In just a couple of hours, he had the culvert in, and the driveway graded out.  It would have been nice to have a couple loads of dirt brought in, but overall it was really looking good.  That pretty much took us thru the summer/fall of 2012. There's not much that we could do over the winter.

Starting in spring of 2013, we got serious with the ground improvements. We borrowed a bobcat from a friend and moved quite a bit of dirt, and also remove a few tree stumps that were a big pain in the ass. Unfortunately, we managed to accidentally rip up the conduit I had buried for the future pavilion. Shit happens sometimes.

I bought a 4 wheeler with a small box blade.  Not as handy as a dedicated tractor, but in the end, this little unit turned out to be more useful than I ever thought possible. The picture below shows it hard at work clearing the front walk at the house after some record snows in the winter or 2013-2014.




The 4 wheeler is an Arctic Cat 300. It has a double-low gearbox and more grunt than you could imagine. However, shifting into reverse, and raising the blade was a HUGE pain in the ass, so seeing how we had a circle driveway, I just spent countless hours going round and round smoothing up the area.

Next in was the rock. The driveways and parking pads were as level and smooth as we could get, but one little rain would turn them into a muddy mess. We contracted with a local hauler who brought in 5 loads of rock and spread them out. He did a really good job spreading the rock with his dump trucks, but there is only so much you can do that way. Again, the little Arctic-Cat came to the rescue!

Finally, after a lot of hard work,  we had the lot just were we wanted. Cleared, with a nice gravel driveway, parking pads for the campers, and still enough trees to keep it shady. A pretty big difference from the first time we saw it. 

From this:

 

To this!

The little camper was sitting about near the back edge of the parking pad on the right.

Panorama of the lots, with all the ground work done.

Mike had won an auction at a charity event for 2 pallets of landscape blocks. Leveling his spot left a bit of a 'notch' where the blocks would be perfect for making a little retaining wall. So one weekend, we set all the block and really made his spot look nice.  Somewhere along the way, we installed a porta-potty in the upper corner of the lots.

So.. .what to do next? Why, camp on it of course! 

We really enjoy our time down on the lake. It's very relaxing, and there's lots of stuff to do. A lot of good food, good times and good beverages. Swimming, ATV trails and just a good chance to get away. We had some other good friends, Ray and Rosemary and their kids stay with us a couple of times, and they all really had a good time. Despite only living about 15 miles away, they talked about getting a lot as well. Turns out that while looking online for lots, Ray stumbled onto one that just happened to be the undeveloped lot right next to mine. They snatched that one up right away, and now we have ourselves a little 'compound' going on over on Possum Hollow drive.