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...

The Lot, Post 1: A Lot of Nothing

Some background: we live next to an empty lot. It was owned by someone out of state who never took care of it and who had never, as far as we've seen, visited it. It's created some fun times like when we have to have our town file violations and then come chop down the foot-tall grass, or when we have to shovel the sidewalk every winter. It was an ugly overgrown mess but at least it provided us with shade and a hope that perhaps one day we could unite it with our property and turn it into a proper yard.

Then it went on the market and, many months later, sold. Abruptly afterwards, the trees got tattooed.

The writing was on the wall or, at least, on the trees. Neighbors got together to try to get the town to step in and refuse to permit the tall, beautiful trees to be cut. For reasons I'll get into in future posts perhaps, we and our neighbors think that there may be permitting issues later and that the lot may not, in the end, be able to have a house on it. So we wanted one simple thing - don't remove trees that are decades (or more!) old before you know if you can actually use the property.

No dice. And so what follows are some pretty depressing before and after photos.

Here's the lot, with our house on the edge of the picture.

 And here it is two days later.

Here's the view out the second floor bedroom window (the one you can see from the pictures above):

Needless to say, we had to put up room darkening curtains. I'm pretty sure the lack of shade on our roof will raise our electric bill significantly as well.

 Here's the view from our house to our neighbors on the other side of the lot:

 And here it is now.

It's a good thing we like our neighbors.

If this lot actually gets developed, I plan to blog it as a side note here, just because seeing a house go up next to ours could be really interesting.

Or the new owner will decide the lot isn't buildable and we'll be left with this ugly eyesore and none of the redeeming beautiful trees.

Oh deer!

Last fall after our rope hammock pretty much disintegrated, I splurged on this beautiful blue Hammaka 2-person hammock (more like one adult plus one-to-two squirmy children):

I liked it so much I even remembered to take it in in the winter.

It made it through spring and half of summer beautifully - the colors hadn't faded yet despite being in the sun pretty much from 11am to sunset. I actually enjoyed sitting in it (when it was 95 and humid out there). And then this week we noticed this when we went outside:

Multiple individually ripped ropes and even some nibbles to the cloth itself. What the heck! The only thing we can think of is deer. Did it need more fiber in its diet?

I'm curious for suggestions on what I can do to prevent this. I really want to buy another but at $65 each, I'm not on the market for deer food. Nor am I willing to bring it in nightly. Please help!

(Our neighbor's solution to the deer problem in his garden - assuming that's what it is in this case - was to apply for a permit to build an extra high fence. While I would like to enjoy my hammock in peace, I'm not quite that desperate.)