Making a House a Home - Backyard Expansion Project

When we bought this house we knew that we were going to want to expand the backyard. We have 2.3 acres and there was a good amount of wooded area in the back that was begging to be cleared and leveled! Most of the existing backyard was taken up by the previous owners landscaped swing set rock pit. We knew it had the potential to be an expensive project so we started trying to do as much on our own as possible. In November before any major snow, my Dad started by taken some brush down and the first 2 big hard wood trees.

Then it was put on hold for the remainder of the winter, until St. Patrick's Day when we started back up again!

After that weekend, we were motivated to continue working, so Charlie went ahead and got himself a small electric chain saw! It was nice to be able to get out in the yard when we had free time instead of having to plan on my Dad making a trip north with his equipment.

There was only so much we were going to be able to do on our own, we had a number of pines along our property line that abuts our next door neighbors property and while Charlie had become pretty skilled (thank you YouTube!) at cutting down trees, he wasn't about to attempt trees that, if they fell the wrong way, would take out the neighbors house. So it was time to get a quote from a tree company. We had been told by a number of people to try calling lumber companies because they would want the wood and would most likely do the work for free, but the company who came out late last summer had told us that lumber companies don't take lumber from residential properties because there could be the potential for more damage done to trees, like nails or bb's. I ended up calling a local company and got a quote that was pretty standard and they were scheduling 6 weeks out so I sat on the quote and decided to see if there was a local lumber company just to see what they said. With the house needing to be painted and the upcoming installation of a sliding door for our deck we need to save pennies where we can.

I don't know why I missed this the first time I looked but I found Varney & Son's Logging. Their website states that if you have 20 or more trees to remove it could potentially be free, so I called the number and left a message. About 5 days went by and I was about to call the other company to get the job scheduled when I got the call from Cy. He came by looked at the job and told us that while we have the quantity they are looking for we didn't have enough quality, so he would have to charge us a small fee. It was WAY less than we had been quoted and he could do the job by the end of the week! Holy moly! Now I am getting excited! On Wednesday April 18th, he came by to drop off his equipment so that he could start first thing on Thursday. The boys got a kick out of the tractor and I made sure to go around and snap some "before" pictures!

On Thursday, after we got home from school and Family Center, I came home to find Cy (the one man wrecking crew) working his magic. I was so impressed with how fast he was able to get these trees down. At one point while the boys and I were eating lunch we watched him drop FOUR trees at once! I wished I had my camera ready for that! I did manage to get this one though!

After he cut the trees down he would drive them up to the side of our property and stack them for the lumber truck. We had some hard wood trees that we also wanted cut and since he breaks even with the hardwood and my parents heat their house with a wood stove, we asked him just to drop the trees and we'd cut them up. The one downside to using a company like this, is that all they do is take the wood, they leave the limbs and tops. So the aftermath of this process has your yard looking like a tornado had touched down.





Lucky for us, it happened right before April vacation and Charlie was home so we spent as much of our free time as we could working on clearing brush. In the last 3 weeks we can now finally see our swing set pit again thanks some help from my Dad, my brother David and Jesse. We still have a lot more to do but it's nice to see the progress!

Here is a slide show of the entire process so far! We just got the quote back from the company who will come in and stump, level and loam the new open area and hopefully if all goes well, they will also be able to muck out the swamp so we can turn it into a pond! We have to find out the exact details of what is allowed since it sounds like it's been delineated as wetland.