Buying a plot of land is the first major step when building your own home — and it can come with surprises. In this post, I’m sharing how we found (and cleaned up!) our future home site, including a broken water pipe, a mountain of debris, and how we prepared the land for our prefab house.
April 25th, 2016 — Mr. Right and I officially became plot owners! Hooray — we finally had a place to build our home! The plot came with a stork’s nest, plus existing water, sewage, and electricity connections — a huge bonus. The only catch, which we discovered later, was that the water pipe had been cut about 20 meters before reaching our land. (We’ll come back to that little drama later.)
The Unexpected Cleanup Before We Could Start Building
At first, the plot looked like a bomb crater — literally. There was a huge hole! Apparently, a manure storage pit used to sit there, which meant the ground level was much lower than the surrounding plots. The previous owner had pushed the fertile topsoil to the back corner, planning to level it out again after the foundation was filled in.
As you can see from the photo, the lot included brush, a “pond,” and a roughly 3-meter-high soil mound. Some coarse fill (like leftover concrete chunks and bricks from construction) had already been dumped there, but there was still a lot to do. The bigger issue? For some reason, neighbors had been using the plot as a dumping ground — old bottles, boots, broken toys, garden waste… you name it. It took us several days to collect all the junk and bag up the garden debris and leaves from the future house site.
Mr. Right also spent several days cutting down what looked like a small patch of brush. Judging by the number of wheelbarrow loads of branches and small trees we pulled out, it was anything but small.
How We Prepped the Plot for Building
Once the site was cleared, trucks began hauling in finer fill — around 500 tons of crushed concrete from a demolished department store.
We compacted the material with sand using a soil compactor until the future house pad was nice and firm. For the rest of the yard slopes and transitions, we didn’t want to waste the “good stuff,” so we’ll use cheaper material later.
While doing the filling, we also laid down drainage pipes, extended the sewer line to the house, and started investigating the broken water pipe. After some detective work, we discovered the break was near the neighbor’s shed. No one knows exactly what happened, but we had some theories. Each plot is supposed to have its own pipe connection at the edge, but our neighbor had accidentally connected their water system to ours — and somewhere in the process, our connection got cut off.
Long story short: they’ve been using our water line, and we’ve had none.
We did something unexpected
It was an awkward situation to solve. But in a very un-Estonian move, we went and actually talked to the neighbor! Turns out they’re incredibly friendly (we already suspected that, but now it’s confirmed), and they were happy to help. They had no idea what had happened during construction.
The real problem? Fixing the pipe means digging a large hole under their shed. That means either tearing it down, relocating it, or propping it up during digging — and waiting for dry weather so the soil doesn’t collapse. We chose the last option, since the whole situation was embarrassing enough already — and I really didn’t want the guilt of demolishing someone’s shed. 😅
So for now, we wait for dry weather. In the meantime, the neighbors are generously sharing their water with us — so nobody has to go without.
If you missed how we ended up deciding to build a house in the first place, you can catch up on that story here.
