The Nest's Backyard Transformation

Our Transformation Of The Nest's Back Yard - A Few Fewer Trees Or The Mystery Of The Missing Shade

When we first moved in, the back yard was pretty much nothing but dirt, covered by leaves, enclosed by a dillapitated fence, overgrown with bamboo in both corners. The hard to get rid of kind, but we managed to get most of it out of the way. We put the shed in sometime after that. Ann wanted it behind the carriage house but having just finished getting rid of the rest of the bamboo from replacing the fence, I didn't even want to think about taking out more bamboo there and having to repair or replace that section of fence too. It was easier at the time to just set it up between the big oak tree and the back corner of the house. The trees came out just after the 4th of July in 2016 and thankfully we didn't have to move it then.

(7 July 2016 - 9:00 AM)
I don't know if you've ever had a crane on your antique, 1925 concrete driveway stripes before, but I can tell you that any concrete will be rubble by the time your done having this magnitude of tree removal. I wish Ann could have been here to see her wish come true, and what a MASSIVE process it was just to cut down three huge, irreplacable oak trees. I would have been happy with one, maybe two, but that one really needed to come out and covered most of the back roof of the house. At this point it really didn't matter anymore, because they are here, with a crane that takes up nearly a third of my driveway. They are here, an army of guys, just to remove three trees and trim off some major branches. They are here, with trucks that carry other heavy equipment. They are here, and they get started pretty early this morning...

First clearing out low branches for the crane, then holding the power lines away from the crane, with a plastic rake. The crane is in place by around 9:00 AM.

(7 July 2016 - 9:13 AM)
Crane swings around and the guy is all set with his rigging. The crane operator lowers the hook and the guy straps himself to the crane and up, up, and away he goes into the first tree. At first it's diffcult to see what's going on, but they are slowly attaching rigging to major branches, then the rigger cuts away the branch as the crane carries it away. A way up and over the house as the crane swings it into the front yard and the awaiting crew to cut down into chunks and fill the back of one of their fleet of trailers. There were trucks up one side of our street and down the other. They're setting the first large branch down in the front yard ten minutes later.

It takes quite a few more rigs and cuts, but eventually just the the trunk is left standing, with enough of a top left that it just looks like a tall, skinny tree. They take it in two pieces, the last cut is the trunk at the ground, and the first tree is gone. And only about an hour after they first started. Nothing is left but the stump, and it's HUGE.

(7 July 2016 - 10:07 AM)
That one really needed to go. The roots were just awful, growing under the back porch, and we were constantly tripping over them. The branches were already laying on the new roof and we needed them gone before they destroyed the it. We knew it wouldn't be long before that tree just took over, choking out the smaller one closer to the garage. I wanted to keep that one, thinking maybe it would take off and grow out now that its overpowering sibling was gone...

But before I can blink, the rigger is off and up in the second tree, the one I would have left.

(7 July 2016 - 10:30 AM)
They take the second one down in two cuts, not even half an hour later and it's gone!

After seeing how they waited until they had the second tree out of the way, before starting on the third tree, and having to back the crane closer to the back yard just to reach it, I'm thinking it probably would have been too much in the way. But it doesn't matter, because this second one comes out in just two parts.

(7 July 2016 - 10:45 AM)
As they're backing up the crane to get to the third tree, they manage to collapse the top of what looks like an old well or maybe even septic tank. I've never seen a septic tank that was round and lined cylindrically with bricks, but I have seen old water wells like that. We'll never know because as long as it's sitting there, nothing is getting done, so they raised the crane out of the hole using the hydraulic stabilization jacks and quickly filled in the hole to the top so they could set the crane back down on it and back the rest of the way up. It takes a few tries, fill in the hole, smash the stuff down with the front wheel of the crane, throw in some more stuff, smash it down again... rinse, repeat.

(7 July 2016 - 11:07 AM)
Not more than twenty minutes go by before the crane is setup for the third tree, only about two hours from the time they got here this morning!

The third tree is even more amazing, because now I can see the crew in action and not have to keep walking around the crane to get to see the action out front. The crew had moved to the back. The rigger set up three cuts, all three rigged, and the final at the ground through the trunk. In the time between the crane setting that cut down and the next, most of it had been cut up and carried off.

(7 July 2016 - 11:33 AM)
Once the third tree was down, not even half an hour later, they went after those two major branches.

