Tree Removal

We have had two aspen trees in the front yard, right at the corner of our property.  They are part of an "island" near the corner of the sidewalk and are the first thing you see as you come up the road to our house.  They had grown close enough to each other and close enough to the large pine tree next to them that they had formed into what looked like one tree.  I haven't really liked them.  Aspens live between 20-25 years, ours were right in the middle of that time, and the one closest to the pine tree was mostly dead.

Last September, in a fit of cutting frenzy, I chopped off a number of smaller, lower down branches.  I just used a little hand-held saw, and I didn't try to make it look pretty.  In fact, I deliberately made it look pretty bad.  I was hoping that Kent would come home, see my "handiwork," declare it all an ugly mess, and take steps to get rid of the trees.  Because of the way they grew, it wasn't really possible to remove just the one next to the pine tree because the remaining one had a bare side.  Both needed to come out.  Unfortunately, Kent's tolerance for ugly trees in the front yard is quite a bit higher than mine.  Nothing happened last year, and so we've had a mangled aspen tree in the front yard.  It has looked bad, and I have not been happy about it.

About a week ago I decided to take matters into my own hands.  Last Saturday I casually mentioned to Kent that on Monday, I was going to go rent a chainsaw and cut down the trees.  His eyes got really big and he said, "Do you even know how to run a chainsaw?"
"No," I replied, "but I'm going to watch a video on YouTube.  I think I can figure it out."
If it was physically possible, Kent's eyes got even bigger.  "You know," he said, "that logging is like the second most dangerous job in the world?  You can cut off your leg with a chainsaw."
"I'm not going into the logging business," I said.  "I'm going to remove two tress in the yard."
"And what about the children?  What are you going to do about them?  You know they will be super interested."
"I'm going to make them watch from the porch and yell 'Timberg' (what Brandt says) when the tree starts to fall."
"Please don't do that," Kent said.

That was enough.  On Monday, Kent brought Lee's chainsaw home from work.  He didn't say anything about it, just put it in a prominent place in the garage.  Today, he fired it up and did some tree removal.
Here is a view of the house with the trees in place.

Can you see how the left side tree is dead, 

and the right side tree is half bare?

This is the sad evidence of my hack job.

The trees totally block the street view of the house.

Kent was going to start in the morning, but this was also the day all my cousins were over to go through Grandma Hare's stuff, so there were lots of little children running around, more than could safely be in the vicinity of tree felling.  So this afternoon, he began.  With only two trees, it didn't take too long to bring them down.  Of course Brandt was in attendance, wanting in on the action.  He had to be restrained until they were safely on the ground.  Afterward, however, he was very helpful.

Kent makes a start.

Working on tree number two.

Kent is behind the bush, pushing the second tree over.

Chopping the trunk up.

I had been a bit concerned about how to get rid of all the wood, but funnily, we had no problem.  Just after I took this above picture of Kent cutting the trunk into pieces, our back yard neighbor's daughter drove by and asked what we were doing with the wood.  She asked if she could have some of the pieces for a centerpiece, and we happily agreed to give her as many as she wanted.  She selected and arranged seven or eight pieces, told me she was going to fill them in with greenery and berries, and that they would make a beautiful Christmas arrangement.  Brandt very helpfully loaded them into his green vehicle and drove them around the corner for her.

Before we had done much more, our backyard neighbors' across-the-street-neighbors walked by and asked what we were doing with the wood and if they could have any we didn't have plans for.  They helped us stack it and were going to come back for it.  Within a short time, our across-the-street neighbor came over and asked what we were doing with the wood.  When we told him it was going around the corner, he volunteered to bring over his tractor with front-loader attachment, load it up, and let Brandt drive the tractor around the corner to dump it.  Shamaz!  Brandt was thrilled.  I didn't get a picture of that, but Brandt was absolutely delighted to be driving the tractor.  The wood got dumped in the neighbor's drive way, and all the big stuff was gone, all within about an hour.  That left smaller limbs with lots of leaves, but the neighbor who got the bulk of the wood came over with a small trailer, helped Kent and Brandt load up the remainders, and drove away with it.  By day's end, you would never have known we had cut down two trees.  

Now I don't want to brag or anything, but I would like to point out with only the mention of renting a chainsaw and YouTube, I was able to get two trees removed from my yard.  As my sister Mikayla pointed out, I have had a true example of the quote from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, "The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants."  

This is the after picture which I obviously didn't take the same day.

The bush next to the pine tree was absolutely gloriously red last week,

and the magnolia tree has lost all its leaves.  

But you can see that the tree removal has opened the view of the house.

I love it!