This little slice of heaven we live in is called Fircrest... And as you might expect, Fircrest has lots and lots (and yes, lots) of fir trees. When we bought our house, it had at least ten fir trees in the yard! We had three or four of them taken down a couple years ago - got lucky, and the city decided they were too close to power lines... FREE JOB! Those were trees we simply WANTED to have taken down. As you can see in the picture above, we now have (well, had) a tree we NEEDED to have taken down. And talk about making us appreciate the free job the city did for us!
That tree on the left is dead. The one on the right was in the process of dying. It looks exactly like the other one did a year ago. So we decided it was time to just get both of them taken down, and enjoy the added sunshine in our backyard.
I love the way they take these big trees down... While it's fun to imagine it being like in the cartoons where they just whack at the bottom with an axe and yell "TIMBERRRRRR," in real life, they climb the tree, cutting off all the branches as they go.
Once they have all the branches off, the guy with the saw is up at the top of the tree, and he just starts cutting off foot-long sections of trunk and dropping them to the ground.
We had them leave the trunks about 10 feet tall, because another Fircrest tradition is having bears carved out of your tree trunks. We'll be wanting to get that done some time in the future, so we planned ahead.
So this morning as I look out over our backyard, it's got
No cub scouts though... There's a guy up the street who sells firewood by the box to help pay for his ailing mother's care, and Cindy offered him free access to our wood. He'll be taking a truckload a day until it's gone, so maybe by October we'll have our backyard back! Already the increased sun exposure is making it a better-than-ever place to be!
However, the trees were so tall (about 150 feet each) that there is sawdust EVERYWHERE - front yard, neighbor's yard, our roof, and ALL OVER OUR BRAND NEW VAN!
CLEANUP, NUMBER 813 PLEASE!
Well you guys are really lucky. If the good old City of Kennewick decides that something on your property is a nuisance, yeah of course they'll come and take care of it. And then send you a highly inflated bill for the privledge. Several years ago the sidewalks on Kennewick ave were buckling from the very old trees that line the whole street. Our benevolent city held (taxpayer sponsored) meeting after meeting. They came up with several different solutions. Fineally after months of paid experts and agonizing late nights (again paid for by the ever so accomidating taxpayers). They decided that....................
ReplyDelete................................
..............
The trees belonged to the homeowners so they would have to take care of the problem and pay for it themselves. Oh but wait it gets better. The home owners were not allowed to have the trees cut down because they were a KENNEWICK LANDWMARK (or in other words property of the city). Instead the ingenious city planners had so generously developed a solution to save the trees and fix the sidewalks at the same time and that would only cost the homeowners slightly more than twice of what removing the trees would.
The moral of this story?
You guys have no idea how lucky you are.
Doesn't that make you HAPPY?
That was sure a tall tale of the timberlakes. What a cool thing to post. That looked awesome. What a story of Susans.
ReplyDeleteWell, at least its done. Take Care and have a great weekend.