Monday, September 10, 2012

Lots of work, or "why I don't cut down trees very often"

So, a while back I had a tree guy come and cut off the top of a madrone that is to the west of the house.  The top was shading out a bunch of the sunlight on the solar panels. It made sense to cut the tree to gain the environmentally sound power boost.  When the tree guy left, there was a huge pile of branches and leaves. Maybe 8 feet tall and 15 feet in diameter:
 I spent a bunch of time pulling off the smaller branches and cutting them up with the machete, and then the other day I finally got the chainsaw out and cut up the big branches that still need to be split:
 The smaller branches that I could cut with hand tools got cut and stacked:
 and all the little tiny branches get broken up and the leaves removed so the leaves can go in the compost and the small branches can be used as kindling: 
 Here's a shot of the new compost pile with a couple loads of madrone leaves added in:

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Design Mistakes in my cob house

So, I have long meant to create a list of mistakes I made when designing the finishings on our house.  Now that we've lived in it for a ...