Madeline's Castle!: Time Flies

With the start of school the blog has really fallen to the bottom of my To Do list. Therefore, this is going to be a little bit of a catch up. The deck building to a little bit longer than we thought. This was mostly due to Nate breaking his finger by hitting it with a hammer. Information we learned from this: the very tip of your finger bone is called a tuft and that breaking your finger makes your finger get really big hours after it is broken resulting in a ER trip at 3 in the morning. Anyway, it's all better now and the deck is progressing nicely.

I couldn't really visualize how big the deck actually is until we had all the decking down. Next post will include the significantly more finished deck once I take pictures. The deck was just one thing we needed to do around the yard. Another thing we needed to tackle was a huge stump in our front yard. We had tried to get it out using the Kaboda tractor but we had little luck except digging out all the dirt around it. We decided to pull out the big guns to try and extract it. Both my dad and Nate's dad visited for the weekend. They brought along a chainsaw and a come along to battle the stubborn stump. First attempt: attach the come along to the entire stump and use the tree across the driveway to try and pull it out of the ground. Nate, however, proved himself too strong and snapped the cable between the tree and come along which resulted in him getting spanked by the cable (resulting in huge welts... it's really good that we live within walking distance of the hospital). At that point the guys decided that trying to pull the entire thing out at once was not going to happen. That's where the chainsaw came in handy. After much effort (This was NOT a small stump) my dad cut the stump into thirds and after semi fixing the come along the guys were finally able to pull the pieces out of the ground. Each piece was a good 200 lbs. It definitely looked like a meteor hit our front yard once it was gone.

One third of the stump

Since we had a huge whole in our yard, we decided to fill it in we a new, much smaller tree. We went to the nursery and found a tree that we liked for the front yard and found out that the fruit trees were buy one get one free so we decided to get a few peach and pear trees too.