Before…

Ever since we moved into the house last year, we’ve been saying that the big pine tree in our front yard needed to go.  Only the top branches were green and the electrical wire to the house ran through it.  If the tree fell over on the house, we’d be goners.

One day while I was out doing yard work, I saw a tree truck go to the house at the end of our street.  On it’s way back, I flagged down the driver and asked him how much he estimated it would cost to bring down the tree.  He figured it would be about $150-$200.  I took his card and said I’d talk with Mark about it.  When I told Mark, he thought the price seemed reasonable.  I did due diligence and asked my neighbor how she felt about the service and she said she trusted him and that her nephew was working for him.  I called a couple days ago and left a voice mail asking him to come out and give us an official quote.  He called yesterday morning when Mark was here and I wasn’t and told Mark again that it would be $150 and Mark said, “Great!  We’d like to do that.”  Nothing was said about when that would happen.  I was figuring we could do it maybe by the end of the month.

I got home from my outing and was just getting ready to make lunch when the doorbell rang.  The tree guy was here with a cherry picker ready to go.  He told me about his conversation with Mark earlier.  I asked if he would bill us and he said he wanted cash or a check when the job was done.  I said, “Let me go in and call Mark and see what he has in mind,” but before I even got Mark on the line, the tree guy was already cutting branches.  Mark left work to get money for the job.

He’d already gotten this far by the time I grabbed my camera and came out.

This was the wire through the tree and I was so afraid the tree guy was going to electrocute himself!

Setting up the cherry picker in our front yard

Making a stable base

The guy in the orange hat is our neighbor’s nephew, Vance. He is the ground assistant. Jeff is in the cherry picker basket.

De-limbing the tree

The basket got awfully close to that wire

When he got the limbs off to this point, I saw there was a bird’s nest in the fork of the tree. I hope there were no eggs.

He topped off one branch…

…and tied a rope around it. (Not a bad shot from the ground, huh?)

Vance pulled as he cut that branch off and brought it safely down.

Jeff cut the trunk down in sections till he got down to the wire.

At the wire, he tied the top of the trunk.

Timber!

The mighty tree has fallen!

Jeff cut the trunk into “easier to handle” pieces.

Then he re-cut the stump.

We told them we’d handle the clean-up ourselves.  I spent all afternoon working on cleaning up this debris.  When Mark came home, he helped too.

We managed to get the right side pretty much cleaned up. There is so much more light in front of the house now!

My latest pile of tree debris

And some more prospective firewood