Good-Bye Holly Trees

We have a ton of Holly trees in our yard...well, actually we had a ton of Holly trees in our yard. Below is the view of our house from the "street". We don't actually live on a street, rather we live on a private drive that we share with four houses. Essentially it is similar to a court, but our drive is called a "Pipe Stem" in Virginia. You learn these fascinating real estate terms when you're in the military and you live in a variety of states. In Washington state a similar street is called a "keyhole" , and FROG stands for "Finished Room Over Garage" in South Carolina...just a small geographical real estate lesson for you.

We have a lot of plans for our yard (dreams) now that we're wrapping up the majority of our projects inside. Our problem is that we have champagne tastes on a beer budget. Always our problem...so we were planning on slowly chopping down the Holly trees each weekend to avoid much attention from our HOA as well as to make the project manageable. Brad took down two small trees last week with his new chainsaw and was debating what to tackle this past Saturday when our doorbell rang. A tree trimming company was looking for business. We had two quotes last month ranging from $800-900 for the ten Holly trees in the front yard. We decided to pay ourselves that money and take the trees down ourselves and use the money for some of the other projects in the yard. But on Saturday morning we had nothing to loose and the tree trimmers were pretty desperate...the results were striking a deal for half the price of the original quotes. We decided it was money well spent considering that in a few hours our yard was free of Holly trees...a project that would have taken us every Saturday for the next month.

So the before...

And the after...

You can actually see our front door! Before we had a huge Holly that totally blocked the view of the center of the house preventing any curb appeal (which we don't have much of anyway...but at least its a start).
Here is another "before" view from the front/side of the house.
The "after" from a similar perspective. It's amazing what a difference it makes...now that my neighbors can see my house I guess we have to continue on trying to make it look nicer on the outside.