The Ultimate DIY!

For quite some time now we've been needing to take out nine 75+ foot trees that go along the road behind our house because they are all dying. Every windstorm brings a little stress as we watch the dead ones sway back and forth in the wind! Finally, one of them did the inevitable and snapped in half and fell across the road (it's really more of a driveway up to just a few houses.) Luckily, no one was walking or driving by, but it did make a mess and spurred us on to doing something about the rest of them. We tried to get bids to have professionals come out and do it, but only one guy was even willing to come out and look and we didn't want to use his services after all. So Tyson decided to rent a man lift and just do it himself! He was completely fearless and spent two days cutting each tree down in smallish pieces starting at the top. I can't even imagine holding a running chainsaw in a swaying bucket 75 feet in the air, but he did it! He managed to direct most of the pieces into areas on the ground where they wouldn't damage anything. He did hit our chain link fence a few times and a small piece speared right through the roof of our shed, but those things are all fairly easy fixes. I'm just glad no one got hurt and none of the trees landed on our house! Tyson's dad, Bill, came up for two days and helped a lot and the boys and I worked really hard both days. We did have a few neighbors who wanted wood chips so they came and helped us run the chipper for a few hours. We still have quite a bit of cleanup to do, but all the trees are down and we chipped approximately 7-8 tons of woods chips! So far we haven't had to take a single load to the dump and have been able to give away all the chips. We gave them to three different neighbors to use in their landscaping. One of them, Sharon Madsen, brought us movie tickets and a gift card to Pizza Hut for our efforts, which I thought was very nice. We took the kids to see Spiderman: Homecoming (Tyson and I actually went in the the Planet of the Apes movie instead) the next night even though we couldn't go until the 9:20 show and I thought they'd all fall asleep! Needless to say they did actually sleep in for once the next morning!