I took some time off around the holidays. This is the project I’d planned:
I bought 13 of these – solid pine, pre-framed panel doors, intending to do all of them. I got 12 stained and urethaned, eight installed, and have five frames painted. I’ll be getting a professional to do those going in the kitchen, as they have about 3/4" of the frame sunk in the floor. One we’re leaving for later, as that one has a cat flap in it.
One reason I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped:
We had a dickens of a wind storm – 40 mph/65 kph winds for most of a day. This tree was a 75’/23 m tall, 3’/1m diameter yellow poplar/tuliptree. It was perfectly healthy, just came down. It was right at the edge of our property, fell across one neighbor’s yard smack-dab into the fence of another neighbor, who has dogs. It took out about 50 feet of his fence, and we’d never met the guy. It turns out that we’re not legally responsible for this since the tree was healthy, but still wanted to at least remove the tree from our neighbors’ yards. So my sister’s husband and my wife’s stepfather came with four chainsaws between them and we spent a lo-o-ong day out there with chainsaws, wedges, mauls, and even an old axle shaft from a Model T (to get the first cut-section out of the trunk), cutting up the tree. Much of it is still in the one neighbor’s yard, but it’s in small enough chunks (about 80 lb) that I’ll be able to move it as I have time.
Damn! I hate when that happens. One minute you’ve got a healthy tree, and the next minute this nasty fence just jumps up from out of nowhere and takes your tree out right at the root line. I mean, what are our backyards coming to when we can’t trust our own fences to behave properly and mind themselves and sort of, you know, like, remain stationary? I mean, really! Geez!
Well. I can identify on many counts.
One: I’m very good at installing doors and door hardware. Ours are some kind of exotic hardwood, but the person who ordered them can no longer remember the name of the wood or where he ordered them from, and I didn’t start paying attention to this stuff until I realized I really had to…BUT…I did end up installing the hinges, handles, and locking lever thingies in a whole bunch of them, and I can totally hang the things.
And also (two:)
What do you suppose that tree in front of our house is?
Right! It’s a tulip poplar. It’s a big monster of a tulip poplar whose two trunks are held in check by two cables way up in the treetops.
There was a time when I wanted it to fall on the house. Someday I will post a photo essay of those days of renovation. In case anyone thinks I bought this house. I did buy it. With sweat, tears, and probably blood. (pinot noir alert!)
Well…anyway…I don’t want the tulip poplar to fall on the house right now. But it sure provides some nice shade in the summer.
On the positive side, no one was injured. My neighbor has a tree in horrible shape. Many years ago, I told him that he does not need to feel bad in the least when that tree falls on our laundry room/carport because a master suite is going to raise like a phoenix. We keep waiting.
We’ve got another tree that our deck actually wraps around (among somewhere between 25 and 29 others, depending on who’s counting). It’s pretty protected, so hopefully the white oak that’s unprotected on the west side of the house will be the one that falls on us..
What to do about old trees that are growing close to the house is a common problem in my neighborhood, which was a mature woods in the early part of the 20th century. I had two large trees in my backyard removed this past year. It was expensive, but I feel more at ease knowing that all of those branches are not hanging over our house, garage, parked cars, and power lines coming into our house as well as our neighbor’s house. Last winter a large limb from the tree broke off and fell over all of the utility cables coming into the house, and this past Spring another large branch fell onto the garage and my car, luckily not causing too much damage. Call me psychic if you want, but I commented to my wife that that limb was going to fall, and the next morning we looked out the window and it had fallen on the garage. The back yard sure looks different with the two big trees gone, but we still have other trees and room to plant new ones, choosing ones that will not become so large that they present a similar problem to future owners of the house. Before the two trees were removed the backyard was in heavy shade, but now I have enough sunshine to plant a backyard garden.
I love populars even though they are trashy trees, meaning they drop debris non-stop. I’d be more concerned about the impact on my foundation with a tree growing so close to my home. We had 9 60+ year old trees in our yard until a tornado came through. Also took off the back of the house with the help of a Loblolly/Longleaf cross. A friend of mine who is an arborist, and my wife and I as crew, cleaned it all up in a day using a 90 ton crane. Our whole neighborhood suddenly became defoliated, it was quite strange.
