All the trees are down!

I came home from school one day to find that Seth had a field day with the chainsaw. :) He took the trees down before I could get a picture of them up and blooming, but ah well. Here is the state of chaos I came home to a few weeks ago:



and


The flowering trees that were on the right were pretty, and if there were only one white one I probably would have kept it. The yard was just too filled and messy and unkempt for me to want to keep anything. The Christmas tree you see downed on the left definitely had to go. The tall Dr. Suess tree the ladder is leaning against was another definite gotta-go. Trees had been trimmed all weird and sideways and upwards, planted in awkward random places, run into with lawn mowers, etc. So everything was cut down.




Thank you Frank for lending us your chainsaw!!!!

All the trimmings stayed in the front yard until that Saturday when we borrowed Sharon's truck to haul it to the city landfill place. The front yard now looks a LOT better opened up. We're still going to work on the front landscaping, but it's better for now.




You can see the azaleas in front, which are pretty when in bloom (although I'd rather have white than pink against the brick house). I'm still going to eventually replace them with regular evergreen bushes that are a bit more shaped and formal. And we're going to eventually put up a small brick retaining wall even with the front step, maybe with small brick pillars on either side. I don't know what other plants I want in the front, but this is a good start.

This time, Seth cut down a tree

I don't know why, but one afternoon Seth decided to just up and cut down a tree. It was the tree bordering the yard on the side, and I think the neighbor was nervous that we would drop the tree onto her house, but it came down successfully into our yard.

You can see Seth and Justin's very experienced plan of cutting down the tree. :) Justin had a rope, pulling on the tree towards the yard, and Seth was cutting it down little by little. He made sure to cut the trunk in such a way that it fell towards the yard, too. Plus, their highly sophisticated tools of a string and a reciprocating saw. (we're hopefully going to borrow Frank's chainsaw for the other trees).

Well, they got the tree down, but then had to get the trunk down. They took to it with the neighbor's sledgehammer/axe thing, and some more cuts with our saw, plus the neighbors' tree-cutting hand saws.



It eventually came down to this level:

So now we have a big hole with a stump in our yard. Our landscaping jobs are superb.

If you look closely, you can see the chisel that Seth got stuck in the stump:
We'll eventually cut out the majority of the stump, and then grind it down and fill in the hole.

Earlier today we wrapped up the branches, and we'll leave them out Tuesday for the city to pick up to turn into mulch.

Hopefully, now that the weather is getting nicer we'll spend more time getting our yard in order. Oh, and one of these days when neither of our cars is in the driveway I'll post pictures of that, now that it's finished.

One [massive] tree down

Along the curb in front of our house was a huge tree (not sure what kind of tree). It was an old tree, with huge hollow spots in it. You can see one hole about half way up in this picture, but there was one twice as large on the other side, closer to the ground. It had brittle-looking branches overhanging the street and near the house. It seemed like a dangerous tree - one good storm might have knocked half the branches off.



So we called the city in January (since it's on the curb, it belongs to them) to ask to have it cut down. They agreed, and said it would be cut down in March. Well, one day in mid March, I had parked Seth's car in the street (to get to my car which was behind his in the driveway). And, wouldn't you know it, there was a wind storm before I got back home, and branches fell down, onto Seth's car. It must have hit his car pretty hard because it dented the metal right above the door.

Thankfully, the city had their contractors out last week to cut the tree down. They came Wednesday and left this:



then came back yesterday and ground the stump. Now we have a huge pile of wood chips in our front yard:

The tree-cutters said that after the organic material decomposes, it will settle down a lot, but that it could take about a season for that to happen.

The city said that they'll plant a new tree, which is awesome. I'd like to pick a big, wide-leafed shade tree, to match the others on the street. I just have to pick which kind of tree now. and move on to all the other trees you see in the yard....