Deforestation project

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but our house came with several large trees.  One of the trees in the backyard we have nicknamed the whomping willow because every time it’s windy (which is all winter in Canada) we can see it twisting and thumping the neighbor’s garage.  We lived through the whole winter wondering if the trees would stay up and not come crashing through our house or the neighbor’s garage.

I had to use Google street view to get this 2012 picture of the Whomping Honey Locust... apparently by 2014 the branches extended far enough to reach our neighbors blue garage!

Another Google street view of the large Blue Spruce to the right of the silver car and you can clearly see the bushy Juniper encroaching over the second garage door, by 2014, we couldn't use that garage entrance before hacking off several of the Junipers branches.

Here is a Google street view of the side of the house.. isn't that crazy?  You can't even tell there is a house!!

As soon as the snow cleared we made a date with a tree company that we’d spoken with as soon as we moved in.  We picked that company because the guy who came to give us the estimate told us the estimate in the fall would be higher than if we got them back in the spring.  So we choose him because he was helpful and seemed honest.  So April 25th we had his company (Ottawa Tree Surgeons) come and take down a very large blue spruce, a big dead Ash, a very big Honey Locust (aka Whomping Willow) and a medium sized Juniper in front of the garage.

This was taken early in the morning on April 25th, 2014 so the trees aren't that fluffy like in the google pics above.

Another early morning pic, but you can see the Ash tree's naked limbs.

For some reason I didn't take a picture of the juniper that is touching the side of the garage before they cut it down, but in this picture you can kind of see that it was looming over that side of the house.

They had to use an aerial lift to get the top limbs off and take the trees down in sections.  They cleaned up all the branches with a wood chipper and they used an impressively big stump grinder to clear the last evidence of a tree away from the yard.  It took them the better part of the day just to get those 4 trees out, but man are we happy we had them removed!  Several of our neighbors were quite happy as well because as soon as the Whomping Honey Locust was cut our neighbor of the blue garage doors came over and thanked us profusely for removing that tree!  LOL

Juniper on the side GONE, Blue Spruce and Ash on the front lawn GONE!  We can actually see the house now!  Woohoo!  You can also see my car's ass end peeking out of the garage :)

There is still another ugly spruce and it's ugly baby on the front lawn, but we figure if we trim up the bottom they will look better *fingers crossed*

Here you can see that the whomping Honey Locust is gone as well as a whole big section of hedges.  There was a Hydro box totally engulfed by the hedges and we had to rescue it before Hydro came and hit us with a big bill for the removal.  John and I removed the remainder of  the hedge after the Tree guys cut out a 5 foot section to get to the whomping tree.

The trees had to go and we are happy they are gone.  Now we need to save up the money to get rid of the the other big Honey Locust in the backyard.   Also there are some out of control hedges growing up to almost 30 feet tall between us and our neighbors that we want to take down.  We talked to them already and they look forward to getting sun in their backyard LOL!

If you click on the picture you can see my clever use of arrows to indicate more tree stuffs that need removal.  You can also see a large pile of branches on the front lawn after John and I removed the hedges on the side of the house.

Here is my handiwork of trimming the bottom of the ugly spruce to try and make it look better :S

We hired a company to try and salvage the hedges that are not 30 feet tall.  Here is a picture of the back hedges before and after Stu from Capital City Hedges came and gave us a good trim!

Here is the side of the garage before and after.... you can spy the 30 foot monsters at the back of the after picture.  Stu said that those were no longer considered hedges but full blown trees!  LOL

Every time we are outside doing yard work, or just coming in from picking up the mail; we still stop, gaze around and marvel at how much we like the changes we've made.  We are thrilled that the neighbors are happy too!