Moving to Ohio (a state we know nothing about)

Good morning everybody,
A couple weeks ago my husband was given an option at his job: Stay at the current location in the position he's in (a good position, but he's gone as far as he can go. Any upward movement would only happen if the current area manager decided to quit, which won't happen for a very long time), or become an area manager at the new location they're building. Area manager comes with a massive raise, more raises every six months, steadier hours, the ability to hire his own guys, basically it's a promotion that will take a dead-end job in an industry my husband likes and turn it into a dream job.

EXCEPT

The move will take us from rural south western Virginia, the beautiful Appalachian mountains we've both been born and raised in, and into central Ohio. New Albany specifically, which is basically part of Columbus (as it appears on Google maps anyway). We know nothing about Ohio, and certainly nothing about flat flat central Ohio. In our current place, we are just months away from starting a home build on a nice 20 acre property with rolling south facing slopes, some pasture, lots of forest, and a reliable spring that's never stopped running since my husband's granddaddy discovered it back in the 40's.

Here's the question: is there any one in the central-ish region of Ohio that knows of good places to buy? Our home buying budget (sad we have to buy, since we were getting ready to build our own little cordwood cabin) is about 350k. We were hoping for a plot the same size- 15 to 20 acres, but it appears most of the areas around New Albany (up to an hour away!) The most we can hope for is maybe five with a house already on it that isn't falling apart. We wanted to have 2 dairy cows plus their calves, 10-15 goats, same number of sheep, a few weaner pigs every year, ducks and rabbits and chickens, a garden big enough to feed our family of four (soon to be five), an orchard filled with groves and lots of different fruit trees....the works. Obviously we can't have it all at once no matter where we are, but we were hoping for the space to grow to that size.

So I guess first question is "where the heck is the land in central Ohio? Does anyone know of anything available within an hour of New Albany/Columbus?" Second question is "We know nothing about the fertility in Ohio, how much CAN we have if we end up getting stuck on five acres?"

Ps. This move is slated to happen between June and August of next year, to keep from uprooting the kids in the middle of the school year. So we have some time but not tons of it

Thank you all so much for your help

Oh! I forgot to say, we wanted the extra space so we could also grow most of the food for the animals, we want to limit outside purchases as much as possible, both from a money standpoint and an environmental standpoint. We'd like to limit the carbon outputs of transportation as much as possible, plus get to a point where the 'stead at least pays for itself. Hard to do that if you're buying in tons of feed...

I just don't know. It's looking like we are having to choose between our food/sales goals (number of animals, size of garden) and buying in food and I'm not sure which way we should swing. Basically the plan was to grow double what we needed of everything, and sell to pay for what we ate, not to make a profit but to make our net costs zero. Can we do that if we're buying tons and tons of hay for all these animals? I don't know. I guess just looking for advice in navigating this (good opportunity) curve ball life threw us

i haven’t spent much time in ohio for a few years decades now, but the area around lancaster (~45 min. south of new albany), i remember as being slightly rolling-hilly and full of small farms. some local amish communities. generally the area about that distance south of columbus is where you’ll start getting a little bit of topography.

Thank you!
So do you think we should focus our efforts to the south/southeast portion of the 1-hour radius around Columbus?
Also obviously thinks may have changed since you've been there, but do you know of any areas we should avoid? (That may have intense local regulation or poor ground water or anything like that?)

it’s a place to start, anyway! sadly, i won’t be much help re: the other stuff.

That's okay, I still appreciate the heading!

South, South-east has the more hilly terrain in Ohio and a little in the East side. North and West is flat.
i dont know about the house prices that side of Columbus but i know New Albany can be a little expensive.
East of Columbus the prices are much cheaper except for Dublin area.

As a kid, my parents moved around a lot, we even lived in Mexico at one time.

Since we sold our homestead, dear hubby and I have lived in a few various states.

If I were in this position, I would try to stay less than an hour from dear hubby's job.  

What we did when we were looking for our homestead was to draw a circle on a map so everything in the circle was less than one hour from our jobs.

Then I looked at land prices within that circle.

Next, I looked at which area would work best for us, our kids, and our financial aspects. That is where we choose to buy.

I would also suggest getting to know the area if I could by visiting.

I would also suggest finding a good real estate agent to represent you and show you various properties that are not his listings.

You have gotten some nice sounding recommendation so I hope one of these will work out for you.

Hi,  I know almost nothing about the specifics of Ohio. There is a national forest south of Columbus, the city is quite big and the suburbs sprawling for mid west states. Wish I could help you more.

I think it will be a big culture shock to you and your family. You mentioned being born and raised where you are, and I assume you have family there. If you move to Ohio do you have family and other people to support you who live in Ohio?  I assume you and your husband have done some research to find out how much more work he will have to do in his climb up the ladder, and how much less time he will have with you and the kids and animals.

I don't want this to sound negative. My real dream job was considered low and unimportant. But I thought my dream was to be more and move up. The pay was not great, until I started getting promoted and received awards which led to higher paying positions. My dream of climbing the ladder turned nightmarish, with little time for my family. After seven years of the climb I quit, got a lowly dream job where I could spend more time with the ones I love.

What I am trying to say is know your true self and priorities before jumping into the new adventure. Sometimes staying put and slowly building where you are is the dream come true. Sometimes it is something totally different with Big moves.

