Trees are heavy. No. I mean REALLY heavy.

Yesterday and today I rolled a few more of the large rounds part of the way up the lawn. Mostly I wanted to move some of them so we could begin cleaning up the smaller branches underneath, and figure out what to do about the huge holes in what used to be the lawn. We'll have to make a concerted effort to spend an hour or two a day for the next few days rolling all these things up the hill so we can park them all for the winter. Looks like we'll have pretty warm weather though tomorrow... supposed to be 85. Only got up to 65 today, so that was nice and cool for log rolling.

we have at last count around 90 pieces of these, and they weigh between 40lb for the smaller ones to about 200lb for the ones from the base of the tree. I figure each round will split into about 10 decent sized pieces of firewood, so that's about 900 pieces. Should be enough from this tree alone to keep us warm for the entire winter of 2009. Not to mention that we already have a cord split from other down trees that we're burning this year, and about 2 cords more still unsplit from other trees. Hopefully we'll get to it all before the termites eat it completely.

Today we had a tree trimmer come out and do some work for us. He did a good job, taking down one tree completely and trimming limbs off another up to about the 100' height. Here we see the guy in the tree at about the 80' level, after he had taken off all the limbs for the whole tree, and cut off about the top third already.

Can you tell from the picture that the tree is actually leaning toward the house? That's the only reason we would cut down a beautiful healthy tree like this. And, it's on the south side of the house which is the direction from which the high winds always blow.

He dropped pieces of the trunk in about 10' sections (about 700Lb each). Here is one falling to the ground. It makes quite a thud (and an indent) when it hits the ground.


So, now we have about 90 pieces of tree on the lawn (ok it used to be a lawn), which at least have been cut into firewood sized rounds. However, I will mention that at the base, this tree is 31" in diameter, and I estimate that the base rounds each weigh between 150 to 200Lb... We'll have to escort each of these beauties up the hill behind the house to stack them someplace out of the way that we can cover them so they dry out until next year.

As it is visible in the background, I will mention that the treehouse is now covered with a tarp for the winter. I'll start in on it next Spring I think.

Last night as I was doing my rounds before bed, I peeked into the garage to discover that there was water flowing from the water heater out onto the garage floor. Never a good thing, but even less so at 9:30PM. I rushed to turn off the water to the water heater, and that seemed to stop the leak for the time being.

Spent the next day draining and removing the old unit, and purchasing a new one and installing it. Had to take an emergency day off work, but I managed to get it all done and actual hot water coming out the taps by about 3pm. Here's the new unit. Total cost was around $550. I could have elected to get a smaller unit (this was a 65Gal), but that was the size that was there. In hindsight I should have gone with the 50gal unit I think. Oh well, its done now. At least this unit will save us about 30% on the electricity that the old one used.

Today we decided that since it was cool enough and not raining, it might be a good time to get some of the log piles in the yard from the last few years of downed trees consolidated into a single pile (not on the lawn area). Its about 8' vertical and about 100' up the hill, but we managed to get about half of them rolled up the hill and stacked in a pile on some old plywood.
Even though it was cool, it was still a log of work to get about a thousand pounds of logs rolled up the hill and stacked... I would just have started splitting them except we already have about half a cord split and stacked... Perhaps I will look into a fireplace insert to keep the heat costs down this winter...

I decided today on a whim to check out my Alton 3.5KW generator, and see what kind of waveform it was putting out. I had read a few things online that caused me to wonder about the quality of the power it puts out for me... I hooked it up and measured it with my oscilloscope.

As I don't have a 10x probe at my disposal, I had to adjust the image so i could see the top of the waveform. It's not a sine wave, but it does have the general shape and only a few deformations. Much better than most of the UPS signals I have seen...

This is my secondary generator, the one that will run the well pump and pressure pump for the wellhouse in the event of a power outage - so I can have RUNNING WATER... I didn't get a chance to measure the output of the main gen that powers the house. Perhaps I will take a look at that in the near future, just for grins...

Today out in the blazing 80 degree heat, I managed to get the floor up to the treehouse and get it installed. The Doug fir is about 140' tall, and is 19" in diameter at the level of the floor. I figure it's around a hundred years old or there abouts.

I used two sheets of tongue-in-groove plywood, on top of the 2x4's and 2x6's that I managed to get put up last year. It was a little bit difficult to get the hole in the middle for the tree cut right... Had to refactor both the tree bark and the cutouts on both sides. It didn't turn out exactly square as I'd hoped it would... but it should be good enough. There's only a small gap in one corner that I can fix easily.

Next it's time to cut out the trap door, and figure out how to build the stairway up to it. Then, it's walls, roof and siding. More to follow...

Well, it's independence day again. Flags are flying. It's raining. Cassanova owns my shoe.
And he says "Yeah, what's your point?" So everything is pretty much normal around here.

Did finally get around to putting up a swing on the corner of the partially started treehouse. You can't see it in the picture, but it's what the ladder is leaning up against. The floor joists are all that's built, and up 9' on the doug fir. So I figured I'd hang the swing off the corner. It sure did make all the wood rock up there when my son was testing the swing. I had intended to put up a diagonal support for each of the 4 corners but hadn't done it yet. It was required for this one, and it made the corner rock solid, even when swinging. He sure likes to swing on his new swing too, so that's a bonus. Someday I will actually get to building the rest of the dang treehouse.