Off-Grid Cabin on 550± Acres | Maine Real Estate

Morning folks, I'm Phil McPhail here and welcome back to United Country Lifestyle Properties Maine YouTube channel. Today I'm really excited to bring you on a quite an adventure we're going to take today. We're going to see an off grid cabin 550 plus or minus acres in eastern Maine. This property has a cabin, power supply, storage buildings, all kinds of creature comforts here you can live like you do at home. But you can be in the middle of 550 acres with an incredible view to the south past the Dump Keg Mountain. So come along with me. I'm going to show you all this property today. Hopefully this is the right one for you. Hey folks, we're, we're here at the property just want to show you this gate. The property starts right here at the gate. There's a there's a blue painted property line here right behind If you're not here with with me, show this to your real estate agent that you bring with you. Because once they have the code of this lock, and do remind them to bring something to thaw the lock in case it froze here in the wintertime. But this, this is kind of an ingenious little gate. And what it does, we've got a chain to tighten the chain up. They've got an old boat winch in here that connects on to the chain. This is the MacGyver stuff you find up here in the state of Maine. And then we tighten up the chain, just like so. So like I said, if you're not here with me, bring your agent show them this because they're going to need to know how to close this gate. And it's a little difficult to pull that chain tight without that. Hope that helps. Before we go look at the cabin, let me tell you a little bit about this location. We're located at 1218 Upper Dobbs Road in the town of Lakeville. Lakeville is a very low populated town. I think there's 50 or so residents in this town. One of the lowest tax rates in the state of Maine, probably one of the lowest tax rates for property tax in New England. From this off grid cabin, which we feel like we're in the middle of nowhere, we can't hear any cars, planes, trains or automobiles at all. We're about eight miles to the nearest service town, which would be Lee. Lee's got a gas station, restaurant, there's a small ski mountain there, there's a school there. Any major services you're going to want are going to be just under 20 miles away in the town of Lincoln. And Lincoln's got a hospital, car dealers, multiple restaurants, grocery stores, building supplies, everything you're going to need to live and enjoy your property while you're here. If you're looking to get out and go out for the night, 70 miles, just a little over an hour and 20 minutes is the city of Bangor. That's northern Maine's largest city. That's the nearest commercial airport. Multiple restaurants again, world class little city, about 35,000 people. And then Maine's largest city is just under 200 miles from here. That's the city of Portland. That's going to be about a three hour ride. And Boston is about 303 miles from this location. And that's a five hour drive right from this property. All right, let's go over and take a look now at the buildings here. The cabin itself is right here. This cabin is 16 feet by 26 feet. Plus it's got a six by 16 foot open porch here that's got a roof over it so you can stay out of the weather and enjoy this beautiful view of the mountain to the south. Over here, we've got a 20 foot shipping container. And that's locked up. We're not going to look in that. But if you've seen a shipping container, you've seen one, you've seen them all. That's a fairly new, great condition. On the back of the cabin here, I will show you this now. This is a five by eight storage area, but it also houses the pressure tank for the water supply from the drilled well. And it's easy in here to disconnect the water. So when you want to drain it for winter, you can easily do that right here. And you got a little extra room for storage. Plus your power supply from the generator we're going to look at here in a minute comes in to this section of the cabin. So over here, as I said, the generator, this is an eight by 10 shed. And we've got a diesel generator in here with a fuel tank right inside. There's extra room here for storage if you want a nice big wide double doors here to open up and access this building. And right over here is our drilled well. And we've got a lot of information folks I can share with you if we don't cover here, when this well was drilled, what kind of water supply it was putting out. But that's right here. And then back across the driveway where I was just standing here a minute ago, we've got the septic tank in the field over here. So and we have that design on file if you'd like to see that we can show you how this was set up. This was set up as a two bedroom septic design. And I believe we've got a chamber system and 1000 gallon concrete tank if I remember correctly, from the report. So let's go inside and take a look at the inside of the cabin. All right, let's go on and take a look at the camp before we go in. This is a really nice porch. You got room out here for your barbecue grill. It's six by 16. Beautiful view of the mountain as we saw earlier. And as you come into the cabin, come on in and check this place out. Close the store behind you. So we got an open living area. We've got a unique this is a gas powered refrigerator. If you're not familiar with those ask me I got one very similar to it in my cabin. We got a unique four burner gas stove here. Kitchen sink is all plumbed in right here. Over here we've got a small dining table. As you can see, and then there's a sofa over here. The only heat in this cabin is this unvented propane heater. And these are not made for year round living folks. So if you wanted to use this all winter long, you would want to put a vented heating LP direct vent