Overgrown Lot in Kountze, TX

What to do right now

1. 1Before anyone cuts a path in, find out whether the lot touches a Big Thicket National Preserve unit or Village Creek bottom, and call Texas811. Nothing inside a preserve line or a wet bottom gets cut until it is understood, any pipeline marker or lease road on the tract gets its operator on the phone before a bucket touches dirt, and an old well or cellar from a timber camp is flagged rather than driven over.
2. 2Walk it with someone who knows the property and decide how much you actually want open. The envelope, the yard, the drive and the septic area need clearing. The rest usually does better mulched under the canopy, and the estimate follows that decision.
3. 3Have the plat, the deed and your surveyor's drawing ready. On timber ground the pins are often near old firebreaks and logging roads, and an unmarked or disputed line, especially along a preserve boundary, goes to your surveyor first.
4. 4Ask whether the tract was ever logged. A cut-over lot has a stump field under the regrowth, which changes the price and the method more than the acreage does.
5. 5Have the septic designer look at the ground before the clearing plan is fixed, because the drain field location constrains where the house can sit and the machine has to stay off it once it is chosen.

Why this happens in Kountze, TX

Kountze sits about twenty-three miles north of Beaumont on Highway 69, the seat of Hardin County and the headquarters town of Big Thicket National Preserve. The lots around it are timber, hunting ground and rural homesites rather than subdivision, on sandier uplands that drain better than the coastal clay and carry a machine more of the year, with Village Creek and its tributaries running through the bottomland on the way to the Neches. The species mix is dense mixed hardwood and pine, and much of the country has been through commercial forestry at least once. Preserve units and corridors sit beside a fair number of private tracts. Hunting and recreational property is the dominant use, so many overgrown lots here are opened for lanes, plots and a camp rather than a house, and mulched ground holds open here longer than it does anywhere near the coast.