Our friend Butch from down the road came over with Doug, also from down the road, who had a small bucket loader. He had offered to get a big lilac bush next to the side of the house pulled out to make room for a new deck we're going to have built.

The lilac has to be pulled not only to make way for the deck, but the reason for the deck is to move the entry door to the screen porch from the side of the house over to this side. After putting the metal roof on last year, that entry area became treacherous with ice and huge falling blocks of wet snow sliding off the roof.

You can see how big this lilac bush is, and why it required a bucket to get out.

Those roots are in there. My landscaper had tried to tie a heavy rope around it to pull it out of the ground. All it did was the tires on his truck dug up the grass, and the rope snapped like knitting yarn.

As Doug was positioning his truck to get the bucket loader off the trailer, the truck mowed down our mail box. You can see the tangled dead body of the box on the ground in front of me. Butch came back the next morning and put it all back together again with a new mail box I had gone out and bought.

Demolition at it's best!

Lilac bush gone, and everything filled in. Next up will be the landscaper will come back, pull out all of those vines and lattice work, move the lamp post, and dig out the ground and throw crushed gravel down where the deck will be so we have good drainage so no under deck rot.

A very rough sketch that I drew up with Sue's thoughts on how the deck should look so that our contractor Steve, who did all of the renovations on our house here in 2017, has an idea of what we'd like done. Other renovation pages can be found on the Home on the mountain page