The house is now ours and it is nestled in a slice of woods in Galax VA.. We have 5 acres of land, some of which is steeply sloped. Most of this land is full of southern pine trees. In fact there is only about 1 acre of somewhat cleared land and that is not even in the best of shape. Knowing where your land actually is can sometimes be difficult.

Before buying the house we got it surveyed. Caution: Tangent coming!

Surveying the land was one of the best things we had done. Surveying consists of hiring some guy to traipse through the woods and down steep hills trying to find the boundaries. We had this done and found out that we owned part of a creek. After talking with our new neighbors we found that their children call this part of the creek "Fairy Land". It is a slice of heaven. We also found out from our Realtor and our neighbors that land on this mountain had been passed down and sold via handshake and some people thought they owned more than they did. Well we actually got the survey recorded in writing and it is on record at the land office in Hillsville, VA. We find out later that our neighbor has a dispute with another neighbor when he bought an extra 5 acres of land and he did not have it surveyed. Our other neighbor thinks he is squatting. I stay out of this dispute. The moral of this story is to know exactly what you are getting. We had the sellers pay for the survey but if you have to pay for it yourself it is well worth the money. I think it cost about $1,000.

So anyway, there we are with our new house and it is surrounded very closely by pine trees, some of which look to be in their last legs. So I did the proper thing and went out to the nearby Lowes and bought the biggest Husqvarna chainsaw that I could find for about $500. I actually researched this online for a while and found that the one I got (A rancher E455) was the best in the business. I got it with a 20" bar and a seriously sharp Oregon chain. Back in Connecticut I had a standard Home Depot chain saw and was constantly wishing for more power and less clogging. I cut down a few large diameter trees with that old saw but seriously wished I had a bigger one.


I have to say that spending money for the best is worth it. I cut down some trees in effortless minutes that would have taken me tens of minutes of sweat and swearing with my old chain saw. You can see this in the photo. Chalk that up to a getting what you pay for. So this was fine for the trees that butted my new house. Was there a point to cutting down some more to reclaim some more cleared land?

Soon after we bought the house and chain saw my wife and I walked down the slope of our hill deep into our woods. At the bottom, the land cleared a little and we saw the most incredible view. We had a view of hills with fields and cows and streams, and lovely farm houses. None of this could be seen from our house because of the pine trees. The decision was forming in our minds to cut a view for our house. At the bottom of our hill we found an old logging road. It switched back and ran along the edge of our land towards the small falls in our creek I mentioned before as "Fairy Land". Beautiful indeed. Below are some views through the trees.











When we got back to the cabin our decision was made. Clear the trees and get the view. At that point I called our real estate agent (who grew up there) and asked for a name of a local logger. He gave us Billy.

Billy is a career logger. You know the kind you see on those Discovery channel shows about dangerous jobs. He came over and talked to us about clearing the land and how he would do it. He also told us that he would clear it and give us half of the proceeds of the logs he took to the mill. He thought this would give us about five thousand dollars when all was said and done. Sounded good to us! We were going to get our view and get paid for it too.

The next entry explains the tree cutting process and what happened. It was a bit more than we envisioned.