Trees=Privacy (or so we hope!)

Call me mean, rude, bad neighbor, insensitive whatever you want, but I'm fed up with our neighbors. We have had issues with these people from almost the moment we moved in. They would cut across our yard to go to their mom's house on the other side of us, have a great dane bark all night long, where I had to get the police involved to get it under control and then last summer, they build a pool. This year, they put a deck around that pool that FACES our house! This may not be a problem most of the time, but since our backyards are at such a slope, its like they can see right into our house. I have no idea why they had their deck built this way. If we are sitting down eating dinner, they can see directly into our dining room, its like we are on display. Fine, if they don't want privacy but we do! This is what we see when we look out our family room window...

Not a pretty sight! First of all, she rarely watches her kids, so I know that someday something will happen to one of them. I mean, look at the picture, she went inside and left her 2 year old standing on the deck, ALONE! They just burn me up!
Anyway, since they put their pool up last year, we wanted to do something to give us privacy but this year, it just made it all more urgent to get something going. I found this guy on Craigslist who has a tree farm and would plant them all for less than what I would pay at a nursery or Lowes for a tree that we would have to plant ourselves. Last night, him and his wife came out to deliver and plant them, I LOVE them!

I had one pear tree planted on the other side of our yard to help give privacy over there.

A White Pine planted in the front, next to the driveway.

And then onto the real problem. This was our view from our dining room table before....

This is after.....

This is a view from our bedroom window before....

This is after....

Does it completely block our problem? No, but its a darn good start. Pear trees grow fast and has dense leaves so hopefully by next year, it will block even better. I love that these trees are so much taller than what we would pay $30 for at Lowes. I'm very pleased with how it all turned out.

The night we planted these trees, was the same night a tornado ripped through Joplin, MO killing so many. That storm was heading our way when they were just getting started! We kept a close eye on the sky and the weather on TV to find out when and where it was going to hit. They dug holes so fast and tried to get them planted. They were only able to get 2 trees planted, but got all the holes dug, so they knocked some money off of what we owed them, left the materials that we would need, so we could finish the job. They were out there in the heart of the storm cleaning up and trying to make sure everything was finished, as much as they could get done.

Once the storm passed the sky looked so weird. We are very high up, therefore we have an awesome view of the horizon. These are some of the pictures I took after the storm. The sky was very weird. Sunny to the north and stormy to the south, such a sight!

The end of the storm, and the sun ready to pop back out.

Double rainbow.


You can see the sun is out in the front of the house

casting a shadow in the backyard of our house, with

the dark sky behind the trees.

This just looks like fire in the sky. The clouds

were so weird, but I thought this was a great

picture.

After the storm passed, the kids were in bed and me and Ryan finished planting the trees in the dark with the lightning lighting up the sky in the distance. It was a very weird night, not at all what we had planned, but a very memorable one.