If you don't already have a current boundary survey, you should get one before you do anything. If there is any chance that part of the property is in a flood zone, instruct the surveyor to include it on the plat.

Stake out the center of the spot you have in mind for the house site. Instruct the surveyor to indicate it on the plat. Having it on the plat may or may not be useful in the future, but it won't hurt anything and the extra cost, if any, will be inconsequential.

In our case, our having the proposed house site on the plat was enough for our lender to determine that we did not need a flood certificate, even though part of the property is in a flood zone.

You probably don't need to clear anything for the surveyor. They are used to brush and will deal with it themselves, if need be. Modern equipment allows the survey team to move in other than straight lines, so they can go around obstacles in a lot of cases.

Your next step will depend on the land itself, local conditions and customs, and building regulations in your jurisdiction. You will need to talk to local people to research this area. A good place to start is your local building officials.

In our case, we partially cleared (thinned) the potential building site ourselves. Once we determined that was where we wanted the house, I hired an excavator to push a driveway in and clear the building site.

Once it was cleared we brought candidate builders out to see the site, handed them a set of plans, and asked for proposals. The builder we selected took it from there.

Power, water/well, and sewage/septic considerations are first. If getting power to your lot is a 100K prospect, then that may deem the lot "unbuildable". Same with water/well. How far down will you have to drill? What type of septic is being approved these days? If you have to have a leach field, where can that go on your lot and how will that impact where a house can go? There's a LOT of research about those issues that needs to be answered before you even start to think about actual building.

First as creekside said you *have* to be sure of the boundaries if you don't already have them surveyed. Then as lwo said you have to determine about running power - how far off the road (how long a driveway) do you plan? Contact the electric company and see what they charge - you may want your house closer to the road than originally planned, over a certain distance you will require a transformer (and of course more digging/conduit or poles).

Then once you have an idea of how long the driveway will be, you can walk with engineer to determine where best to site the house - he should be able to give you an idea of suitable sites (avoiding ledge, wetlands, etc.) though sometimes ledge can lurk where you least expect it (ask me how I know!). He'll do the perc tests to find out where best to put the septic and what design will have to be. You may also have to hire a soil scientist and a surveyor to then go out and mark wetlands and proposed foundation/septic/driveway locations to bring to planning and zoning and/or wetlands commission. Of course you have to have an idea in mind of what the foundation size and shape will be.

Although our preliminary site plan showed we were more than required distance from stream, our engineer *and* soil scientist as well as DH had to attend wetlands commission meeting (at $100/hr each, they got to us at the end of the meeting). Be prepared to pay $$$ and build in plenty of time for delays. B/c the commission only meets once per month and we had an ice storm the day in Feb they planned to meet, we did not get reviewed until March meeting, and we could not start clearing land until we got their approval so we lost a month.

Once we had the site cleared and started digging we hit ledge and had to move the house (took some doing, since we couldn't change approved septic site w/o losing even more time), clear more, dig and pray the new location would allow us to have full 9ft basement. Since we were doing modular builder said we couldn't change house/garage plans w/o impacting schedule, we had to keep all windows, garage orientation the same, so tried to shift foundation SW without changing passive solar design/orientation. This from 100 miles away, looking at site plan while on the phone with excavator! So we ended up with 3ft door walkout on gable end, 4ft change in elevation, instead of 11ft drop with walkout (bigger door) in back. At least I was GCing all the sitework myself so we could change the foundation plan and the driveway length/curve.

As far as well, our driller said you never know what you're going to find until you start drilling. Be prepared for cost overruns there. Our neighbor's well produces so much he can't use it fast enough (with 2 teenage girls!), he had to put in an overflow. We took 3 tries to find decent amount of water (used other 2 wells for geothermal), then we had to hydrofracture. GT wells are 279ft each and water is over 500ft.

It took us months to get zoning approval. There had to be a survey which included borings and we had to cut down 4 trees so there would be good visibility to pull out from our new driveway onto the road. Lots of $$$ to the utility company to run gas and electric to our house plus $$$$ for sewage lines and a grinder pump.