When life gives you lemons...squeeze them hard and make Lemonade

On the second level of the house, we used trees as support posts to give the house a little character. They were all hauled away in one of the dumpster after the fire so we had to find new ones. As luck you have it, they are building a new subdivision and one of my friend called me because they were going to burn the trees they bulldozed down and he thought they would work for me.

So off I went and found a field full of red cedar trees, some as big as 27 inches at the base and they also had the root system in tack. So we cut the tops off and trimmed the branches and loaded them on a rollback truck and hauled them home. Cost....75 bucks a tree...and 85 to have them hauled to the house....I bought all they had........


The reason we took the whole tree and the root system was because I wanted the bottom of the tree to flare out into the floor, instead of being a straight cut. That created a new problem, power washing the ground from the root system so we could square cut the bottom....After 8 hours both my son and I had had enough of this noise......


So we talked to the 4 amigos....and offered them 150 bucks each to clean the trees on the weekend. Well, on Friday they showed up with the wives and girlfriend and they worked on them Friday....then the rest of the weekend the 4 amigos finished them up....


We had a crane come in and set the trees down on the second floor along with other supplies and they were cut so that each had at least a solid 10 inch squared bottom.
Even with cleaning out the dirt, we still used 8 chains as some rocks had grown into the roots and could not be seen....cost 14 bucks a tree....rotfl...at this rate I will have to trade a few more contracts.......


One by one, we lowered them down, cut them square and then set them...all 10 of them. Cost 110 bucks per tree.


By the end of the day, well it looked like a forest to say the least. But WOW, it will be outstanding once we have everything in place....Will post the rest of the second floor and how the beams were laid in later this week....GOOD TRADING