today, the happy house update. next up, the not-so-pleasant update. (spoiler, it involves rats).

another step towards getting a new tree!

so, early on, there was the drama with the water valve that caused us to lose the only tree on our property, a beautiful old ginko that our realtor assured us was a sign of good fortune.

the short version of the saga, oh wait, nevermind, there is no short version. the briefest version i can give goes: water was leaking from a water pipe in the basement. the plumbing joint in question couldn’t be tightened until the outside water valve was shut off. the ground was frozen so no one could get to the valve. so we waited for the coldest winter on record to end, while the trickle of water created a sort of sinkhole under one corner of the basement. eventually the ground thawed. our contractor’s guys dug up the entire front yard looking for the valve. finally found it, but the valve was faulty and couldn’t be shut off. so we put in a request to the city water department for a new valve. they came out and decided that in order to access the valve, they’d need to get a backhoe in there to dig. but there was a tree in the way. so they sent the department of forestry out to cut down our beautiful ginko tree. tree comes down, ben calls again to get the water guys back out. water guys asked if the tree had been stumped. nope. well, if the rootball is still in the way, then they can’t use the backhoe. never mind, they’ll just come at it from the other side by removing a chunk of sidewalk (WHICH BEGS THE QUESTION WHY CUT DOWN THE TREE IN THE FIRST PLACE!?). valve was replaced. water shut off. plumbing joint fixed. water turned back on. basement sinkhole filled in with concrete. after a few weeks i began to file requests with the city to replace the sidewalk. sidewalk guys came, put down wooden forms, but didn’t pour the sidewalk. after a few more weeks, i make another call. someone returns, pours the new slab, but dumps all their leftover gravel and concrete into the yard where the tree (now stump) had been. i made more calls and complain about sloppy work. a few weeks later someone came back cleaned up the excess concrete. a few weeks later another department rolled up and put down some nice new fill dirt. a few weeks later, to my total surprise, another department comes through and plants some nice new turf. a few months after that, on a cold winter day, we look outside to discover that a weird little tractor is pulverizing our tree stump back into bark. it is now December.)

sometime last summer, i filled out a dubious-looking online form on a city website requesting a new tree. i read in various forums that the waitlist for a tree can be long, and it’s not always clear how and why the city decides to replant when they do. but lo and behold, exactly as i (sarcastically) predicted, a [nearly-] Easter miracle: we found the following notice hung on our front door a couple of days ago.

so….the next step is to ask the gas company to come out and mark where our gas line is. so that i can request that the city plant the new tree NOT next to the water main, unless the other side of the yard is even less diggable because of a gas line. (one would think that the various city departments could coordinate…one would think wrong. see above.)