Back That Branch Up

I committed a blog sin by forgetting to take a "before" picture, but trust me when I tell you that the big magnolia in the back yard was starting to crowd our garage roof.

D originally wanted to have the tree removed entirely but I enjoy its shade and fragrant flowers (though not the giant pods that seem to fall constantly and are large enough to cause a twisted ankle). In any case, we decided we would try to trim it ourself with an extendible tree pruner. With a freshly installed sharp blade, we went to work attacking the branches leaning on the roof. Fortunately none were so squashed up against the roof to make us fear the falling branch would grab a slate on its way down.

 You can sort of see the problem branches from here....a little. If you use your imagination:

 The sharp Fiskars blade made surprisingly quick and satisfying work. We removed 3 branches (D did 2 and I did 1) in about 10 minutes.

Here's the "after" picture from the angle we should have used first. You can see none of the branches  are touching anymore

It took longer to trim the branches, especially after we realized that our handsaw was incredibly dull. A 2 day delay to wait for a new 15'' handsaw from Amazon, and we were set:

We're saving these for firewood so D cut it into usable pieces, all stacked and ready for winter.

This was a very exciting project, given that we started out getting estimates to remove the whole tree for about $500 and spent a total of about $20 for new saw blades instead. I'm sure I'll continue to curse the tree out when I'm cleaning up the pods, but I'm glad we decided not to take it down. At least now I know how easy it is to take off a few low-hanging, annoying branches.