The Trees are Coming Down!

Now on to some exterior work... Our house is located on a corner lot, which is great because we get that little bit of extra land, but it also has some drawbacks. Namely four old, dying trees along one side of the street.
As you can see, they are growing dangerously close the the electrical wires, despite numerous trimmings by the local gas and electric company. The branches are also coming close to the house and this allows animals (squirrels) to jump onto our roof. I'm not really sure if there's any harm to that, but better safe than sorry!

One of the trees also has limbs that are breaking off and leaving huge branches in the street.

Not to mention some funky stuff that is growing up the trunk. It doesn't look so bad now, but in the warmer months, this stuff is green and nasty!

We also have a monstrosity of a tree out in front that is basically 4 trees growing out of one set of roots. Let me tell you, the roots of these tree are so long that they go all the way across our yard and under the fence to our neighbor's yard. We liked this front tree because of all the shade it gives the yard and it's great for the kids to play in the shade in the summer. And you might notice that we've already had some work done on it to try and shape it, but it just wasn't working.

Recently the tree started dropping limbs randomly. And I don't mean little twigs, I mean HUGE limbs that left holes in the ground. Like, if someone had been standing in that spot at the time, they would have ended up in the emergency room! So we knew the tree had to go.

While we were at it, we had the tree companies give us an estimate to remove this bush also. It doesn't really do much, and it's in the perfect spot to create a small vegetable garden. The kids are I are looking forward to doing that in the spring and this little corner (minus the bush) is really the perfect spot. 

We asked three different companies to come out. The first two came out promptly and the third called to say when they'd be coming and never showed up so we nixed them right away. The company we ended up choosing came in almost $1000 less than the other company, and we have used them before so we are confident they will do a good job. We were waiting until this time of year because the tree business is usually quieter at this time so companies will really try to give their best prices to get a job.

Stay tuned for some after pictures!