Trees, Gromit! Trees! - Part2

I'm keeping with the Wallace and Gromit theme.  I like it.  To recap, pretty much everything that rhymes with cheese is said in a 'Wallace voice' in my head.  So this all makes sense.  Really.

"No trees, Gromit.  Not a bit in the house."

Surprisingly, that pretty much sums it up.  In Part 1 of the Tree Saga, we cut down a tree (alright, giant weed) that was about to encroach on our electric wires.  For Part 2 - we're taking took down a tree we'd rather not see fall through to encroach the inside of our house.

Now when I say 'we' here, I mean Jon.  And my stepdad, Steve.  Alright, mostly my stepdad, Steve.  But not me at all.  In fact, I did not want to DIY it.  I'll pause while you pick yourself off the floor.  I was willing to hire someone to do it and Jon was wanted to do it himself. Go figure.  But once Steve offered to help, the deal was sealed, and I was cautiously on board.  I was able to console my 'loss' by counting the stacks of money they saved us :P

So there is the very dead tree with it fist up in the air, poised ready to strike our house. I do worry about it, since it seems we have some sort of yearly major storm that takes down many local trees and wipes out power for a weeks... like this ice storm that I actually wrote about a few years back.

So lets get crack-a-lacking.  First off in our This-Does-Not-Substitute-Professional-Advice post, you wrap a rope around the tree, somewhere high up. Toss one side up, loop it around, and make one end a slip knot.

Once the rope is secured around the tree, we they tie the end to the base of another tree... which is out of sight for this image.

Now that the rope is in place, we Steve notched out the side that we want it to fall on.

Now, I did have some sort of duty for the day.  I worryingly moved the cars to the back yard.

I cautiously kept my family a safe distance away.

As well as concerningly practiced an escape route with everyone, had the tree come our way. And most important.  I nervously filmed the whole thing coming down:)

I wish the camera had caught the noise a lot better...  It was quite the satisfying sound. You can hear both mine (and my mother's) nerves peaking as we yell "RUN!" to Jon...  Like he wouldn't have otherwise.  ::eye roll::  I really shouldn't have been that paranoid, as I have seen Steve has cut down a lot of trees before.... but it's so much harder to stay calm when it's your husband (and house) on the line.

The video wasn't that clear in the next few steps, so I'll outline them.  (I don't have a very good handle getting good looking compressed video made, so... sorry.  I hope to get a new camera soon.) Basically, Steve makes a few cuts on the back side of the tree now, slightly above the other cut. He pauses to let Jon try to pull the rope out to the side to pull the tree down in the direction we want it to go.  This was actually our their second pull attempt after Steve made a slightly deeper cut.

Once the tree was down we all ran in to investigate.  It was pretty sweet looking smattering of remains.

After backing everyone away for the work to begin again, I had Steve pose with his kill.

They used Steve's Log Jack/TimberJack to help turn the logs over.  It also kept the logs off the ground for the chainsaw, so that they could cut the log into manageable pieces. I had to google the name.  My guess was 'log turner'.  I wasn't far off, as google got me to the right name :)

Steve left large section of tree for us, per my request.  We're hoping to turn into some sort of outdoor seating next year.

That's it!  No more dead tree piercing the sky in our front yard!

And for those who really enjoyed the tree's slow motion, here is the koyaanisqatsi version:

Again, sorry for the crappy film quality & compression of the video. Edit: Wow, uploading made it 3x worse.  I give up!

(.....And if this reference is foreign to you, I highly recommend watching Koyaanisqatsi. Warning: It's artsy!  But, you'll be able to better understand references in comedies like Scrubs, the Simpsons... and the Simpsons.)