Catch-up Blog #1

I have to get caught up.  I just realized what the problem is - I post everything on facebook so I feel it's been shared.  So backtrack I must...

The first thing to blog would be: 

THE STUMP REMOVAL

We had been working on it for a couple months and had come to an impasse.  By hand we were about as far as we could go.  Which meant only one thing - heavy machinery.  Or at least as heavy as we could rent from Home Depot.

So I asked Denny if he could get it done while we were on our road trip (I knew he'd enjoy using the machine!).  He looked at his schedule and decided the best day to do it would actually be the day we were leaving on our road trip!  Hence the delay on our departure.


We got up early and rented the machine nearly at the store's opening.  My friend from the Kingdom Hall, Bryon Parr, was the kid who rented it to us. Nice kid and he did a good job of running us through the rental checklist.

We got it home and Denny started digging around the stump, then below the stump, until we could see movement - it was exciting!  We had already found some electrical conduit while digging by hand and Denny found a leech line from the septic system.  It made the job a little difficult but he did a great job at safeguarding those pipes.

It took about 3 hours to dig it loose and when it was done it sat about 2 feet below the surface of the ground.  So now we had a stump that weighed probably near a ton sitting in the bottom of a 6' deep hole.  How to get it out?  Let's lift it out with the arm of the excavator.  Nope.  How about the scoop on the other side?  Nope again, it just sat there and laughed at us.  I know, let's get Rick's pickup and make a ramp from 2x12's.  Hahaha!  Next we tried Denny's big work truck with twice the traction, weight and torque - HAHAHA!!!  That stump is interminable!

Well, we couldn't lift it or pull it but we could tip it.  So we tipped and back-filled.  Then tipped the opposite way and back-filled some more.  Back and forth til it was a couple feet from the top.  Then he used the machine to just jockey it out.  

Now it sits in the yard being trimmed, hacked, chainsawed, chiseled and blasted with water to reduce its weight.  Then what?  That remains to be seen...

Just another reason that tree should never had fallen.