Chainsaw Massacre that Ends with Lights

I took Friday off from work, and spent a few hours participating in the madness of Black Friday.  After showing off my loot to LD (mostly DVD movies), I decided to finish clearing the vegetation on the east side of the house.

All nice and clean!

The northeast side of the yard is actually starting to look decent now.

This morning LD wanted to go for a run at Shawnee Mission Park, but I was too lazy and decided to go to Panera instead.  After spending a couple of hours reading the Sunday paper, enjoying a hot cup of coffee and an orange scone (yummy), we came home and LD decided to tackle the 50+ year old bushes that were dwarfing the side of our garage.

Can you actually spot LD in there?

One trunk left.  We need a new chain for the chainsaw to cut it down!

LD wanted to remove the vegetation so we can put up Christmas lights.  So after all that hard work, LD talked me into going to Target to buy LED lights.  I thought we were going to hang them the next time we had warm weather, but LD had other plans.  We got home, and she immediately pulled the ladder out of the garage.  I had no other option, but to help out.  The lights look better than I expected, and they only use 2.4 watts per string of lights!

The War Against the "Jungle"

LD/Delia - 2    Jungle - 0

Our first point was the cleanup of the vegetation outside of the bar windows (see October's blog post).  After that we got the bug to do more, we just needed the right time.

We had a "scorching" weekend (for the end of November that is).  With temperatures in the high 50's it was hard to pass up the temptation of tackling some of the overgrowth around our yard.  We have a dead tree near the master bedroom whose branch fell, and was leaning on the cable and phone line (which we are having problems with).  It had already lost one branch last week, and we feared that the big branch was going to fall as well.

Before

Before

Next to the tree we have a ton of Forsythias.  The overgrowth was so bad that the ATT technician commented that he was glad that the problem was the router and not the phone line.

Before-the air conditioner is in there somewhere!  The compost bin is barely peaking out.

Several months ago LD started to remove the Forsythias that wrapped around the east side to the front, but she was only able to remove the front bushes.  So we spent a couple of hours on Saturday and a couple of hours on Sunday cutting them down.  We managed to cut down over 85% of the "mass".  I think one more hour and we would have gotten them all done.

After-the compost bin looks like it is sticking out now!

After-oh look, we do have an air conditioner.

The bad news is that our brush pile keeps growing!  We once thought about having a bonfire, but it is so large that it might cause a forest fire!!  At some point in time we are going to have to haul it away.

Brush pile

We are also trying to find "green" ways to remove 2 very old, large Christmas trees.  The previous owner planted two Christmas trees about 40-50 years ago, and they are now 20-30 feet tall.  So we came up with the idea of giving them away to a city, community or organization.  They are free to anyone who is willing to cut them down and haul away.  We advertised them on Craigslist.  So if you know anyone who is interested in very large Christmas trees, let us know!

Tree #1

Tree #2

We have 1.25 acres, so this is only the beginning of our yard work!  It is going to be a long journey.