Thinking about moving to SE Tennessee...building a house, homeschooling etc...

[Sieren]

Hi everyone!

My husband and I are thinking of moving to somewhere in the mountains of SE TN...right now we are monitoring land in Cocke, Carter, Greene and Unicoi counties as possibilities.  We want to purchase around 20 acres of land with preferably some open area, some forest and some type of water (stream, spring, pond...).  We will be building an earthship home there ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship ), so it would need to be a county with few/no building restrictions (or just septic, I think?).  We will be homeschooling our future children, so somewhere homeschooling-friendly, would be awesome.  Also, we'd like to live in a rural area, but be withing driving distance (30-40min) of a decent sized, interesting, fun city with stuff to do like farmers market, artsy stuff, music, restaurants, etc.

Any suggestions for areas to look at?  I am so excited!  I think we've finally found the place for us after looking for awhile!  Of course, we do have to visit yet, but everything sounds like what we're looking for!

[seawitch]

Hiya. Are you still interested in this? We are contemplating the same exact thing, but we haven't narrowed down possible locations. But, I almost could have written your post word for word as to the location we're looking for. Nearish a big city but rural, homeschooling friendly, mountains of eastern TN, water feature... How cool. When are you guys thinking of relocating? We are waiting out for our house to sell which could take... umm.. a while... But then after that a house-hunting will we go. Maybe we'll be neighbors.

Oh, except we probably won't be building a house. We don't have the funds for that at the moment. That'll probably make our job of finding a site a little harder, as TN has a lot of land without houses on it.