Logging the Back .40

Note the decimal placement. Not the “back forty.” The back “point-4-0.” As in .40 of an acre. Really, it’s half an acre, but “logging the back .40” sounds better.

We live on a double lot. It wasn’t always a double lot. In fact, when we bought our house twenty years ago, the property was .40 of an acre. My Liege, although trained as a professional forester, was, um, “blessed” with a businessman’s mind. So it always bothered him that our property was just shy of the ability to subdivide it. After about ten years, our family’s needs grew too large for the house. We looked around, but couldn’t find another neighborhood that suited us. So we built an addition. The day we began excavating (literally, THE DAY), the daughter of our elderly neighbor asked if we wanted to buy the elderly neighbor’s house. The DH was all over this. It was a huge financial challenge to buy the neighbor’s house while building an addition on our present house. Especially because the housing market tanked, and after changing the property lines to get enough extra area to take off a lot between the two houses, we couldn’t sell the neighbor’s house for the same price we bought it at. It sat empty for several months, then we finally began renting it out. Wonderful renters, too. But the house was only two bedrooms with one bathroom, so when the wife became PG with their third child, they had to move. We put the house on the market again. It didn’t sell. Then I decided to sell it myself. Don’t ask me why it sold then. Clearly, I’m uber-talented. But we got our asking price, the same price we’d bought the house at (yes, we put some work into it, too).

Naturally, a year later, the housing market began climbing again and before we knew it the house was worth twice what we sold it for. That’s real estate for you. You do what you can at the time and don’t look backward.

Long story not really shortened, we’re still living in our first house (with an addition) that we bought twenty years ago and our back yard looks reaaaaaaaaaaaaaally big. But it’s actually a second lot.

I could go into a lengthy description of the number of trees surrounding our house twenty years ago, but it’s a pretty huge description, including an exhaustive number of Dutch elm trees that were supposed to be a hedge but the old people we bought the house from had given up and let them grow into trees. We turned them back into a hedge, realized it needed cutting every three weeks, so cut the hedge to stumps following a bad car accident that left us incapable of trimming the hedge every three weeks at the time. The next spring, A MILLION irises, lilies, tulips, daffodils, and the like sprung up in place of the hedge. I swear, I did not plant a single one. The thickness of the hedge had prevented them from blooming.

Over the years, we’ve cut down trees here and there. Two so we could add on a sundeck, two so we could add on a mud room. One because our toddler was allergic to it (birch). One because it was infested with Dutch elm disease and we learned the black bugs that had filtered down our fireplace were also getting into our neighbors’ houses. Plus, the row of evergreens between our house and the neighbor’s house slowly turned into a wood pile, because it looked weird to have our new 1/2 acre yard cut at the 9/10th mark by a row of old, skinny, scraggly trees (we kept a copse for the quail and pheasants and deer to play in/chew on).

For two-three weeks, our yard was a mess, while we waited for the chipper to arrive.

I know some people will hate that we cut down ANY trees. But people who live in wood-framed houses and have wood floors and furniture made of wood and don’t recycle their computer paper really shouldn’t throw stones. 😉