The Treehouse is Gone!

Last weekend was a very momentous time in our backyard's history.  We found someone that was able to come and {not only} remove the treehouse from our yard for free, but also use it for something new (a pretty great hunting shack, from what I have been told). 

This treehouse was built into our backyard many years ago with an industrial state of mind.  Graham and I both agreed that if a tornado was ever to come through the area, the treehouse would probably be safer than our house!

But, we will not longer have such a monster taking up the backyard (and hopefully less neighborhood cats will be hanging around enjoying the sandbox).

This is what we used to have in our backyard (notice the height of the men versus the height of the treehouse):

And this is the "tool" we had to take it down:

A ton more work went into getting this treehouse down than what the following pictures will depict -- but essentially the first step included balancing the treehouse on the skylift.

Then the support legs were cut out.

Then the treehouse was slowly lowered.

I thought the hard part was over at this point, but I soon found out that backing the treehouse out of the yard (and between the house and garage) was going to be a bit trickier.

But, they made it!  Notice the man in the long sleeve blue shirt (holding the coffee mug).  Graham and I thought he knew the guys taking the treehouse down.  After everything was over and we asked about him (after he had left), they said they thought he knew us! 

Apparently he saw what was going on from the street and just walked into our backyard.  A little scary, but the man did put in some effort during the day.  So, if anyone knows this man, please tell him thanks!

After they lowered the treehouse onto the trailer (with about 1/2" on the sides to spare), the guys offered to pull the leg supports from the ground.  We knew they had been cemented in, so we graciously accepted their offer.  However, we NEVER thought we would see this much cement support:

The man standing next to the support beam was well over six feet tall (for reference).  Oh, and our "friend" was doing his part again!

It took us all a long while to figure out what we were going to do with these things now that we had them out of the ground, but we finally decided that we would load them on our boat trailer and take them to the city waste management area (we called ahead just to make sure it was okay).

We were only able to get two of the pillars out of the ground (the other two boards snapped).  So, at the end of the day, all we had left in our backyard was sand and a couple of buried cement beams:

...before...

...after...