Another Tree Bites the Dust (or, More Accurately, Bites the House)

Just when you think homeownership is getting kinda boring and you start wondering what project to tackle next (deck? kitchen backsplash?) and are just planning to do some dumb maintenance (re-caulk the tub, how exciting), a tree falls on your house.

Let's see that again:

 Hi tree.

Last night a half hour before we put the littlest one down for bedtime, the ground around this tree's roots got too wet to hold it down, so the tree - always slightly angled over our house - plunged into the kids' bedroom. I saw it happen from the dining room window while getting the table set. I heard a whoosh and felt the house shake and looked up in time to see the tree moving (probably on its bounce back from impact).

First we took everyone outside to see if it even looked safe to go upstairs and investigate. When it seemed like the house wasn't going to crumble, I went up to see this:

Fast forward to panicked phone calls to tree companies (this being Friday at 6:30pm...), calls to our home insurance, texts to very helpful neighbors, etc, and by 9pm, we had an emergency tree company here to take it out of our house, in the dark and in the rain.

This cost way more than any of our previous tree removals have cost. But then they came within a few hours, at night, to pull a tree off a house, and pretty much knew we were desperate (the idea of shopping for quotes was not exactly one I was willing to entertain). Hopefully our insurance comes through for us.

Sometime late in the night, we heard shattering. Out went the branch and down came the glass. Here's the view from this morning, with a tarp blocking the window.

So much glass. Clean up was not fun and multi-stage (pick up big pieces, vacuums medium pieces in crummy vacuum, vacuum again with good vacuum, wet mop, etc.)

 Yikes...

Fun side note, for some reason the water that was getting in a floor above was making its way down in drips to the window frame in the office below. Sigh...

This is the other view from this morning - looks like the empty lot next door was good for something. If the trees hadn't been totally cleared away, I'm not actually sure how the crane would have gotten to our back yard to remove our tree. Though I'm still not totally convinced it would have happened if the trees there would have contributed to rain water absorption. (D joked that the tree fell onto that side of the house because it was trying to give us the shade in that room we lost when the 8 trees were removed.)

 The tarp the tree people put up was good, but not good enough. There was no actual seal and we didn't know how long we would have to wait for repairs. A new window pane alone can take a few weeks.

 So today we had a contractor come out to give us an estimate on the repairs and we also paid him to do more dramatic sealing and clearing right away. A team of two spent about 3 hours putting temporary patches on the 3 holes in the roof, removing debris from the window area, and putting up plywood to weatherproof the hole.

 It's not pretty, but at least the kids' room is livable for now. It's Saturday night and no one else is coming until at least Monday. So now we wait...