heater or maybe put a wood stove in here somewhere. And then back here, come on back, we'll show you this. This is a one bedroom. And there's enough room for a couple of twin beds in here, a little bit of furniture. We got pine on the ceiling and panels on the walls. And let's go back out and we check out the bathroom. And this is a pretty nice feature. You're this far out in the woods. You know, everybody likes running water. So we got a shower stall in here, a sink and behind the door a flush and I'll let the cameraman go in and show you all of that. Probably wondering what does this cabin set on and we do have freezing cold temperatures here today. It was two degrees when I got up this morning. But the cabin is on a gravel pad. And it has concrete blocks set on those. So there's no, there's no foundation, no slab, it's a gravel pad with concrete posts, and they support the cabin. Alright, so I just pulled this ladder down. We do have a small loft up here for sleeping for extra company. So let's go up here and take a look. Okay, so there's not a lot of headroom up here in the center of the cabin, you can walk great spot for kids, we've got a bed where you're looking from now. And there's a room for a bed down here. If you didn't need bedroom space, it would make great storage. But this is a it's all insulated ceiling up here and pretty well open along the floor. Folks, before I change my clothes, we're going to jump on the land here want to give you a little tip if you're coming out here to look at this property or you're not coming with me and you're bringing your own buyers agent, make sure you have a torch. We've got a gate at the end of the road. It's a half a mile a driveway that accesses his cabin off the road that you get to this property from. And in the wintertime, we we often have trouble with locks and this one's frozen. I had to fire it to unlock it and it refroze. Now I need to fire it again to relock it. So just a little tip. If you're up here in Maine in the wintertime, you buy yourself a little cabin. This is one indispensable tool. They sell much smaller versions of this little thing. But the old Burns-O-Matic is my tool of choice in the back of my pickup. All right, I'm going to jump on I'm actually going to jump in some heavier boots and some warmer clothes. We're going to go for a walk on this land and show you some of the features of the land. All right, folks, I'm not sure you can see this, but we'll put it on the screen. But this is the whole property. We are right here. I'll blow this up. But the road, Access Road, Upper Dobson Road is out here. This is the camp lot and then we've got 510 additional acres. So this is a 40 acre lot plus 510 for 550 plus or minus acres. And as we scroll in, we're right here on the where this all these photo icons are at about 420 feet above sea level. This property, the topography of this land runs from about 260 feet down here along Rand Brook and we've got over 7,000 feet along Rand Brook. We'll talk about that a little later. The height of land is out here behind us kind of blocking the northern winds at 600 feet above sea level and we're down here at 420. So we're on a south facing ridgeline, beautiful spot to tuck a camp in here. And this yellow dotted line is about a 2500 foot driveway that comes in from Upper Dobson Road. Ultimate privacy at this location. So we're going to go jump on the land and walk you around. We're going to follow this ridge down. We'll try to get you down to Rand Brook. It is winter. We'll do the best we can with the time we got. So let's go for a walk. Folks, we just started down off the hill where the cabin is. And I don't know if you've ever watched my videos before, but I'm really amazed at what the glaciers did when they rolled down through this country dropping these big boulders. This is what we refer to as a glacial erratic. You don't know and you may already know, but as the glaciers were receding to the ocean, they dropped boulders like this all over the place. And I've seen some bigger ones than this, but this sucker right here is so big. It has been here for thousands of years. It's got trees and ground growing on top of it. We were walking down through the woods and I said, man, there's a cabin down there. But no, it's not a cabin. It's a great big square rock. And it's about nine to now it's probably down to the ground three or four feet. So it's probably 15 feet high. Pretty cool. Natural feature. There's a number of smaller boulders around here, but this one's pretty cool. We're gonna keep walking. All right, we're down here where the topography starts leveling off going out towards Ram Brook, which is off to our west. I'll tell you a little bit about that brook in case we can't get there today. This that brook is a very short brook, it kind of forms up in the wetlands that drain these hills right here and some springs that are feeding it. It runs in the Pasadumkeg River just south of us. And so this is the headwaters of the Pasadumkeg, which is a major tributary to the Penobscot River system. We've got a lot of wild brook trout in here. Occasionally you'll find landlocked salmon plus other species of fish. It's a beautiful canoe trip down the Pasadumkeg River. There are some carries that you'd have to carry around to get down to the Penobscot but beautiful area. As we're walking down here, once we're down in this lower level, this more level ground, what we're seeing here is we've got some red pine in here. We've got Norway spruce, we've got balsam fir, we've got some red maple. We have some white pine, yellow, gray and white birches. So we've got a nice mix of trees but this is primarily softwood down here in this lower section. It's very thick. There's a lot of sign we've seen a lot of snowshoe hare sign in here. So we're gonna pick our way westerly and see if we can get out to the open