Gutters, Hornets and a baby pool

Saturday, Amadou and Chris came down to help Dave with work on the house. I wish I'd taken more photos of the section of the forest they clear cut BEFORE they did it. But let's just say, the side of the pole barn was totally overgrown, you could not walk down this path you see here. Not at all. You couldn't even SEE the side of the pole barn.



The clear cutting revealed a fire wood shelter along with rotting particle board feed bin that sort of looked like something we might find a decomposing body in. It will be added to the burn pile.


These evil, awful, horror movie style trees are all over our property and have sliced up Dave and anyone who has come over to help with yard work. I am not sure what trees these are but those thin "branches" you see sticking out of the trunk are actually GIANT thorns that are very sharp. They completely cover all branches and the entire trunk and they are all at least 15 feet tall. We have about a dozen of these trees and they are just downright evil.


The guys pulled up all of the nasty glued down office carpet from the basement that was covered in mold and some sort of cat awfulness, which combined for a pretty bad smell. They also removed a bunch of garbage left in the basement, such as: a little kid's kitchen playset, a fake Christmas tree, some of those fab aqua kitchen tiles, stero equipment, a falling apart desk and drywall covered with mold. We kept the BB gun. (now we need to rent a dumpster)



Our firewood pile grew last week too because Dave's dad came down and helped Dave chop down the birch tree that was (stupidly) planted RIGHT NEXT to the house.

BEFORE
Here is the tree (on the left side of photo) and all it's offending branches that clogged the gutters.


AFTER
And here's Dave (sans tree) looking at one of the many small trees he pulled out of the gutters that were under the birch's branches. I don't think the previous owners ever cleaned the gutters.



Dave pulled about a dozen giant hornet nests off the house today, and for those of you that know me well, any flying stinging insect makes me panic so just photographing these empty nests made me really squeamish - here's just a sampling of them:



I've been working hard too, but it's all painting indoors and it's not quite done yet so that is being saved for a later post.

Lastly, Moose is a very spoiled dog - he has his own pool. He loves cooling off by crawling around the circumference of the pool on his belly, dunking his entire snout under water and blowing bubbles.


Just don't tell him he'll have to share this with a toddler one day.