Yardwork Project Completed: Clean Your Surroundings — Clean Your Mind!

I'm tired.

I spent most the today doing yardwork, and tidying up the remains of previous yardwork projects that had been started but "not quite finished." Seems like there are always a few of those around because... life happens!

The guest room window is behind that, somewhere...

Lately, I have been in a tree-felling frame of mind. We have a lot of lovely trees on our property, but the previous owners didn't seem to think very much about the locations they chose... and the fact that trees tend to grow.

Among other things, we had this rather bushy maple growing much too close to the house on the south side... I suppose the idea was that it would offer some shade to the guest room during the summer, but I'm not sure what they were thinking.

I repeatedly trimmed it back from the wall and thinned it... and topped it, a couple of times. We even tried to cut a "window" in it to let light into the bedroom, but that didn't much work.

No, really... there's a window behind there...

Then there was the additional problem of an incredibly invasive ivy, trying to strangle the tree and take over the house (as ivy tends to, if you're not careful!) which was getting increasingly difficult to control.

So, time for the poor tree to move on to its next incarnation.

Cutting down a sizeable tree that's infested with ivy is a pain in the ass, because first you have to dig your way through the greenery to even find the tree trunk.

Since the tree was also very close to the house, I decided that it would be best to "dismantle" it in parts, rather than just cut it down. A wise choice!

Down she comes, bit by bit...

The thing about the ivy is that it makes it very unpredictable where limbs are going to fall,,, and I also didn't want anything crashing down on the heat pump (that's the one that needs major repairs!) or accidentally going through the window...

Besides, "in pieces" made sense, as I also needed the component parts to fit in the back of our truck to go to the yard waste area of the local dump.

No, I was not going to save it for firewood. The amount of work involved in dealing with thick vines of ivy wrapped around the useful bits was more than I was willing to deal with.

Down to manageable stumps... look, there IS a window there!

Like most "projects" it was rather more work than I expected, but so it goes. Hacking through the ivy, and then removing from the siding of the house was a pain in the butt!

On the plus side, there's suddenly a lot more light in the guest room! It had really become one of the darkest corners of the house...

In the end, it took two dump runs to get rid of all the branches, greenery and the ivy... I saves the largest and straightest of the multiple trunks for a different project where we are building up one of our beds to keep it out of what has become a bit of a run-off path from up the hill of our neighborhood during the wet season. The water flow changed some years back when there was construction 150 yards uphill, and the slab and their septic system somehow "diverted" the subterranean runoff route so parts of our lower yard have become a winter swamp.

It looks a bit bare... but now I can scrub, sand and paint the wall...

It was almost dark, by the time I got finished and all the debris hauled away... shorter days are definitely here! Of course, it's not super pretty with just the bare wall there... eventually we might put some low flowering bushes there.

For now, "one thing leads to another," because now I am going to be able to thoroughly scrub that wall, then give it a good sanding and a fresh coat of paint. A couple of siding boards will likely need replacing, as well... the ivy got under some of them.

But that's for another day!

For now, we just have a much lighter guest room.

Evening mood in the back yard... at lower left the spot where the tree "trunklets" will be used

Lightening the Load...

Getting this particular project done not only feels like an accomplishment in the practical sense... but it was also a poignant reminder of how getting things done can lift a mental burden.

You walk around with part of you mind holding a space for "this needs to be done," and it has a weight of sorts. Now that weight is GONE, along with the messy tree and ivy on the wall!

Thanks for reading, and have a great Sunday!

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Created at 20221002 02:30 PDT
0660/1906