We cut down our tree

It is amazing how far our yard has come since we moved in!  In this picture you can't even tell that there is a tree in the back yard.  There were tons of them!  What a mess we had back then.  We had dandelions instead of grass.  We had weeds throughout and there were about 50 more trees than we have now.

Here's a picture from last summer from about the same angle in the yard.  What a difference.

Here is a picture from spring a two years ago.  We still have weeds, but the other major foliage is gone.  I don't think I ever got a good picture of the full tree, but from this picture you can see three major pieces going up from the main trunk.

Nature took down the back section.  It fell right through the fence in back.  You can see the replaced board in the fence.  That thing got shattered when the tree fell but wasn't too tough to fix.
Then last Thanksgiving as the weather was warm, Mike and Josh thought it would be fun to take down a branch.  All it took was a hatchet to get through the soft wood to take it down.

When the branch fell, it broke into lots of pieces like the ones Josh and Mike are carrying here.  That tree is/was so rotten throughout.

Finally this spring the last of the three branches fell during a storm.  It was the perfect fall.  It landed in our neighbors yard and did very minimal damage.  Plus, then I didn't have to try to figure out what to do with the wood.  The neighbors took care of it all!

Finally, Jay came over and helped get the remaining portion of the tree down.  I think we picked the hottest day of the summer to do it.  It was predicted to be over 100 degrees.  I weighed myself before and after.  Along with the two water bottles and the 32 oz. Gatorade that I drank I still lost 4 pounds out there in about 2 hours of work.  Again, it was brutal.

Here's what we had to deal with:

Don't have a rope?  Use an extension cord.

What do you think?  I used my foot to kick away the base of the tree.  

Jay getting ready to cut.

We just missed the neighbor's telephone wire when this came down.  That was the only real worry that I had when we started. 

Piece #2 down.  Now to cut it up.  Jay did the major cutting while I was hacking away with the ax to split up the wood for fires.  Unfortunately, most of it was too rotten to burn.

Termites...

Still sweating away.

Most of the tree was taken away by me on my bike to be reclaimed by nature.  Sometimes the kids went with me to help with the reclamation project.

Throwing some small chunks of wood into the river.

They learned that wood floats and rocks sink.

Enjoying the view of the water flowing over the dam.

Charlie insists on holding the handle bars when he rides with me.  As long as he isn't yanking us off course, I love it!

Finished product.  So nice not to have to worry about it falling over every storm we have.