It is finally fall! The weather is perfect: cool in the mornings and warmer in the afternoons... and the air has that wonderful smell of leaves, apples and burning wood.



This past weekend we tackled a huge tree removal project. John and I have been contemplating removing the 2 pear trees in our front yard. One of them has some sort of funk and is slowly dying and they completely block the front of the house. We hate to cut down trees but we finally decided it would be for the best and we will plant another one in the back yard to make up for it.



John bought a cute little chain saw:14" chain and it's electric... so, Friday afternoon we cut the trees down! John used the chain saw to cut down the big branches and then I used the clippers to cut the branches up and stuff them into a zillion lawn & leaf bags... hey, we live in the suburbs... we use little play chain saws and stuff whole trees into lawn & leaf bags! John cut up the larger branches and the trunks to use next summer in our fire pit in the back yard. I think those 2 trees supplied us with enough wood to have fires until we are 112.



For the larger branches John tied a rope around the branch which I pulled on while he climbed the ladder with the chain saw being careful not to trip himself on the chain saw's cord. It went well except for one branch where the chain saw got stuck, the branch began to fall the wrong way toward our neighbor's house and I couldn't hold the rope. Samantha had to run across the street to get our neighbor, Skip.

Boy were we sore on Saturday morning! We thought we could get the stumps out ourselves but um... no, we couldn't... the roots were huge! So we called our neighbor, John, the professional tree guy. He laughed at us! He laughed at our tiny little chain saw and out wimpy rope and all out lawn & leaf bags. Then he really laughed at the trench we dug around the trees and the axe we used to try and cut out the roots. He used this big machine that chopped the roots up into oblivion, it was really neat and quite fast. He is a life saver!

It looks really odd to not see those trees out there in the front yard but wow, you can see our house! It looks really nice. We do still have one tree up by the house in the front yard so we do feel good about that. I will post the pictures soon... they are still on my camera.