At last, it is gone:
You don’t know how glad that I am that this tree is gone. Take a look at the house now:
Now, you can actually see the house, which I think is an improvement. After all, I paid a lot of money for this house, and I want everyone to see it. And now, with that ugly tree out of the way, you can. That tree really did hide the house before. There were also a few occasions where I nearly killed myself slipping on either blossoms or fallen leaves.
Though speaking of a tree that hides the house, I found a photo of the tree on Bing Maps from back in 2014 when the tree was larger:
Photo: Bing Maps
As you can see, that tree was a real beast. Its limbs reached across four different properties at one time. I don’t know when it was trimmed back, but all of the real estate photos that I could find for the four affected properties show the tree in its final form, pruned back to where it only towers over my property.
Getting rid of this tree was a long time coming. I hated that tree from the moment that I first laid eyes on it, because it was ugly. The rest of the house was awesome, though, and so I was willing to overlook the tree. When I had the home inspection, the inspector asked me point blank if I was planning to get rid of the tree. I said that I was. For the last two years and some change, I had thought about getting rid of that tree. At first, the biggest obstacle to the tree was Elyse, since she was adamant about keeping the tree. Then after seeing some big bugs living in the tree, she changed her tune and came around to my side on it – or at least didn’t vehemently oppose it anymore. Meanwhile, I waited a long time to do this because of other funding priorities. After all, I had to get a new car a few months after I got the house, and so that occupied some funds that I would otherwise have had available for that. I also put more effort into work on the interior of the house than the exterior, since I would be spending more time looking at the inside than the outside. Thus I put more time and money into furniture and repainting much of the house (speaking of which, I do have another completed paint job to show you, but I want to clean up a bit before I photograph it).
One thing that I also considered was doing the tree removal myself. The way I figured, I had the extension pole from the painting project, and maybe if I could get a saw end to put on the end of my extension pole, I could cut it down a little at a time over a period of weeks until it was all gone. It seemed feasible enough, but Elyse wasn’t exactly enthused about it. She told me that it was more likely that I would either hurt myself or damage something important, and thus really shouldn’t do it myself. I begrudgingly agreed that it was probably a bad idea to attempt it myself. Then this year, I used some of my tax refund money to cut the tree down. I used Shifflett Tree Service, and they came out and made quick work out of it. No more tree!
And here’s Elyse standing on the pile of wood chips remaining after they finished:
Now, with the tree gone, I need to see what else I can do to improve the landscape. 2020 might just be the year of the landscape, as I have plenty of things that I need to do with the outside of the house, including weeding the backyard, power washing a few things such as the deck, backyard brick, and fence, fixing the grass in the front yard, and also a few other odds and ends. I suppose that a homeowner’s work is never done…