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.