TIMBER!

We have five trees in our backyard that have been nice ornamental, shade trees. They blossom each spring and look beautiful, then have rich green leaves during the summer and fall. About wintertime, it gets cold enough to have them change color and the yellow leaves are gorgeous. When we moved into our home 13 years ago, they were little and cute, but they have grown gigantic and they were taking over our yard. Soooooo..... I decided they had to go. A few weeks ago, we cut all the big branches off the first tree and broke the branches and stuffed them into plastic bags and the garbage men hauled them away. Then Sr. D gave the project over to Taylor and any friends/cousins who wanted to join him and earn some money.

Uncle Jeff heard about the project and brought his chainsaw to help out. Well, Monday, July 5th, our project went into turbo charge mode! :) He took the last three trees down, and chopped them up. We had Taylor, cousin Dover, cousin Brian, and friend Markus working on bundling.

The branches kept falling into our neighbor's yard. Luckily they weren't home, or we would have really freaked them out. Especially on the last tree. Uncle Jeff was sawing at the trunk after having removed some heavy limbs, and Taylor and Brian were pulling on a rope, but the tree went the wrong way and landed on the fence. (See video below!) Several fence boards were casualties in the crash, and we have bought new ones. Hopefully today we can get those fixed.

It looked like we had had a hurricane! I don't know how Jeff didn't feel overwhelmed at this sight! And it was 102 degrees outside, about 75% humidity!

This is Tuesday with almost all the work done. The bundles are to the left of the picture, where we will carry out manageable piles that our garbage men will be willing to haul away. We also have a pile of bigger pieces of wood that we may Craigs List as firewood and give away to the first taker.

What a project! Thank you Uncle Jeff for being Mike Mulligan for a day!

And thank you to Taylor, Dover, Brian and Markus for all the manly labor! They got money, tans and a total body workout, so I think they came out ahead! (You can see the poor fence in this picture)

And here's the video of the last tree coming down. Wince, wince.