Goodbye, Tree

Yesterday I had a tree company come out to look at this huge bottlebrush that leaves a ton of crap on my yard.  We need to remove it for a couple of reasons:  we want to expand the house in the future (adding on a bathroom to the master bedroom) and we want to put in a pool next summer.  While we could have waited on this, the reason I really hated to is because we get tired of this:

 

All those leaves everywhere! and these:

those hurt when you step on them, and there's been plenty of times I've caught myself before I fell when I feel them rolling under my feet!  And there's hundreds of them out there.

The first thing the tree guy said was, "That's not a bottlebrush, it's a tristania."  It looks like a bottlebrush because the bloom are similar, but this has a different type of bark and it's much larger.  Which is what I thought was odd about this, but I'm no tree expert, that's for sure.  So besides the tree in the picture at the top, you can see two smaller, interior oaks behind it.  These are pretty messy trees, too, so they were going to take them all out.  They showed up bright and early this morning and got right down to business:

 

and in no time, they had that tree cut right up.  My cats were fascinated.  When they got to this part, the guy started cutting chunks of the main trunk, and when they hit the ground, you could feel the thunk!

I had to go to work, so I left right around here, hoping that when I got home, it would be neat and tidy, like they promised.  And it was!  And now, it looks so bare out there!

This morning:
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          This afternoon!
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 One of the downsides to cutting these trees down is that our yard is going to feel HOT with the late afternoon sun.  But we'll get some stuff planted, and get a pergola eventually to help out.  It'll be nice in the late fall and winter, though, to get all that sunlight streaming in. 

So now, here's the view from in front of the garage:

When we closed on the house
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                                                        This afternoon:
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Yes, that sad lemon tree will be going eventually, too, but it blocks the sun from coming directly in the living room during the late afternoon. We're hoping that the bamboo we planted will grow in the next couple of years to help do some of that, too. 


Now that the trees are gone, we're probably going to lose what's left of the scrubby grass, but what the heck, more room for plants. 

And now, I can start looking for estimates for a pool, so we can plan how that's going to work in the coming year.    Finally - the cost.  When we lived in Indiana, we had a massive cottonwood that our FHA loan process insisted that we have trimmed.  It cost us $850 to trim that tree.  The guys from OC Tree Care that came today to cut down and remove all the wood/waste for 3 trees, and grind the stumps below the ground, and charged $500, which I thought was really reasonable.  I was pleased with the work they did and the way they left the yard.  I'd use them again if we need any work done on our trees.