meadow, which would be that stream ram brook that runs through the property. It's not a fast moving stream here, it's going to be more of a slow water, flat water stream. Let's see if we can find it. Made it down here to the edge of ram brook, which is right here behind me. Unfortunately, as cold as it's been, it's completely frozen over. So you're not going to be able to see it. And we've had some flooding just before the cold weather. So there's water frozen. I'm standing on three or four inches ice right here. Not sure how deep it is. Hope not to find out. But this is the kind of country this is that runs down through there. We got a lot of the spruce bog kind of country where the ram brook rolls through. It's not going to be a pristine lakefront setting here, folks. This is wildlife habitat at its best. We've seen moose in here, deer tracks, snowshoe hare. It's it's a beautiful wetland if you like to see that. And that does run through the center of the law. We've got high ground on both sides, really high up by the cabin. I was trying to see if I could see it on the mountain behind us, but I can't. So we're going to make our way back up on the hill and show you a little more of the forest up there. Go out and show you the road front and wrap this up for you today. All right, folks, we made it back out of that thicket that went down to the brook. You know, a little bit of time exploring this, cut yourself a nice trail down there. That would be ideal. But this is my first big day walking this property. I've been on it a couple of times already. But the snow makes it a little tough to see. While we follow this trail back out to the cabin, let me tell you a little bit about this area. You know, Lakeville is named Lakeville because of all the lakes here. And this is on Upper Dobsie Road or Upper Dobsis Road, which is named after Sissela Dobsis Lake or more specifically, Upper Sissela Dobsis Lake, which is just a little bit east of us here. And that lake flows into Big Sissela Dobsis Lake, also known as Lower. That's a lake that's nearly 10 miles long. There's Junior Lake, Scraggly Lake, Bottle Lake, Keg Lake, Pug Lakes, Spalding Pond, Duck Lake and more. I can't remember them all. Actually, I probably could if I thought about it. But anyway, they're all in this town. Like I said earlier, this town has a low population, doesn't provide a lot of public service. However, the last known tax rate was $3.90 a thousand, which is one of the cheapest in Maine. I think it was the fifth cheapest last I looked. And definitely lower than most of New England. What else is around here? Well, the Downey Slakes Community Forest is right nearby 57,000 acres of conserved land open for hunting, fishing, hiking, boating. What else can you do there? Just sightseeing, whatever you want to do. Beautiful piece. And the newest part of that is about 2000 acres on Sissela Dobsis Lake, just a few miles down the road from this property. So a lot of conservation land in the area. Let's see, what else? Canadian border. In about an hour, a little over an hour from here probably you can be Calais, Maine, St. Stephen, New Brunswick border crossing and head right across the Trans Canada Highway. Check out the Bay of Fundy area. That's an easy day trip from this location. If you like ATV and snowmobile riding, this area through Lakeville has hundreds of miles of improved and maintained trails by clubs. It's a beautiful area to ride. It doesn't get the traffic that some more popular places in Maine get. Grand Lake Stream down the road, you can actually cut down through the woods from this location and end up in the village at the end of a very long logging trail. And that's Maine's kind of premier, one of Maine's premier landlocked salmon fisheries, fly fishing only in that stream. Beautiful, beautiful place. So there's a lot to do up here. You can see this changing topography on this lot. This is a great lot if you like to hunt deer, bear, get yourself a moose tag for this region. There's moose habitat here. Beautiful, beautiful area. So we're going to keep walking and we'll get up on the driveway here shortly and we'll show you a few more features of the property. Thanks for taking the tour with us today, folks. And before we wrap this up, don't forget, don't forget, like, share and subscribe to our channel. Hit all those notifications when you hit that bell down there. Turn them all on. I know a lot of you call me and say, hey, I missed that last video before it sold. What happened? Well, their notifications weren't on, so they didn't get a chance to see it before we sold it. So let's wrap this up. What do we got here? We got 550 plus or minus acres. Beautiful piece of land, all wooded land except for the open meadow and the bog down along the edge of rambrook elevations from 260 to 600 feet above sea level. We've got this nice little cabin here with a beautiful southern view. We got something we missed to show you there was some timbers over here for our solar power rack. If you ever want to put one in, it's all pressure treated. Those will stay with the property. 16 by 26 cabin with this six foot by 16 porch I'm sitting on right now. We got that 20 foot storage shipping container, an eight by 10 generator shed plus a five by eight storage in the back of the cabin. We got a drilled well septic man I'm telling you this is peaceful folks. If you're looking to get away from everything. I haven't seen a nicer place to do it for the money price on this property $525,000 the taxes are less than 800 bucks a year if you can believe that 550 acres in the cabin with all these improvements under $800 a year taxes. If you want to come take a tour of this property and give me a call at 207-290-0372 be happy to come up, walk you through the woods show you this cabin help you find your little piece of Maine. Looking forward to the call