Progress On Our Yard

Hi everyone!  I hope you're having a good week, and I'm glad you're here.      Today I'm sharing our major tree removal project with you; this work has been going on for a period of about three weeks (off and on).  Next week, the stump grinder will be here to take care of all that remains of these monster trees.  We put this project off for a long time because we knew the cost would be prohibitive, and it was.  By the time the stumps have been ground, we will have spent about $20,000 and some change on this.  For that kind of money, we could have had a sunroom added on to the back of our house, which I've wanted to do for years.  But...then we would be constantly worrying that these trees would drop a massive limb on the sunroom, or worse, one of the trees would get struck by lightening and fall on the house.  Among their many "endearing" qualities, poplars are also known to be lightening magnets.  😏     

   

   

You really need to see these trees to appreciate the size and scope of this project.  This picture shows the front half of our driveway and the trees on the other side of it.  You can't tell in this picture, but the trees extended in a line all the way down the border of our property.  Some of the trees were on our neighbor's property, but he was happy for us to have those taken down along with our trees.  He also hired the same tree man that we used to take down several trees in his yard that were too close to his house.  He's our new neighbor, by the way, and so much nicer than the previous ones.   

These guys working for the tree service were consummate professionals and great to work with.  We would recommend them wholeheartedly.     

Need any logs?  😄 

   

   

On this particular day, they were using a crane and a bucket truck to take the top half of these trees off.   They just lifted the tops off the trees and laid them down as neatly as you please.  Not a single thing in our yard or on our house was damaged during this whole process.

   

  

A more close-up view of the trees closest to the house.  These were right outside our carport.

   

Our next door neighbor, Parker, was fine with the tree company parking their trucks and machinery in his yard in order to get to our trees.  

   

This is our driveway -- you can see a big limb at the top next to the street.

   

After the trees were cut down.  Yesterday, they brought the last of those giants down.  They didn't use the crane yesterday, and we had several big booms when the tree trunks hit the ground. 

   

This tree was obviously not healthy and was a hazard.  We're so glad it never fell on anything.

   

Our neighbor had some mighty big trees, too.

   

This picture is kind of blurry , but this is a yardstick, and you can see that the tree trunk was over three feet in diameter.  

   

There were at least three trees with trunks this big around.

   

This trunk would make a good class exercise to determine the age of the tree by counting the rings.  There are a lot of them, as you can see.  

   

We paid the owner of the tree service today, and he earned every penny of his fee.  He and his employees were such hard workers.  He told us this afternoon that between the wood chips and the logs/trunks, he made 25 trips to the dump and the sawmill during the course of this job.  I know he was glad to be finished, and we're going to sleep much better at night -- especially during tornado season.  The bottom line is -- yes, $20,000 is a lot of money, but we don't feel like the price they charged us was unfair.  They took down 18 large trees and probably a dozen small to medium-sized trees.  They also did a great job of cleaning up afterward.  

   

I apologize for so many pictures; I just want to document all this work for future reference.  Our next step is to find a good landscaper, and we hope he/she can help us make our lawn a lot more pleasant to look at.  I hope I'll have a "prettier" post for you soon.  How has your summer been?  Have you started dreaming about fall yet?  I think I'm about to get to that point.  Thanks so much for visiting me today, and have a great weekend!!