The house that a tree built...

Actually rebuilt and repaired, but you get the point.

One night right after I had our littlest princess she and I were sitting in the bedroom, while Jon put Boogie to sleep in her new attic room. The rain was coming down hard, the wind was howling and the trees were bending just a little to far for my comfort.  I don't like severe weather to begin with, bad childhood experiences down in Florida, so I was on edge but trying to stay calm, reading a book.  All of the sudden..."BAM" scratch "BAM".  My heart is racing, rain is pouring in the through the hole in the ceiling and all I can think is Jon and Boogie are up in the attic and the giant tree in the side yard has just fallen on the house.  One call upstairs reveals that not only are they okay, but Boogie is still asleep as are PJ and the wee one.

We quickly move everything out from under the hole in the roof and Jon runs outside to try to find something to tarp the roof with.  Having found a Bagster dumpster bag my husband climbs onto the roof, in the rain wind and lightning and tries to stop the rain from pouring into our bedroom.  Insurance is called and we finally start to relax a bit.  Once the rain let us a smidge I got Jon to follow me out to the side yard with the umbrella to take some pictures. and this is what it looked like at about 11pm.

Its bad we can tell that, but we didn't really get the full effect till the next morning... when we got up and saw this...

Boogie's swing fort got upended and twisted up a good bit, the root ball was huge, although very very shallow.

 The tree started at the side of the house where our Master Bedroom is and went well out past the other side of the house where the kitchen is.  It hit the roof and then rolled hit the roof again and landed on the side of the house and fence.

 This is from the kitchen side of the house, the tree went out a good 10 feet past the end of the house.  Seeing it made me realize that had it landed just a few more feet to the other side and it would have landed on me, the wee one and PJ.  Thank you, thank you, thank you God for watching out for us.

 This is from the back yard, there is a little house down there somewhere behind all those branches.

This is what you saw out of the little girls bedroom window. PJ loved it because there were tons of finches in the branches and one day the neighbors cat even visited. LOL!!

 This was the view out of our room, kinda neat and private, but also wanted to get rid of that tree.

 Once the tree was removed and the estimate was in to fix the house, it was decided that the siding on our house was too old to try to match and so the whole house would have to be resided, a whole new roof would have to be put on and of course all of this was done once the structural issues were fixed.  It took a little over a month to get the process started.  In that time I picked out a new color for our little house.  Its the green in the middle of this picture, a nice light color called Aruba Aqua.  I was a little timid, but as you will see it turned out wonderful.

So this is our little house before all the work began.  Come back tomorrow to see what it looks like all spruced up. :D  Oh and in case your wondering, our fantastic insurance also paid to have Boogie's swing set replaced since it was so twisted up.  Wait till you see what she got.  Remember check back tomorrow to see more.