When a Tree Falls

When a tree falls, or rather tree branches....multiple times....that tree needs to be taken care of.

Remember last year when the tree in our front yard lost a branch and it blocked the road? Well, almost exactly a year later, it lost another branch. This time it didn't fall across the road, but fell on my car. It narrowly missed breaking the back window, but gave it a decent scratching, a large dent, and pushed some of the rubber (?) siding stuff out of place.

This time it just blocked my driveway.

So the same tree guy came out, got out of his truck, and immediately said, "Isn't this the same tree I said needed to be removed last year?". Yep, that would be it. Except our HOA doesn't like to move quickly on anything. Ultimately, he said the tree HAD to be removed before it started raining again or else we'd have branches falling into the house, our car, and the neighbor's car. But again, the HOA is slow as molasses. After numerous phone calls over a week and a half, stressing that we were going to have significant property damage on our hands if we didn't take the tree out, we were able to get emergency approval from the management company (not the HOA itself but the people who work for them). That was good enough for us, so out it came!

Now my yard looks weird and empty.

And Aiden was very interested in the stump.

Here's another before (from when we bought the house) and after to compare.

We have so much more natural light coming through the front of the house, the yard guys don't have to clean up massive amounts of leaves every Friday, and I don't have to deal with my car being covered in bird poo constantly. The whole tree removing process was amazingly fast. From the time they arrived to the time they left totaled about 15 minutes. And the rains started the very next morning. Whew!

I am so happy to have that tree gone. Although now it is painfully obvious that the trim on the house needs to be painted. And that will need to wait until next summer.