T I M B E R ! ! !

We have had a really ugly looking 20 foot tall Norway Spruce stump adorning our front yard for almost four years .  It has been irritating me every single time I've had to look at it, so that's been almost 2000 different times during the years since the electric company cut the top off of it.  Although I've mentioned it a few times, I'm apparently really really patient and I don't like to nag, so nothing has ever come of it - until today.

Every time I mentioned getting a chain saw and just cutting it down myself, Doug has said that I should wait because he wanted to pull it out of the ground so that there would be no tree stump. I'm not sure how this happened, but all of a sudden Doug responded to my most recent threat of chopping it down myself and today was the day we finally got it down. Doug did most of the work, but I sawed most of the tree roots so that it would come out of the ground easily.

Isn't it hideous?  I think it is a real eyesore.

At first Doug toyed with the notion of attaching it to his car and pulling it down that way.  Fortunately he changed his mind.  I guess he didn't want to end up in one of those Darwin Awards videos.

He decided instead to use his magic pulley.  This is the same pulley that Doug used to lift the all of the foam core panels up to build the roof of our house and that we later used to build the front section and the front porch.  This pulley has amazing powers!  It will lift or pull hundreds of pounds, maybe even a thousand.  He attached it to an unused concrete pier near our foundation at one end and to the top of the tree at the other end.

After the rope broke he used a chain around the trunk instead.

We also decided to cut most of the big outer roots with a Saws-All.

Now we're making some progress!

Watch it come down in this exciting video!

Yaaay!  It's down at last!  Now all we have to do is chop it up and take it to the dump.   And that WILL be happening tomorrow!  Yaay Doug!