Definitely verify the fracking issue.
Well or city water? If well, I'd be concerned about contamination from drilling.
How much of the 5 acres gets good sun or would it need clearing to make it farmable? Keeping some of it wooded is nice, for firewood and habitat for beneficials, but you need sun for edibles.
Depending on rent prices in the area, why not park a trailer on the land instead? Would make it a lot easier to get time in on the construction. Rural did that, I know, so if she chimes in that'd be cool.
I didn't just chime, I wrote a novel. Or perhaps a series of novels. Anyway...
Our trailer was already there, listed as uninhabitable in a rural county where I had not idea such a term even existed! It's a good route if you're allowed to put a trailer (or a "workshop" or "garage" -- that's what Spork and spouse lived in for several years). Don't get a 40-year old trailer, though. Twenty is probably reasonable, though if we hadn't had the trailer already, we might well have lived in the barn we put up to shelter building supplies. It's a pretty good model if you don't mind really roughing it, and it would be more structurally sound than our trailer was. If you can find a way to live on the property, then you can put every cent that would have gone to rent toward building supplies.
Here's a case in point about the time and effort, though: I was actually reassuring my husband this evening. We both went back to school full-time for the fall today, and he's been stewing a bit over not getting more done this summer. I told him not to worry and pointed out that this summer has been the first opportunity we've had to
live since the spring of 2009. All the time in between has been building and working.
That said, we built our house for right at $80,000, which includes the purchase of a very used backhoe to dig the foundation and push in the driveway. But you get the idea there of how much we did ourselves -- even digging the foundation. Also, my father did a hell of a lot of the work, staying here on our property in a travel trailer four days a week and going home for three days for a stretch of several months -- his four days included the weekends so that he and my husband together could do the jobs that required two men.
Theres a thing i didn't fully expect: Unless you are much bigger and stronger than I am, you will also come to the humbling realization of your own physical limitations. I can't carry a truss up a ladder. Just not possible. I can't even lift up my the end to my husband once he's carried the heavy end up the ladder. That was a two-
man job, given our available labor pool. The single woman around was useless in that scenario. There were many such, actually (I also couldn't reach the pedals on the backhoe). I lined up summer work for pay to buy more supplies, cooked big meals to feed men who'd been working all day when I got home, and stirred up a lot of Gatorade (the powder is much cheaper than premix).
Would I do it again? In a heartbeat, but only if we could be the age we were when we started in 2009. We're at a point where the extra five years could make the difference between getting stronger and serious injury, and my father? If he didn't come from an obscenely long-lived family, he'd have been at "way too old" when we started.
It's that sort of project. You will get older doing it, maybe faster than the years you spend doing it. But you get stronger too. It will take years. It will take twice as many years as you think it will.
Oh. A big thing. The house will never be "finished." There are still things my father needs to do on the first house he built (my parents' home), uncomfortably close to fifty years ago now.
Check on the drilling. That's big. Be sure. Check on the water source if you don't know. Check on every damn thing. Checking now is free, and finding out when it's too late about whatever-it-is could ruin you.
Search your soul, and do soul- searching with your husband. Do you want to live in that area forever? Are you sure you can be happy with only five acres? With that many acres? If your children, assuming you have them, move far away when they grow up, are you going to want to follow them? If you can't be sure on those questions, you probably don't want to take this on.
Where will the time you need to do the work come from? My husband teaches, so summers were building time. But weekends, every weekend, were too. And summers sound nice but aren't. One particularly vivid memory is of me, my husband, and my father frantically hammering down black synthetic underlayment in 105 degree heat in the sun (sitting on black stuff, remember), trying desperately to get the roof dried in before the thunderstorm we could see approaching over the next mountain reached us (we made it, but we didn't have time at the end to stop to drink when health and sanity required it, and I didn't have time to stop to do anything about it when I broke my middle finger with a hammer blow, just used the index until we got it done, then taped it up while the rain fell).
It's mostly miserable. It's worth it if it's worth it to you, if that makes any sense.
Do you or your husband have any building experience? If you don't, you run a real risk of coming out of this, not with a life-changing experience of mostly awfulness and a dream realized on the other end. If you have no experience at all, it's frankly more likely you'll get the awful and lose the dream in the end for one reason or another.
How solid is your marriage? If there's any real point of friction, this is a stressful enough thing that it may well split you apart, which would of course be the end of building a house, too.
If you do decide to go forward, I strongly suggest designing it for accessibility and aging in place, because you won't be willing to move out when you are old and frail.
Think about it, a lot. Talk about it. Don't let this particular piece of land that's for sale force you to rush at all. More land will be for sale later, and it's much, much more important to be sure. Even if you think this is a great, one-time bargain. Maybe especially in that case.