See those massive, overgrown, 70s style hedges under the two front windows? I have finally had enough of them. I'd say they are original to the house, putting them at 35-40 years old. They trap leaves, provide homes for critters and crowd the trees and plantings that I do like.
About a month ago I mentioned to Jason I wanted to hire someone to take them out and replace it with some nice clean drainage stone and mulch. Hire someone? Jason jumped at the chance to do this project. It was destruction, and according to him he couldn't mess it up.
Step one was to cut all the greens off. Easy enough. That turned out to be about 3% of the total project. He then started battling the roots and stumps, unsuccessfully. This was more difficult than he thought.
Around the same time we were having some trees taken down so I asked the tree crew if they could pop the stumps out. The tree guy winced at the thought and said that wasn't as easy as it sounded. Three guys wrapped chains around the root balls and with a tractor tried to pull them out. Two of the eight got pulled out before they gave up. And we thought we could do it with loppers, a saw and a shovel?
To make a long story short, it took us many days of hard, back-breaking work but Jason happily posed for these "after" pictures on Sunday. Moral of the story? Never underestimate destruction!
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