The northern Wisconsin lake lot my wife and I bought last December came with a completed soil evaluation and with county health department approval for a conventional septic system. It turns out that doesn’t mean installing a system will be easy. A number of factors complicate the project.

When we bought the lot last December, I promised to share our experience as onsite system customers. As I write this early on a Monday, I am planning to drive three hours north in the evening, stay the night in a travel trailer we have parked on the lot, and meet with the installer, soil tester and homebuilder in the morning.

We’re working with an installer subcontracting for the builder — it seemed simpler that way given the travel distance. I do expect to observe the installation, and in the morning I’ll watch the digging of a new soil test pit, and perhaps two or three. Did I mention that there are complications?

Wooded hillside

The lot, on the lake where we have taken rented-cottage vacations with our kids for the past 20 years, is fully wooded with mostly red oaks, a number of hemlocks, several stately white pines, a birch here and there, and other trees I haven’t inventoried.

It also has a steep slope down to the water. How steep? Well, a walk up the hill from the lake leaves this 57-year-old, in pretty good physical shape, with a thumping heart. We certainly need to cut some stairs into the hill to make the climb easier, and we’ll need an above-grade stairway at the waterfront, where the slope is most severe.

The lot is 100 feet wide. There are, of course, 10-foot setbacks from the side property lines. The property is about 200 feet deep, but the county shoreland zoning law specifies a 75-foot setback for any structure from the lake’s ordinary high-water mark, and a setback of 50 feet for the drainfield.

The drainfield also must be at least 10 feet from the cottage we build, and we want to leave room between the cottage and the town road so that we can keep the semi-circle driveway that’s already in place. The lot to the left of ours has a cottage with a well that requires a 50-foot separation from the drainfield.

And then there’s the matter of preserving trees. There isn’t much point in having a wooded lot if you’re just going to clear-cut it. So you can see that there are issues in placing both a cottage where we want it and a septic system where we need it.

Keeping trees

Some weeks ago, my wife and I took four little red flags supplied by the builder and crudely marked the corners of what we consider the ideal cottage location. It’s toward the top of the hill, in a spot where the trees are thin and relatively few would need to be cut.

Unfortunately, a cottage built on that spot would come too close to the spot where the county-approved soil test hole was dug. So we have a choice: Move the house farther back up the hill — to where it would encroach on the driveway — or move the drainfield farther down. Actually, it appears a little of both may be necessary.

Hence the soil test I will observe in the morning. The installer will dig a test pit on a relatively flat portion that runs across the lot, parallel to the lakefront. If the soil is suitable, he’ll eventually install a slender drainfield there (about 10 feet wide by 66 feet long), big enough for a three-bedroom home, though we plan a two-bedroom cottage.

And if the soil on that flat portion is not suitable? Well, then we’re faced with moving the house back toward the road and rethinking the driveway. Of course we also need to set aside space for a detached garage we might want someday.

Or Plan C?

If the soil test farther down the slope doesn’t work out — or maybe even if it does — there could be another spot for the drainfield. That’s at the top of the slope, to the left of the house location as you face the water.

It’s a relatively flat area, close to the side property line. It may or may not be big enough. And using it would mean removing some trees that, even though they are on our side of the line, the owner of the cottage next door might rather not see cut down. We want to be good neighbors. At any rate, most likely, we’ll have a test pit dug there. If that site passes the soil test, then maybe we can build on our preferred spot after all.

So tomorrow will be an interesting day. Quite possibly we’ll be left with options that fall short of our ideal scenario. And if so, we’ll need to make accommodations. I’ll report on the results in a future column.