(7 July 2016 - 12:22 PM)
Before I knew it the crane was packing up and leaving for the next job a little after twelve o'clock, only three hours from when they first got here! Now a bobcat is running up and down the drive, hauling off the big chunks of tree trunk.

(7 July 2016 - 12:46 PM)
The crane in the driveway was replaced with a chipper and tall, rickety looking shell over the bed of a truck towing the chipper they just backed in, now emptying the shredded waste into it.

Like and army of ants, everyone is picking up an arm load of branches from the yard and carrying them to, then feeding them to the chipper. Then an idea pops into my head. I wonder if they'll take all that damned bamboo with them too? I ask and they will, for a small fee. At this point it could have been a big fee, just take them so we don't have to deal with them! By the time they're done, the truck is so full I wonder how all of it doesn't just all out the back, but it doesn't. It's just a little after 1:00, just a bit over four hours from when they first got here this morning... Simply amazing. They tell me they'll have to come back because the stump grinder is broken and they need to get it fixed.

(11 July 2016 - 11:30ish AM)
Not even a week later, the guy comes out with the stump grinder, towing it with a nice looking company pickup truck. The same guy I had to give a cold compress to because he got hit in the face near his eye with a part of one of those cuts coming in. I got him some motrin at the time, and some wet paper towels to put over it. Well, I don't know what to think of this fellow... He's driving what looks like a brand new company truck, towing the recently repaired stump grinder, and tries to back it up the driveway, failing repeatedly. He decides he's not going to be able to get the proper angle on it backing it up that way anyway, so pulls out and tries to pull into the backyard, then tries to back it into the proper position, except...

Except he ends up getting stuck on the stump. No worries, he'll just back it up and get a running start first. This time he gets the differential case of the truck "stuck" on top of the stump he's supposed to be grinding. No worries. He'll just rock the truck, back and forth off the stump, with the stumo grinder still attached. It's all I can do not to laugh at this silly fucker. I'm waiting for the hitch to break, or worse yet, the truck. He manages to get the damn thing moving again, but this time he get the hitch of the stump grinder stuck on the stump. I can't imagine how the stump grinder got broke that last time. Yeah, rolling eyes. I really just want him to leave and someone with half a brain to come back and finish this please.

(11 July 2016 - 11:52 AM)
No such luck, but he eventually manages to get the damned thing setup and running. It's a miracle. He ends up grinding a bit to close to the sidewalk and takes part of it with him. I don't know how much more of this I can watch. I'm looking all around for the hiddne TV cameras... Surely no one can be this dense! Wow. Just wow. It takes him a lot more tries to back that thing out the driveway, but evenutally he manages to be on his way. And I am never so glad to have someone leave my house. It was just scary how many times this guy fucked up and ever didn't notice or pretended not to care. I wish I could be a fly on the wall when he gets to explain to the boss why the brand new company truck has a bent drive shaft... And why the stump grinder doesn't work again.

(11 July 2016 - 12:30ish PM)
Well, that's that. Nothing but a really horrible yard of nothing but torn up dirt and piles of wood chunks left from the grinder. Now we get to wait for all of that to settle. I try to level it out by hand a few weeks later, but it doesn't really seem to matter what I do with it, it's still "lumpy" and full of sawdust and wood chunks. Eventually it gets made into raised flower beds. But before that I needed to get the fence put back in, so once dipshit left, I had to at least move enough to be able to connect those fence panels back up. The gate takes a little more doing, but it gets done too.

It wasn't long after that we did move the shed though. I managed to get that stand of bamboo out and was able to use the spare panel we had left over from the other side to replace the worst section. It was a lot of work to clean out all of that bamboo, and I don't think Rebecca was prepared for all of it to come out, including the stand on their side of the property line. I told them I planned on taking it all out so it wouldn't grow back. Well, at least it didn't grow back on our side of the fence. I have to continually trim it back from growing over the fence from their side now though. I had to clean out all of the roots this time, and it took forever with a mattock, only able to clear several at a time before running out of steam. I was literally chopping the roots out of the ground, a little at a time. This time the bamboo shoots came right up, compared to the other side where we really didn't get any new shoots.

Next step was to level the ground and prepare the base for the shed floor. We had dug out and set in place over a dozen 8" square concrete blocks and set out a 2x4 grid frame of joists, then covered it with a ¾" plywood floor when we first set it up. Now we have to somehow lift the entire thing off of the floor, and move it from one corner of the yard to the opposite one, without it falling apart on us. Our plan is to skid it over using the extra 4x4s from the fence work we did. You can read more about it in the next section.