Home Improvement Mikey-style

Swapping out a few post lamps. Seems fairly straightforward and simple, right? Of course not.

Here's one of three old post lights we were replacing. (I forgot to take "before" pictures when they were actually on the posts)

But before I can get to the "after" pictures we had one giant dead branch standing in the way. It died in the ice storm two years ago and still has yet to fall. The problem is that if it ever decided to fall on its own, it would likely land right on top of one of our new post lamps which means Michael had to figure out a way to get it down prior to installing the new light.

Here he is assessing the situation. The dead branch cluster is technically in our neighbor's tree, but it hangs over our property line and they are out of town so it is now our problem.

This video shows Michael's first attempt at pulling the branch down. It involved standing on top of the column and yanking randomly.


Then he did a lot of pulling from ground level. That helped get down a majority of the branches one of which did manage to fall right on the spot where the post lamp would have been.

And finally, when all else fails he decides to get on the roof with the extended saw thingy. I was standing by to either ship the footage off to America's Funniest Home Videos or call the ambulance, whichever came first.

I'm happy to say the crazy tactics worked and he managed to muscle the entire dead area down. Once that happened, installing the new lights took only a matter of minutes. What do you think?

Traditional versus Mid-Century

Next up, changing out the brown porch posts for more mid-century ones custom designed by Michael and inspired by the square pattern in our rod iron courtyard fence. But first he's trying to convince me we need to buy a table saw. Always something!