Right to Keep and Bear Axes
Monday, May 5th, 2008
Someone stopped by the house awhile back and asked, “uh, Rob? Why do you have an axe by the (back) door?”
While the mind was racing for a snappy comeback, the mouth opened and said, “stump in the back yard.”
doh! Oh well, the truth is out, guess I’ll stick with it.
When I bought the house, there was a stump in the back yard near the driveway. (There’s a fence between the two, so you’ll not see my driveway in any of the pictures.) After mowing around it for many months, I finally decided to be rid of it. The “stump doctor”-family of services you see in the phone book want an insane amount of money to come out to your house and a minor investment for every stump they need to remove. That’s not practical for just one stump and I’d probably have to tear down a chunk of my fence anyway.
As much as my Tim Taylor roots wanted a power tool, I just couldn’t justify the $100 or more to buy a chainsaw for this specific project. On the other hand, $40 buys me a nice axe at Lowe’s and I can lumberjack my way through it, old-school. So I bought the axe and had at it.
The plan was simple — put time into it every weekend that I did yard work. I’d have to police up the wood chips and toss them into a bucket, no need to have the mower sling them into my (or neighbor’s) windows. When the bucket was full, that was a day’s worth of work.
The first week went slow, as expected. I took a small bit off of the Eastern edge and got down a couple of inches below the grass line.
The second week was a little more productive, I “got in there and got some!” as it were.
The third week was the magic moment, the stump was whittled down enough that I could break it loose.
Of course, I didn’t just let the wood chips go to the city. After each chopping session, I’d load up the chiminea and light it, and then light a cigar to savor the taste of victory.
No more stump!