Oh my god, where do I even begin? I have officially lived in this house for 621 days and I can guarantee I have done something renovation related for AT LEAST a third of that time.

I already mentioned that this house needs a lot of work. Some of the main concerns we had right off the bat were knob and tube wiring, asbestos in the basement, an old heating system, and approximately 10 dead or dying trees around the yard.

We decided to tackle the biggest issues first because we like to think of these as our “bug out bag projects.” Have you ever seen the show Doomsday Preppers? DD preppers keep “bug out bags” packed at all times in case they have to BOLT. I consider these projects similar in the sense that if shit hits the fan and we have to suddenly sell the house, at least these projects will be taken care of. Basically, let’s do all the essential UNFUN things first, and work our way up from there!

If you didn’t already know, I am a natural light FEEN. The side of the house that faces the yard was pretty dark, so between that and one of our trees dropping bark on our neighbor’s car, we decided to remove the trees first. We began the project by having a few arborists come out and survey our yard. This was fun because we also picked their brains and had them ID some other plants, trees, and shrubs that we didn’t recognize. They helped us identify which trees were hazardous, or on their way to becoming hazardous (mostly Ash trees due to the Emerald Ash borer), and gave us general advice which I always welcome! Whenever any kind of contractor, tradesman, or expert comes to our house, I always like to ask a lot of questions, going above and beyond the project at hand. You might as well while you have their attention and they are looking around your property!

So in May of 2019, we hired a company and took the day off work to watch the “tree show.” And a show it was! The tree removal crew consisted of about five guys, and the smallest one was the dude who climbed the trees. He wore spikes on his shoes and was tethered to the tree with his chainsaw hanging at his side. Before they started I asked him if he ever gets scared climbing up these enormous trees and he answered, “a little bit.” HA! It was scary enough just to watch him! If you haven’t ever seen it, tree removal is a pretty cool process.

The tree climber starts by sawing off a handful of lower limbs, pausing to let the ground crew scoop them up and drag them out to the chipper on the street, and then climbs up a couple more feet continuing the process.

We have access to our roof through the attic, so Peter and I climbed out on the roof and still felt tiny compared to the 100 foot pine the guys removed from the middle of the lawn. This tree was the grand finale! Once the majority of the limbs were sawn off, the guy started sawing triangle wedges on each side of the trunk to create a notch. When the notch was ready, the grounds crew pulled the rope to steer the tree down in a controlled direction.

The tree was too tall to cut down all at once, so they cut the trunk down in two sections. Of course I was THAT girl and yelled TIMBERRRRRRR! These trunks made some serious NOISE hitting the ground. Our entire house (as well as our neighbors’) were all shaking. People came out of their houses to watch and cars even pulled over on the street, it became quite the spectacle! It also became a little bit of a social event and was a fun way to meet some of our neighbors!

Our driveway is only 8 feet wide with huge stone walls on either side, so we had a large bush removed that ran alongside it. This helped open it up and make it feel less intimidating, even though I still drive like a granny up and down the driveway (I’ve hit my side mirrors on the wall once or twice).

Once the guys were finished chopping down the trees, we had to wait for a different crew to come haul away the trunks and grind the stumps. Due to scheduling conflicts this took a while, so we had a pretty crazy tree graveyard for a few weeks—of course we took this opportunity to have a photo shoot!

The yard was overgrown with a ton of english and poison ivy. I had my first bout with PI earlier in the year...OUCH! The ivy made the yard feel like a jungle; it was climbing up the trees, fences, and it spread all over the ground. Removing all of this began to open up our yard and let more light in through the side of the house.

After the stump grinding, we were left with huge piles of tree mulch around the yard. It was expensive to haul away so we decided to spread it around our garden. This was a good idea in theory, but dispersing about 10 huge piles of mulch became a freakin’ back breaking CHORE. In between other projects, this took us the whole summer of 2019 to finish. We were pretty beat up from wheel barrowing mulch around on those long hot summer days!

Over the last couple months we’ve had some wild and crazy storms (hello global warming!) which have caused a few large limbs to drop from our healthy trees. If you have tall trees on your property, I would highly recommend having them looked at by an expert. You don’t want to end up with one of those bad boys in your living room!

After the trees and ivy were removed, the grass was in pretty bad shape. In late October of 2019 we rented a lawn aerator and planted grass seed. As a test, we only seeded half of the yard, which looked kind of hilarious, because the seed really took! We’ve slowly been chipping away at cleaning up the yard and it has really made a huge difference! 

This past Spring we decided to grow some vegetables, so Peter built two raised garden beds. The veggies needed a structure to climb, so we worked with a local metal fabricator (Hoodco Inc.), to turn our vision into a reality. Once the frames were installed, our veggie garden really took off and now we have more tomatoes then we know what to do with!

Our next big yard project is happening this week and I cannot wait to share the details with you!

Until next time!