Home Repairs

Some of the things we’ve been doing while in “quarantine”.

We’ve started taking apart the back deck. The pool broke last summer and we never got it repaired. So this year we asked the kids if they wanted a new pool and deck or if they wanted a nice family vacation. They chose the vacation. So we have taken down the pool an started on the deck.

It’s going to take a while but we’ll get there. Our plan is to have a nice patio instead and expand the driveway a bit. Maybe add a small deck close to the back door but overall just have a large patio area where the deck and pool used to be.

Burning some deck boards makes for a nice bonfire.

Our tree in the front yard had been a problem for a few years now. It’s been dying from the inside out and dropping very, very large limbs quite often. After having a few close calls with the dead stuff falling off, we finally decided we needed to have it trimmed. We called the REMC to see if they’d trim it for us, since we have several power lines in our yard that the tree could easily fall on. They came and looked at it and agreed that it needed to come down, so they sent someone over a few days later to take care of that for us. They did it for free with the acceptation that we had to clean up the mess after. What a job that turned out to be.

It looked like we had a forest in our front yard after all of the branches we down.

We had a lot of clean up. Thankfully the neighbor has a chainsaw and he came over and helped Trevor cut up the bigger logs. And Bro Dan E. swung by one evening and helped out as well. Between the three of them, the neighbors wife and myself cutting up the smaller branches, we were able to get it all cut up and into piles. Then it was just a matter of moving branches to the burn pile or giving the wood away. Three of our neighbors took some of the wood for their fireplaces, and the big stuff was taken by a guy who saw my ad on craigslist for “free wood”. He had a big trailer and took all of the logs/wood we had left. What a HUGE blessing. This picture is only one of the piles. We had enough to fill up the huge horse trailer the guy had with him.

It took us about 4 days to get it all done. Much faster than we anticipated. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. But the Lord was gracious to us and sent us some help. We are so very truly, thankful and blessed. We now have our yard back and other than a few holes and some dead spots, we can see our yard again and don’t have to worry about leaves or branches clean up ever again. We do have a couple of smaller trees in the back yard but they are not bad at all and not dead. So they shouldn’t drop more than leaves and a few small branches every now and then.

Our giant stump of a tree. Poor thing.