Building our own RV parking spot
What it cost to be able to park our camper on our land!
This picture right here is what my husband and I had been dreaming of for the longest time. Parking our camper on our land for the long-haul. There were so many times this dream seemed like it would never become a reality. We first moved into a camper in April 2017, and the idea was to live on the road and save up money for a parking spot and eventually upgrade that parking spot to a house. In 2019 we bought land. I wanted to take some time and outline the process and the cost involved to go from complete nomad to nomad with a home-base. Basically, what I wish someone had written when I was still researching full-time RV living and when we had just started out.
Maybe you’ve just started RVing. Or you’re dreaming about living on the road. Perhaps you’ve been on the road for a while and are wondering if a home-base to come and go from would make traveling easier for you. Wherever you are at in your RV journey, I thought it might help to get a peek into our numbers for setting up Hartsfield Homestead! While the costs vary drastically from area to area, this might give you some kind of starting point for budgeting.
Buying Land $-$$$$
Around here, land is pretty in-expensive. Usually $1K-$10K an acre. Unless it’s already been developed, or is in town, or has direct access to Lake of the Woods. But Northern Minnesota might not be where you want to park (it’s probably not—your house has wheels on it and you could go anywhere, why move to Northern MN?) We’ve looked at land all over the country, and raw land can get really expensive. But developed land, whether it’s used for farming or in a city, is more expensive. If you’re going to park your rig in the middle of nowhere you can expect to pay $500 to $15,000 an acre. If you want to park in popular vacation areas, expect to pay $100K+ an acre. And that’s still land that’s been largely undeveloped.
I’m not at liberty to tell you how much we paid for our land, but I can tell you that we were able to pay for it outright on a single income. So it wasn’t too expensive. We bought 2.5 acres of land just outside of town so we’re close to everything and still outside of the city limits. It feels rural and secluded. Cozy. Our land is cozy. And we’re stoked to be here, yes, in Northern Minnesota.
Basic Boon-docking $
This was pretty simple. For our land, we needed an access point that wasn’t our neighbor’s yard. We bought a culvert from the township ($400) that we installed ourselves and had a local company bring in a couple loads of gravel ($500). I’ll add the cost of getting mail, which was $50 for a mailbox the county installed for us on a swinging post. Which brought our total to $950. We did put up a metal shed from a kit in 2019 as well, which if you are buying land to use as a home base it may be beneficial to have some storage. I think we payed $750 for ours. So now we are at $1,700 on top of the price of land.
Now we had a spot to park our rig and stay comfortably in an extended camping sort of way. However, our land is low and wet, which meant that we could only bring our camper onto our property during the driest part of summer and while the ground was frozen in the early winter and spring. We did camp on our land, but we ended up using my in-laws’ pop-up for a week. It was nice being able to have a majority of our mail be delivered to our land, but we had the important stuff delivered to my in-laws for the time being. We were still in the dreaming phase. Anything we wanted, within reason, was what we could do with our 2.5 acres.
This is the state that our land was at in March, when we finally parked our camper on it for the first time! The plan was actually to move back into our camper in May (we had stayed in a house over the winter of 20-21) and live on our land in the summer while we built…something, anything. But in April, our house was offered to us, and we knew that it would be into the winter again before we would have it move in ready and so we are still living in the house that we were in last winter. We did spend much of August and September living on our land in our camper after traveling Minnesota in it throughout the summer and it was wonderful! It was great being home and I can’t wait to get back to Hartsfield permanently.
Full Hook-ups $$$-$$$$
We had our well drilled first ($7500) and the company put in an outdoor spigot for us right off the well. So when the electricity ($400) was brought in, Seth dug a line ($800) from the meter right to the spigot for an RV hook-up. The electric company runs a line to the meter, and then the homeowners are responsible for their electricity from there. We were comfortable doing it ourselves, but if you aren’t you will have to pay an electrician to do the work for you. I don’t know what they charge, but I’m guessing it will be pricey.
We had a driveway put in also ($7500), so we can get on and off the land with our camper year-round. It cost way more than we anticipated, but it also has a large loop for easily driving our rig. You could do a strait driveway for half the cost or less, as our driveway is super long.
Our camper has a composting toilet, but RVs come standard with a black tank that needs to be emptied. Our septic system was expensive ($13,500) but it was also scaled for a three bedroom house, so if you were only going to have an RV and never expand for a house it may be slightly less.
Our total cost for full hook-ups was $29,700 + $1,700 (accessing land) = $31,400.
Budgeting for an RV Pad
So, how were we able to shell out $31K+ for a parking spot? At first, we took our time. We paid for the land and the initial $1700 in 2019. We had planned on doing the driveway and electric in 2020 and well in 2021, but 2020 was crazy for everyone and we ended up not getting any real work done on our land. We used our tax return in 2021 to put in our driveway and were going to use our savings to put in a well and electric in the fall. Since we have a composting toilet, a septic system wasn’t a priority for us. From there, the plan was to save up and use our future tax returns to improve the land and eventually build a house and a homestead.
I’ve already linked the post above, but our plans changed when we were offered a 100+ year old farmhouse. We were able to bundle some RV pad expenses into our bank loan, like drilling a well and bringing in electricity. Yes, I do mean offered. The family wanted the house gone, and it would have cost them $20K to haul it to the dump. So we saved them a big bill and they saved us quite a bit of money and months of work. While a house was in our future, a house this size this soon wasn’t expected. We got a bank loan, which we didn’t want to do but seriously, we could not have built anything on our land for less!
When we were looking into eventually building something, we figured between the house, the land, and the improvements it would be at least $150K. Even a tiny house would cost around $36K at the low end for just the tiny house, so we’d still have to bring in utilities. But with tiny houses becoming more luxury and less a real and needed solution to homelessness, tiny house appliances and materials are rising in cost, so $36K would only be possible with largely second-hand and salvaged materials. So we were technically homeless and this family had a spare house just lying around, this solution was a no-brainer for us.
I get it—rural families distributing houses is no basis for future planning and our story is rare. But I still thought sharing it with you along with real numbers might help you make some tough decisions. And if I can leave you with a piece of advice and encouragement it’s this: things will always cost more than you budgeted for but if you can make slow incremental changes one day you’ll look back and wonder how you ever doubted you would get this far. Seriously. When Seth and I first moved into a camper in 2017, the idea of owning land seemed impossible. And even though we are looking at being in a house of our own in just a matter of months, even if this house hadn’t been offered us we’d still have had an RV parking spot of our own with water and electricity and I can just see my 2017 green RVing self marveling at just how far we’ve come.