Timberrrr!

Now that the first load of blocks has been delivered and is ready for use, I’m hoping that my house-builder will start work on the walls in the very near future. However, as I’ve been mentioning for some time, branches from a nearby oak tree were hanging over the northern end of the house and the situation had been made worse by the weight of their leaves bringing them down even lower, making it impossible to build the walls in that area any higher than just a few feet.

My concern was that this would give the builder yet another excuse to delay the construction until the branches in question had been removed and although it had been my desire to find an ‘élageur grimpeur’, a tree pruning expert who ascends into the tree on a rope to cut off the offending branches, while the builder was off site, this had been impossible due to the national French tradition of everyone stopping working and going on holiday throughout the month of August.

I was lucky enough to make contact with such an expert on Monday who came to see the job yesterday and said that they could come on site this afternoon to do the necessary work. I was very impressed by both how well they did the job and also how well they cleared up afterwards and here are some shots that I took after they’d started and had actually already begun to descend below the heady height that they went up to in the first tree to cut off the highest branches.

I was delighted with the results as although a couple of blocks got broken when one particularly large branch swung as it fell down, there are now no low hanging branches whatsoever over the floor area of the house as these shots taken from below and one side show.

The view from the front also gives a good indication of how much space has been created over the area in which the walls will be built, space that will also be amply high over the building’s roof as well.

And one of the good things was that although branches had to be removed from two trees, we got away with removing one fewer than I’d originally allowed for. This was a good thing because as the tree man said, if we’d taken another large branch out of the tree’s canopy it might not have withstood the shock, but as things have been left, it should recover with no long term effects. I’d hate to have been responsible for the death of a mighty oak tree that has stood, albeit crookedly leaning to one side, for generations, but hopefully now that won’t be the case 😉