Trimming the Trees

After my last book of a post I'm going to keep this one much shorter... and yes, it's still something that we did on Labor Day...and by 'we' I mean Mike and Daniel. They were the ones that climbed up on our roof and trimmed our trees.

Lets start by reminding you what the house looked like earlier. This is a shot from when the foundation guys were still doing their work (at the time I was stalking my house). What I want to point out is how much the trees hang down and the way they almost touch the roof:

So Mike and Daniel climbed right up there and got to trimming:

I've heard it said before that when trimming a tree you should cut any branches that are pointed down, but I think that's for newer smaller trees. Our trees are HUGE. We've got two pines and what is maybe an oak tree in our front yard. I'm not a plant person so I have no clue what it really is, I just know it's big and I intend to hang a swing from it some day. Anyways, my point was that when dealing with trees in this situation the rule they went by was 'Don't let any branches be withing 5 feet of the roof.' 

I was surprised what a difference it made. I feel like the house looks less sad somehow:

Though that bush to the right of the front door is totally sad... it's almost been chopped to pieces. Why? Well, the long term reason is we don't like any of our bushes and want to get rid of them, but the short term reason is that it had been overtaken by plant mildew. I didn't even know that was a thing. But look how unhealthy it looks:

So we let Daniel at it. Give an 11 year old a pair of clippers and tell him to go at a bush and you've got a happy 11 year old. Though he didn't get the roots out...oh well, another day another task.