Monday-Sunday, June 22-28, 2026
Day 5 – Monday, June 22, 2026
Monday was busy. First, an adjuster from State Farm (finally) called and I connected him with Spencer. He will be over on July 1st, NEXT Wednesday. Next we scoped out the trees once again and continued trying to get a garage door company over here to replace the garage door. We have that as a high priority for safety reasons.
I also started working on a list of the food we had lost and updated the personal property list.
Day 6, Tuesday, June 23, 2026
I was outside in the morning and a man walked up and said he was from a Menonite church near Arthur and he said he had a volunteer crew working on cleanup. He said they would come over as soon as they finished the job they were on. Any help is appreciated and will reduce my cost on the tree cleanup.
Update: These wonderful people had 5 or 6 chainsaws, 11 or 12 people, and a skid steer, and worked here for about 4 hours. That’s over 40 man-hours of labor. I will be making a donation to their church, even though they did not request one.
Clearview Menonite Church, Hammond, IL
Now we’ll just have to hope that some government entity shows up to haul off all the branches. The city picked up across the street, but the street is the city boundary so they didn’t pick up our side. The governor was here yesterday, so we’ll see what kind of disaster funds they cut loose for pickup.
Day 7, Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Today is tree removal day. The large trees are being removed and placed out in the front for pickup, and in several other large piles around the property. Basically, any tree that won’t make it is being cut down. We have very few trees left west of the pond, and the front yard is now all in the sun. A few straggler trees are left that may grow now that they have more sun, but we’ll definitely have to plant more trees if we want any shade. The good news is that leaf pickup will no longer be much of a chore.
Finally, at the end of the day the garage door guy showed up to measure and order a new door. It will be nice to get that installed.
Day 8, Thursday, June 25, 2026
I learned this morning that the garage door is ordered and is scheduled to be installed next Monday. It will be nice to once again have a working garage door.
A crew showed up this morning to tarp the shed. In order to do that they have to put up some temporary boards on the destroyed front half of the roof truss. They’ll also need to do something about the broken skylight/ridge vent.
Day 9, Friday, June 26, 2026
I didn’t expect much to happen today, as nothing was scheduled and it’s a rainy, soggy day all around. But around 11 a.m. a guy showed up with two trucks and two giant stump grinders on trailers. He was out of Florida, seeing if he could get some grinding work way up here in tornado alley. Since we needed stump removal, we did a deal with him and they had 30 stumps removed within two hours. They used two large, automated (remote controlled) stump grinders and made short work of it.
Our neighbor saw them and did a deal with them to do his yard as well, as he had 15 stumps that needed to be removed. The tree guys around here don’t have that kind of equipment and are very reluctant to do stumps. In fact, when I asked the tree guy I used for my tree removal what he recommended for the stumps, he said “put a flower pot on them.”
That’s one more thing off the “to do” list. And if you live in Florida, call Pro Stump Grinding at 888-500-1080. They do good work at reasonable rates.