Always Biting Off More Than I Can Chew; Log Cabin Makeover; Part III

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Lots of pictures in this post.  We went to the house a couple of times and took down a few trees.  Johnny did some branch limbing "Manuel" style in behind the shop.  Things were looking pretty good.

Before

After, hard to see, but we took down one of the tall Jack Pines on the right.

Then "Hurricane Dave" came along to help.  That's my new nickname for my cousin Dave, you will see why!

The first thing he did was move the old car out to the street, I need to arrange to have it picked up.

So this is how the front looked before Hurricane Dave came by.

And a few of the back yard.

Here he comes!

After pushing the trees over, he picked them up and shook them to get rid of some of the sand, Johnny cut off the roots, Dave would pick up the roots and shake them again and then pile them up.

Dave Starratt hard at work.

We left that mess and moved to the front.  This one fell just right.

And then...

Oops!  This one almost gave Dave a heart attack!  It was heading right for the house and he couldn't redirect it, and then for some reason it slowed right down and rested gently on the roof, didn't even take off the eave trough!

He lifted it off and moved it over.

Manuel moved in to cut the roots off.

Here we go again!

We thought he would push this one on top of the last two, but he couldn't take the stress.  He pushed it into the bush and then pulled it out for limbing.

I can't believe we walked away and left it looking like this, but we did.  We had to get home so Johnny could help Budd with gyproc, and we probably won't get back to clean it up until we get back from our trip to Missouri.  I told him that I always feel good when we leave because we have made improvements, hmmm, this time? Don't think I can say that, but sometimes it has to get worse before it can get better.

Backyard

Manuel couldn't pull himself away until the power saw ran out of gas.  He plans to get a portable sawmill so he's salvaging the big chunks for that, and the rest will keep us warm next year after they dry.

I can't wait to get back there and start the clean up!

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Always biting off more than I can chew! Part II

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 OK, here is another of the before pics,

and here is the interim pic

and another.

A pic of the side yard, or bush, I guess I should say.

Here is the same view after Manuel spent about a half an hour pulling, yes pulling out evergreens.  And I picked up the garbage and carried away his brush.  Doesn't it look awesome!

A before pic of the view from the front door.

The new view, but a little off to the side.  I take so many before pics and then don't get quite the same shot the second time around.

Regardless of the angle, I think you can see the important changes.

Hey, wait a minute, I thought we had this part all cleaned up!  Manuel did some tree cutting (there were a few trees interfering with the hydro lines, plus a big dead balsam), and messed up the front lawn.

 We hauled 4 truckloads (and I mean heaping truckloads) of brush to the back and burned them up.  There, that's better.

This is what it looked like beside the shop when we started.  There's a dog pen there,

and some junk to haul away.

First Manuel decided to free up the hydro line to the cabin, look, you can see the cabin!  You will have to take my word for it that all you could see was bush before.  This pic was taken on day 2 of clean up of this area.  Manuel previously took down the part of the dog pen that was on our property and we did some clean up.

I talked to the neighbour and got permission to clean up the part that was on her property.  (Trying not to step on any toes, we are not used to having neighbours.)  The property line is somewhere between the post in the middle of the pic, and that chunk of fence we left last time.

Ready, set, go!

The transformation!

Not done of course, will do some clean up further back now that we have freed up the front.

Now to the backyard.  The plan is to take down the big jackpine of the left, but save the pines behind it, along with the apple tree in the middle.

Whoops!  Things don't always go as planned.  Missed the pines, but totally trashed the apple tree, darn!  Johnny was using a pike pole to push it in the other direction and I took over the cutting of the tree, but that tree was determined to fall the wrong way.  At least I couldn't be blamed for not pushing hard enough :)

We decided to leave the poor sad looking apple tree and see how it grows back.  We can always cut it out later.  I got most of the brush burned up, but just totally ran out of steam and called it a day.  There's always tomorrow, right?

Aside from some of the garbage that we moved previously, most of the work shown on Part II of the blog was done in 2 short days, the first day Johnny got called to work and we couldn't get done what we had planned, and yesterday he had other things to do and when he accomplished what he had set out to do, left me there burning brush for a couple more hours.  See what I mean when I say he's a "machine"!

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