I’ve given you a short tour of the inside of our house and you’ve seen bits and pieces of the outside.  The truth is that we have a f*ckton of work to do on our yard.  A f*ckton.  We knew this when we bought our house and I thought I was prepared…I don’t think I was.

Our first major project was to remove a couple of trees and grind some old stumps.  Doesn’t sound too bad, right?!!  Umm, yeah.

Here are some before pictures:

That’s the front of our house.  There’s a poplar in the front (near the street at the left) and a blue atlas cedar right next to the kitchen window.  When I say “right next to”…I’m not exaggerating.

There was still a little daylight getting through, but not much.

The cedar needed to be cut down because it’s way too close to the house.  We only recently learned that the poplar was dying so we decided to chop it down too.  That stump with the “x” on it was going to be ground.  Neat, right?

And now for the backyard!

I don’t think I’ve posted any pics of the backyard (because it’s a disaster), but we actually have a pretty big space to work with.

There are more stumps to grind (3 in the picture above, 4 total) and we also needed to trim the elm tree.

It was pretty heavy on the left side and we were concerned it might break and fall on the fence and/or cable lines that run over there.

After agreeing to pay a trillion dollars, a bunch of guys came over on Friday with their chainsaws.  There were six guys and they were here for almost 8 hours.  Spoiler alert: they didn’t finish!  Yeah, it’s a lot of work.

The guys split up to get the trimming of the tree in the back done while beginning work on the cedar in the front.  I liked this guy because he could smoke a cigarette while pulling himself up into the tree:

Now that’s what I call multitasking.

Watching these guys take the trees down was one of the most fun things I’ve done in a while.  I spent the entire day staring out the window at them.

Pretty soon, limbs from the cedar started falling to the ground and it felt like we were being bombed.

And then the tree looked like this:

We should have kept it like that.  I would have loved to hear what the HOA would say.  Or what if we left it like this:

It would have made me laugh every day to see that when I got home.

Oh!  So we decided to keep the wood from the trees so whenever a huge branch or part of the trunk came down, the guys on the ground would cut them down to smaller pieces:

In the meantime, there was one guy in the back running the grinding machine:

I didn’t realize he had a remote control for that bad boy.  Pretty cool…until I saw what that f*cking machine did to our yard.  Holy balls.

In the front, the poplar was getting massacred.

Then they made the final chop and we saw this:

Umm, yeah.  The tree was dead all right.  We are so happy we decided to cut it down.

The hole ran about 20 feet through the tree…the squirrels loved it.

The guys weren’t able to finish everything, but the only thing left is grinding the remaining stumps.  There are about 1.5 left to grind in the back and the 3 in the front.

Here are the after pictures:

Once it starts raining the backyard will be a beautiful mud pit.  Yay!!

Oh, and we won’t need firewood for about 10 years:

Now George and I are going to learn how to split wood.  This should be very, very interesting.