April 26, 2012 - Goodbye Trees

Taking down trees is one of those necessary evils of home building.  We really didn't want to do it, but we really do want to have our own place to live again sometime soon.  So, with virtually no wiggle room as far as where the house could go on the lot, we did what we had to do.

As you can see in the site plan above, our lot had only four trees to begin with, and two were directly in the way of our house and garage locations.  A third (the one that had our "Intent to Build" sign on it) was dying and leaning towards the future house.  Not a good combo.  So, we had to take down three out of our four trees.  Fortunately the fourth is beautiful and we hope it will last a log time despite the fact that the tree guy informed us it is home to many, many carpenter ants.

Here are a few pictures of the tree-removal process.

One thing that did help us stomach the removal a bit better is that the tree guy assured us that typically about 98% of the tree material is reused, mostly either for mulch, or milling into lumber, and he can provide receipts for where all the wood went.  Also, our job foreman took several of the larger pieces to make some furniture, so hopefully when our new home is complete it will house a table made from one of those trees!

After the job was done, our site looked like this:

A little sad-looking without those beautiful trees, but at least now there's room for a house!