Sunday, September 16, 2012

clearing the land


This past July, we had a huge storm whip through the area and one of the 80+ foot trees in our backyard took a tumble.  For the past (almost) three months we've looked at the downed tree and every single day, we'll say to each other, "We should really take care of that..."

DSC_0374
Yep.  We definitely should. 

When Charlie was in California last week, I thought maybe I'd surprise him by having a tree removal company come in and clear out the fallen tree and a few (4) other trees that look like they could go down in the next storm.  Much to my surprise the cost to remove the one downed tree was $2,500.00.  The cost to remove the other trees brought the tab to almost $10K.  We were told the reason it was so expensive is because the trees are located very far down on our property line and they aren't accessible from the road. So they wouldn't be able to bring in any of their heavy equipment.

That bid wasn't acceptable to us because in my opinion - removing a few trees shouldn't cost as much as installing a new bathroom.  So Charlie and I (and our four little helpers) spent the entire weekend cleaning up our backyard.  And the ecosystem that we uncovered beneath the fallen tree was amazing. There were huge crickets, huge earthworms, huge beetles, huge furry spiders (whose size rivaled the palm of Charlie's hand), huge toads, and one itty bitty tiny snake.


As we were outside working, it struck me that for all the pressure I often put on myself to take the children out and expose them to various events on the weekend ... they had the perfect weekend working alongside us in the yard.   And best of all, we cleared almost the entire property AND generated multiple woodpiles to last us all winter.
The organization of these logs puts me in a very happy place.
If we were to pursue another career path, clearing trees might be on the list.


We've found we're very good at it ...


... although it certainly helps that we've got a Superhero on our payroll.

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