The Day the Maple Tree Died

Two years ago, this happened:

In the middle of a torrential storm, this huge branch from one of our maple trees fell down. Lucky for us and our neighbors, it fell right in between our two houses. Not on our house, our neighbor's multiple sheds and/or garages, or anywhere else where it could have caused major damage. God was really looking out for us that day!

It took out the corner of our family room addition, but the damage was so minor that Travis was able to fix it without any trouble. You can see from this picture that the rest of the tree limbs stand precariously close to our house. This picture was taken from our 2nd story deck. So any other tree limbs to fall down would land either directly on our house, our deck, or the neighbor's sheds. 

We hemmed and hawed for 2 years on whether we should cut it down. Should we have a professional service do it? Could Travis just cut it down? What should we do?

Our yard definitely has it's share of trees. We have no fewer than 19 trees on our property. In town. On less than an acre. That's craziness.

So this summer, we finally called around to get some bids on taking this tree down. It was time. The bids we got ranged from $575 to $1300+. For $1300, you better be hauling all the wood and grinding the stump up but that's not what their bid included. We decided to go with the cheaper service, which used a crane, and clean up the remains on our own.

The tree trimmers put us on their list, and I figured they would call to let us know when they'd be coming by. Imagine my surprise when the tree guy randomly showed up on Saturday morning! Luckily we didn't have any plans, so he got started right away.

 We had to get permission from the neighbors for the truck to sit in their yard, since our family room addition pretty much goes right up to our property line.

He was way up there!

The sad remains of our tree:

We were worried about getting in and around the fencing, so Travis is going to cut this part down on his own. I'm kind of sad about losing the shade from this tree; it really helped keep our family room cooler in the summer. Buuuuut...I'd rather not have a branch come down and ruin said family room.

It only took the tree trimmer about 3 hours to cut everything down, including two smoke breaks (I counted). However, it then took Travis the rest of the day to clear all the brush and larger logs out of our neighbor's side yard. I tried helping for a bit, but with Emily it was hard to really be of much help. He did get it all cleaned up though, and now we have to figure out how to get the rest of this ugly tree down. Not exactly how I planned on spending my Saturday!

Are you working on any home projects, planned or unplanned?