Paul Bunyon
Posted: March 13, 2011 | Categories: Miscellaneous, The House, The Twins
We had quite a busy day yesterday. The previous owner of this house planted 140 trees in the front yard. The beauty of him doing that is that you can't see the house very clearly from the street (even though it's not that far from the street) so it hides some of the size of it and we get a great amount of shade in the afternoon (since the house faces West) which makes the house cooler during hot days.
Unfortunately most of the trees are pines (very tall pines) with a few hardwoods in between getting choked off by the pines. We cut down a few sick trees in the front last spring and this year we decided to open up some space around the hardwoods in order to allow them to spread out a bit. We wanted to thin the trees out in such a way that we gave the hardwoods room to grow, but also maintained the level of shade we were accustomed to.
We solicited a bid from the company that thinned the trees last year (we cut down 19 pines in the back yard alone) and they suggested we take down 19 trees and prune the remaining. The estimate? Almost $2,000. Well, that didn't work for me, so a friend brought over his chainsaw and some ropes yesterday morning and we got started. We cut down 5 pines around an oak and a maple tree in the front. We had the trees down in a matter of moments and quickly cut up all the trunks and debris.
At one point, Elizabeth came out and started poking around. I quickly had her put on a hard hat (I had two of them) and before long, she and I were pulling down a very tall tree using ropes as my friend Sean made the appropriate cuts. He cut the tree in such a way that we could pull it down and she was screaming as she saw it start to fall towards us. She had blast.
What was interesting was that I was able to get Anna to come out and help us with the cleanup. It's not that Anna wouldn't help, she's always willing to help out. It's just that she came out, then spent the whole rest of the morning chatting with the neighbors rather than helping me with the work at hand. A neighbor went by walking his dogs, he came back and jumped in helping us cut up the remaining branches.
Anna? She chatted with the neighbor's wife as shown in the following picture (while we worked of course):
The cones? Those are from the kids. They've gotten the Soccer Bug (I couldn't be happier) so they setup a goal with some neighbors and friends and had a little game in the yard as we (but not Anna) worked away.
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