School House Road Trip: Sandy Edition

As you may or may not know, we were relatively unharmed by superstorm Sandy as she ripped through the region a few weeks ago. We miraculously kept our power on throughout, and were able to use the house as a warm spot for friends and family to gather if needed. My mother-in-law, however, was not so fortunate, as she lost power for about a week and had this happen to her home:

Luckily, the two trees were simply resting on the roof and deck, and didn’t break through the roof. Seriously, though, how did those trees NOT break the roof?! So…not unlike our last “School House Road Trip” to Cape Cod in the spring, we road-tripped (albeit a much shorter drive) to her house with the chainsaw. I’m a novice in the tree cutting field, so I raked up leaves and used the backpack blower to clear the yard a bit. These were the guys on the job:

Matt and his brother, Nick were surveying the damage and talking out their plan of action. Matt also needed to survey the damage from up on the tree, too, apparently.

Cindy Lou was helping, too, by barking at the chainsaw and keeping a general “watch” over the proceedings.

This didn’t make me nervous at all…oh wait…I totally tried to convince him not to do this.

Luckily, the boy has balance. After he and Nick got the first tree off the second tree, they only had this to battle:

Luckily, they called in reinforcements (by the way of Uncles and more family members) the following weekend (while I was living it up in Boston & the Cape -oops!) and got that thing off the roof. Good thing, too, because it’s getting colder around here and who knows if a foot of snow would provide enough weight to crack the corner of that sunroom. The woods looked a little bit better after they were through. Do you see how one of the trees snapped back up in the picture below?

I’m gunning for a totem pole to be made out of that bad boy. It took a few hours, but the yard was cleared out a little bit (there are still a ton of branches to clean up) and the roof was saved. Phew. All in a day’s work. Next on the agenda, my mother-in-law is thinking about getting a wood chipper to clear out a lot of the back woods’ dead trees to avoid this in the future. Can you take one guess as to who is really excited about that prospect? Yes, you’re right - my husband, Matt. He wants to store the chipper here at our house when they’re through at his mom’s yard. The man and his power tools, I swear.

#Painting #Before & After