Backyard Destruction

A few weeks ago I came out to the kitchen in the morning to have this greeting me in our backyard.How nice is that? Behind our property is 17 acres of wooded (well it WAS wooded) privately owned land. There has been talk the last 2 years of it getting clear cut by the owner but nothing has ever seemed to happen. Until NOW. No warning, no nice neighborly notice that there would be heavy machinery in our backyard (okay, it never got to our property but it was right there!).

So this was our backyard view up until 3 weeks ago from our patio.

Now it looks like this

And here is the view from the treehouse. Where once you sat and were completely engulfed in trees, now you see this

It is really sad and seems so unnecessary. The girls have been upset by it and asked all sorts of questions like "where will the owls and woodpeckers live", "don't trees give us oxygen"......... Not much I can say as an answer. So now we move on and try to look at whatever possible positives (though it seems a bit hard to find at times) there may be.

• We have alot more sunshine coming into the house and backyard, which will be especially nice in the winter. It used to be very dark and dreary.


• I will be able to do all sorts of different landscaping plans and may be able to even do some veggie gardening


• For the third October in a row, Tom gets to build a fence (hoping it can help lessen our view of the ugly mess they have left) Not sure he sees that as a positive though!!


• The girls can now stargaze from their treehouse and Madison has started her own greenhouse on it thanks to the new sunlight.


• We are much more fortunate than most of the homes that bordered this property. We still have a decent amount of trees left, due to the fact the former owners never cut any down on our property to do traditional landscaping. Many of the homes have no trees left to shelter the view from the mess.

Of course, there are many negatives too, the worst being our concern for how our trees will hold up to this season's upcoming windstorms that we typically get in the winter. I am sure that will make for a few stressful moments in the house. But there isn't much we can do about it (and believe me I tried, and made many phone calls to the county licensing places to make sure it was all legal). So we move on and start some major work to change the landscaping for the backyard. It will take a number of years to get some areas cleared out and finalized but it should be a fun process and I look forward to the final results.