A Tree Fell on our House!

During the night on Sunday night October 12 (actually about 3:00 a.m. Monday morning!) a storm, carrying high winds, moved thru our country neighborhood.  And yes, a large, 40+year old cedar tree split and a large half of it came down on our humble little abode.

 Talk about a rude awakening!  We woke up to loud thunder booming, then we heard a loud crash outside our bedroom window, and almost at the same time we lost electrical power!  It was pouring rain as we fumbled in the dark, found our headlamps which thankfully we keep hanging by our front door, and shining our headlamps out thru the windows we know there is cedar tree laying on our house.  We look down our road and it is totally dark, no security lights on at our neighbors down the road, so we know everyone else is without power also.

I tried to go back to sleep.  Ha!  Ha!  No way could I sleep knowing that there was a tree laying over on our house!


Before 6:00 a.m., Tom and I got in the car to drive up to the Donut Shop (so glad they still have electrical power!) near where we live, so I could get coffee and we both could get breakfast, and we discovered that a major power line is almost down across our side road leaving barely enough room to drive our little car under it!  We met a fire truck headed our way before we made it to the Donut Shop.  I guess someone has already reported that power line hanging low across our road.

So when we leave the Donut Shop, we decide to go back home a different route only to discover a tree AND a power line blocking that road , so we make a quick U-Turn and go back home the way we left, luckily the Power Company has not arrived yet to block our road, however the fire truck that we met earlier did put out some warning safety cones in the road, but we drove around them so we could get back home.  Whew!  Too much excitement!

We get home and soon it is daylight and we see what happened!

 So amazing, and we are so thankful to God for sparing our little house (and us) from any major damage during this storm.   No broken windows, roof doesn't appear to be damaged, so grateful.

Tom contacted a professional tree expert for the removal of this tree off our roof.  However, when he got home from work on Monday he began to lop off some of the smaller cedar limbs from this felled tree while being careful not to dislodge it from the roof in any way.  These tree expert guys were quite busy in our neighborhood for several days as a lot of folks got hit with downed trees and limbs.  Again very thankful that no serious damage was sustained by anyone.  We all feel very fortunate!

We ended up having the entire cedar tree cut down....the half that is laying on our house and the other half that is still standing tall!  Plus if you'll look on the right side of the above photo, see that large elm tree trunk in front of our storage building, we had that tree cut down also since it died this year after losing some major limbs in the past few years.  So we are getting used to having a lot more sunlight pouring into our side yard and back yard now that these trees are gone! 

In order to save a lot of money, and since Tom and I are both quite fit, we only paid the tree experts to lift /move that tree off of our house, and lay the other two done on the ground for us.  We could do the rest.  Especially since this will be our third winter to rely solely on our woodstove (no use of our central heating system) to heat our house, this would be a bonanza of firewood in the elm tree! 

Isn't cedar wood pretty!  We are giving these large cedar logs to a man in a nearby town that builds furniture out of cedar.  Tom has made some "art objects" out of some of the large chunks of the cedar trunk and placed them in our flower beds!  Love it!

              I love the great cedar smell in all the wood lying about!

We can see that this large cedar was dying from the center outward.

And this is the base of the elm tree that died in our backyard!  That was a big tree and it created a lot of shade!

                                  A lot of firewood but a lot less shade!

I really appreciate all the many hours of hard work that Tom has put into our yard this year.  He has worked tirelessly every day since this tree fell to get our yard all cleaned up again!  He has amassed enough firewood this year, just picking up/cutting up deadfall along side our roads, that we surly won't have to buy any firewood at all this year.  I do love enjoying a wood fire on cold mornings!

 We did as much as we could to get the yard cleaned up right afterward because we are so excited that we will be leaving one week after the tree fell on our 5-day Cruise!  More about that in my next post!