naked house (tree removal)
Some previous owner planted pine trees in the front corner of our yard. They screen the house from the intersection, which was probably the objective, but they've grown a lot in the 7 years we've lived here. (I stopped mowing that part of the yard because there was less and less light and the grass stopped growing.) They block the winter sun from the house, but not the summer sun. And the roots would eventually destroy our stone retaining wall.
anniemal wrote about our extreme yard work a couple of days ago, but I wanted to wait until I had before-and-after pictures. So here's 4 shots moving around the corner from the front to the side of our house, before and after the trees were cut down. They also removed some shrubbery from the end of the house, where some of the yews suddenly and mysteriously died.
Then a shot of some of the stumps, the new view out of the yard (that view was a wall of trees the day before), and the back yard, with the large oak tree that is not healthy. That tree will be coming out too eventually, and all the stumps need to be ground out. There's a lot more light in the house now. And we can see a lot more out our windows. It smells Christmasy when I come home - all that pine sap. Now that the house is visible I guess we ought to put up X-mas lights. (We do have some; we've just never put them up.) We need something to replace our screen of trees - perhaps just some more modest hedges. There's a couple of dwarf maples on the east side of the front yard, and a decorative plum tree on the west side.
The oak that will be going too - it dropped a large branch earlier this year, right through the shed roof!
I'd like to have a matching retaining wall on the left side (west end) of our front yard. There's an embankment there now, and it's hard to control its weediness and disarray. Does anyone know about cement/concrete walls with a faux/textured stone face, to match pre-existing walls? (I doubt that we could even find real stone to match, assuming we could afford to have a stone wall built....) The house next door has a sidewalk-level cut through to the house for a single-car garage in the basement. Our driveway is around the corner on the less-busy side street.
While I was taking the "after" pictures, I chatted with a woman who was waiting at the bus stop across the street. There's a log cabin facing our house. (You can see part of a wall in the picture of the stumps - horizontal stripes of wood logs and mud(?) daub. Their yard also has young pines that are quickly filling out as a screen.) It has a modern addition on one end and behind, but I had assumed the core house had been there since early-American times. The street used to be a railroad (which is quite evident from its narrowness, lots of cuts and fills, and gentle grade in a very hilly area (because of the cuts and fills)), and before that it was reportedly an Indian trail. But she told me that this log cabin was built in Pennsylvania - bought, disassembled, brought south, and reassembled here - and put on top of a modern basement, too.