A matter of life or death

One of the most important responsibilities as a home owner is deciding what lives and dies on your property. For the most part, I've been giving Caesar's thumbs-down to spiders. The house was full of cobwebs when we moved in and too many spiders are just a nuisance to clean up after. Dead bugs filled the windowsills. Over all, I'm fine with the little buggers, but I want them outside my space.

The three bushes at my front door

When we first looked at the house, we got a bit of a surprise at the front door. A large spider web was waiting nearby and obviously looking for its next victim. The agent admitted that it could get particularly hairy in the summer and a bush near the foot of the stairs was largely to blame. I'm not really a fan of that variety of plant anyway, with its prickly evergreen nonsense. So I vowed that the first thing I'd do if I bought the house was to cut that sucker down.

So I did.

Christmas morning, the first day living at the Hundred Acre House, I pulled out my new axe (the first housewarming gift I'd received, thanks Jeff!) and started wacking away at the branches. I found the trunk and it was a quite a bit more substantial than expected. It took a great deal more time, effort, and blisters than I had planned on.

Once felled, I stripped away the branches to leave the trunk bare, for this truly was just a short tree. A few days later on I spent some time digging up the trunk and the filling in the hole. Alas, this left a gap in front of the stairs leading up to the front door. I didn't know until then that the area under my porch was actually hollow.





So I picked up some lattice and cut it to fit the area and close off the space a bit.