The damage isn't as bad as it could have been, had the tree fallen directly on the house. As it is, it fell about 3-4 ft from the house and the branches did quite a bit of damage. Surprisingly no windows were broken, but our front door will need to be replaced, along with the awning. We will also have to patch a pretty sizable hole in the roof and fix some interior stuff that happened. The tree was big enough that it also reached our fence that we let the dog out in and parts of it will also need to be replaced as it was crushed. It also took out another tree that missed the house by a few feet as well. If we hadn't had two separate lengths of chain, plus a long rope with a block and tackle and 3 people on it, this would have been much much worse. Everyone is staying till tomorrow to help get the repairs done. My grandfather was in charge of all this and did all the cutting and planning. He feels pretty bad but is gonna make it right. The big positive is that no one was hurt. The cleanup took a long time, this was a much bigger tree than most of us really realized. Our guess at quickly counting the rings put the tree at nearly 100 or more years old. Taking this tree and the one next to it down has been something we've wanted to do since we moved in. Check out the photo's in my gallery and you'll get an idea of how big this tree really was. We cut the tree up into 8ft sections because I have a friend with a mill who will make lumber out of most of it for us.
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Gallery has a lot more photo's....
