Shortly after we bought the land, we started taking stock of everything that needed fixing, clearing, widening or general needed to be changed. Near the top of the list was the driveway.
Calling it a driveway feels a bit weird — it was more of a long, narrow forest road that wound a few hundred metres from the municipal road and then pitched sharply upward into the main camp area. The incline was steep enough to make you lean forward instinctively, and halfway up there was a bump so abrupt it threatned to take the oil pan off any vehicle that wasn’t raised. On one side, a slab of bedrock squeezed the path into less than a single lane. If we ever wanted to get vehicles in and out reliably — or one day bring in a camper — we needed the whole thing widened, stabilized, and, ideally, less dangerous.
At first we assumed we’d tackle it the same way we’d approached everything else on the property: with brute force and a bunch of shovels. However, we soon realized that that approach would have taken far too long.
We brought someone in to quote the work with a small tractor. It seemed like a low-stakes way to learn how much this kind of thing cost without wandering into the world of permits, excavators, and budget-destroying machinery. After a quick walk of the hill, he explained that the job was going to be far more effort than his tractor could manage quickly — and that paying his hourly rate to watch it struggle probably wasn’t in anyone’s best interest.
But then he surprised us. Instead of taking the job, he offered to sell us the tractor. The tractor could do it, but just not as fast as you’d want from a commercial job.
It was a 2020 Kubota BX23S with a few implements, and the price — $24,000 — genuinely surprised me. I didn’t think a “small tractor” could cost that much but after a couple of evenings of research, I realized that not only was the price reasonable… tractors are just expensive. This small one might be $24,000 but the next bump up would probably double the price.
I told him I’d think about it, and over the next few days I went back to the hill with a shovel and a rake, chipping away at the soil like someone trying to sculpt a mountain with a spoon. That’s when the math finally clicked into place.
The main point is that we weren’t living on the land. We were driving up Friday evenings, staying through Saturday, and heading home Sunday morning. Realistically, each visit gave us one good working day. The round-trip drive was two to three and a half hours for each of us - each way. With that amount of time and that amount of work, the driveway alone could easily become a a 5 year long project.
So I bought the tractor.
Once we had it, we used it for everything: digging out stumps, trenching, cutting new ditches, loading and moving dirt for the septic, grading the driveway, leveling campsites, clearing brush with a bush hog, pushing snow in winter. Most recently we added a PTO-powered wood chipper, which has already transformed piles of branches into trail-ready chips instead of tick-friendly brush heaps.
Looking back, buying the tractor has probably been the single best purchase we’ve made for the property and helped us learn a lesson early on:
Can we afford to spend our limited time on this, or is it worth spending the money to move things along faster?
(Of course, we’re not out here buying skid steers and excavators or dropping tens of thousands of dollars all the time!)