Good Luck and God bless you  

Hi, I live in Wayne county Ohio. We are in an agriculture area.  The corporates keep out bidding us to 28-29 thousand and acre. I have had many friends move closer to Columbus to pursue better pay.  Most end up in developments for between 4-500 hundred thousand.  The 20 acre plot has been out of my friends budgets since about 2000.  They tend to pay higher taxes.  If my wife didn't have her masters plus 20 for teaching in Ohio we would be in South Dakota or Wyoming.

My suggestion is to forget about the money & career aspects for the time being & take a road trip up there first to get a feel for the place. Then your decision might be much easier.

One thing you can notice by just looking at a satellite map of Ohio is the highest concentration of people are along a band that runs in an S shape from Cleveland to Cincinnati, with Columbus in the middle. It's pretty easy to see in summer that it's a very defined grey made by the high concentration of near endless suburbs & yards, as opposed to forests. And, it's one of the most heavily populated states in the country, so land prices can be a bit excessive. In some places, you might be able to find what you're looking for for half of what you're asking & in others it won't do much of anything. Suburbs are likely the only areas where you would have an issue with people telling you what your own property can & can not contain. Ohio's generally pretty lax on that, since so much of that land is privately owned to the point where the EPA & Department of Wildlife rarely seem to know what's going on with the state ecologically & just do cleanup efforts near parks & places viable for eco-tourism, public education & monitor locally for large scale environmental disasters, since they can't get on individual peoples' land without permission & most of the country folk are closed off for one reason or another & really don't like uninvited visitors they don't know. At least, they seem to have always been like that in my area, northeast Ohio. You'll find most of eastern & southern Ohio is more like West Virginia/ Appalachia than anything in almost every regard, just with Midwestern slang & their own accent. Most of the large scale farmland is in western Ohio. In my experience, large farms in eastern Ohio are rare. Often you get small scale farms, or farms buying up random parcels of land all over the area to use for different purposes. The people who lived across the street from us growing up grew corn & apples & raised cows on their main property, then owned another field a quarter mile down the road where they grew hay, another parcel at the end of the block in the other direction where they grew soy beans & a third parcel a house away from us on our side of the road as a backup, which they rarely ever used for anything, it seems like.

Hey everybody!
First of all I am so sorry for not responding to each of you, for some reason after the first couple of comments, I stopped getting notified about new replies! I thought my thread went dead!
Secondly thank you all so much for your wealth of information!

Phil, you backed up what some other people have said too, it's looking like the area from 3'o'clock to maybe 5:30/6'o'clock around Columbus is where everyone is suggesting we maintain our search! So thank you :)

Anne, thanks for the good idea. We use Zillow, so we tried drawing our own little search area instead of searching by town or county, made things a lot easier to look at all at once and compare areas!

Arthur, you're right it probably will be a big culture shock. We're used to a tight community in the Appalachians, the kind of place where if you aren't related to someone, you still know them, and their parents, and their grandparents. We lived in Northern Virginia, near DC, for a while, and it was...uncomfortable. Too city, and only had one small chunk of family. Thankfully, there will also be a small chunk of family in Ohio too, I have three cousins (and their spouses and kids) that all live in the Zanesville area so at least we won't be TOTALLY alone. But I never want to live in suburbia/outside a big city again. My husband's prospective position *in theory* has very rigid with no or very little overtime, 6am-2pm, but I suppose time will tell the reality on that front. If it stays true to that, it would be perfect for our family and the way our days are laid out, he would be home around the same time as the kids, and get the whole of the afternoon and evening with us. Early bed time to validate getting up at 4:30, but that's an easy tradeoff. Thank you very very much for your concern, it is definately something we will keep in mind.

Christopher, I understand Dakota or Wyoming. Wyoming is actually my dream state too, with Idaho as a close second. Although the current drought in the far Midwest concerns me. Do you know of any areas where there are still small farm communities? Even if the price tag is a little higher (not ridiculously so, though), a nice 20 acre piece with a crappy trailer we can live in until we build a cordwood home would be just fine. Someone else suggested Lancaster, if you have more recent experience can you confirm or reject that? Again thank you so much for the info, and again definately something for us to watch out for.

Mike, my husband will be going up there one week every month starting in January until we make the move. He'll have free time to explore (they're just negotiating contracts at the moment, no real work), so hopefully he can get a better idea of the area (and where might be nice to focus our search.) Do you have any recommendations on areas he definately shouldn't miss while he's up there? Thanks!

D Tucholske, that swath of grey is exactly what we're trying to avoid :( we were hoping if we found a property of any size, it would be far enough away from the urban sprawl. Sad about the environmental efforts too. Part of me is happy for the lazie-fare (spelling?) Hands-off attitude, but part of me is sad because it means big farms are wrecking the resources. It's a wierd trade off how small do you think we have to go to be able to find something in our budget, while still being big enough to be well away from the suburbans bullcrap? I hope we won't have to do the satellite farm thing, that sounds like a big headache, but I could be wrong!

Thank you all so much again :)

I guess skew more to the southeastern corner, if you can. That's the least populated part of the state & the most ecologically intact. The only issue is southern Ohio's wild boar problem. I really have no idea how far north they've gotten since crossing into the state from the south.

I don't really know anything else, but I imagine the area around Columbus would be one of the more expensive parts of the state to live in, since it's the only area of Ohio whose population has been growing. Everywhere else, it's been shrinking.

2 yrs later I am reading this.  I ended up in Southern Ohio in Greenfield.  Very nice farm country, rolling hills and small mountain range near by.  Moving from CA.

Welcome to Ohio. I play in the mud a lot here. The southeast is prettiest but the northeast is where I call home. Come build with us some time.
--uncle mud