As others have said, get a perc test done first. Western Washington is notorious for not perc-ing. My grandparents actually had to get one of those ugly above ground ones. I don’t know if they even allow those anymore, as that was 20+ years ago. Assume that you will need a new septic. It’s old and trees just love to grow into them….
Pro tip: if you plan on building on a property don’t tell your neighbors. They might decide they would rather make that difficult for you.
Check into permitting in your county on that arena. In some counties in Washington they have rules that a certain percentage of your property can’t be ‘covered’ by something, and they consider an outdoor in that footage. You should be ok since you have 10 acres, but you don’t want to buy and then find out you can’t put in an arena.
That is interesting. An outdoor allows the water to travel thru and be treated naturally so I would have thought an outdoor would not count. Good thing for the OP to look into.
You need access to your barn for farrier, vet, hay delivery ? Plan hay storage? Plan trailer turn around area?
We have our outdoor arena next to a side road with gate access. We can drive thru the arena to the back of the barn. Farrier loves it. We can back the truck w flat bed trlr to the barn for hay delivery. Arena has a base w sand and rubber cover. It can also be used as a party parking lot . The barn is fence surrounded so if a horse gets loose they can’t get out to the road. Our 2 dry lots open to the 3 pastures. Barn has one stall with full sliding door that opens to a dry lot and has an overhang that holds a round bale. Very compact and functional. Easy to maintain and horses are out 24/7.
Our once very quiet road is now a very busy highway and while I don’t mind, nervous riders and spooky horses do not do well out there with motorcycles and transports blasting by.
Honestly deciding where the round pen goes seems pretty unimportant at this time. Wait until you live there and can see where the footing is driest/best.
This sound interesting. Could you please post a screen shot of the satellite view from Google maps like the OP has done? Thanks very much. Picture is worth many words.
Thank you! The current owner bought the property in 2004 so I am not worried about being grandfathered in and such. We have set up cable and internet since we are in a bit of a dead spot. I will definitely be checking with the easements.
Ooooh smart about the neighbors lol. So far they have been nice but who knows. I am definitely looking into permits right now. I did not know about covered percentage rule. I haven’t seen anything about that.
So far hay has been from a neighbor down the road with a tractor so we are good with that. They have been able to deliver it where we need it. I will look though to make sure we do have enough room if we need to bring in a big trailer. That really sounds like a interesting set up, I would loving seeing a picture of it. So far we have been doing the farrier and body work in our little run in stalls so I need to figure out a cover for them lol.
We have a private easement with tons of construction equipment that gets hauled on it. I wish I could avoid putting the arena by the easement but our current horses have just learned to deal with it.
That is probably true with many/most situations.
Even a quiet neighborhood can turn into a busy neighborhood when the developer buys some piece of land that extends off the back and everyone drives thru to get to the new 100 house development.
So far everyone that is on the easement in on both sides(about 7 homes max) are all family owned and have been in the families for generations. I am not really worried about it getting too busy in the near future. When I boarded the ring was at the corner of 2 busy roads and we made do. I didnt hate the noise or anything else, I hated the lack of privacy. We will be putting in a ton of privacy trees along our edges.
Thank you for your concern though! I am not worried about the property much, just the cost of redoing the fencing and the layout since is it wonky right now and doesn’t make much sense for ease of use and letting the pasture rest.
So going off of the google maps measurement tool. I have roughly figured out how big everything could be. Thinking about the fact that there is about 7.5 acres of pasture, what do you think the max amount of horses could be? Are the pastures adequate size or should I make them smaller? The plan would be to have them in the dry lot at night. Should the dry lot be bigger? Sorry for all the questions, this forum just has a lot more brain power then I haver at the moment
I would make the north end more like this. It gives access to all fields by just opening a gate and the lane could serve as it’s own paddock. If you don’t want fields this large, they can always be split with movable electric fencing.
Oh I really like that! Thank you! Right now we have all horses in one pasture at night and they get access to a second pasture during the day. Basically dry lot at night. The stalls are only for feeding grain. #5 has now sheds, there are sheds in #7. We can easily build sheds if need be. I was just thinking of the dry lot where I put it due to the fact that it can run off of the barn with the 5 existing stalls so we don’t have to make too many sheds. Here is a blank set up of the farm for ease of redoing it lol.
This sounds good, you can have a very short two runs of pipes and two waterers, one per two paddocks, their fence crossing over the waterer and close to the house and gates, easy to check as you turn horses out and bring them in.
Easier to not have to handle horses so much, especially when others do chores for you some days.
Okay, I like symetry and safety so I moved the fencing down some, enclosed the barn and put the arena at #5. The south pasture is split that way so the horses have a smaller area closer to the house and two larger areas they can get to during the day. To me, a dry lot is usually a smaller area that is maintained so I wouldn’t want it to be more than half an acre.
Ooo that is really nice. Thank you! My only question is the area south of where you put the arena(where I had put my arena in my plans) what would you do with it? Turn it into parking, round pen, little pasture, ect.
. The barn is fence surrounded so if a horse gets loose they can’t get out to the road. Our 2 dry lots open to the 3 pastures. Barn has one stall with full sliding door that opens to a dry lot and has an overhang that holds a round bale. Very compact and functional. Easy to maintain and horses are out 24/7.
