Till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane

When I went outside this morning to hang up the bird feeder, this is what I saw:



And this . . .



It makes our covered patio look more decrepit than it actually is, but I guess that's what happens when a branch this big . . .



Falls from a tree this tall . . .


Whenever this kind of arborial fallout happens in my yard, I always think about MacBeth and the prophecy he scoffs at -- that his enemy will approach when "Birnham Wood do come to Dunsinane" -- which MacBeth thought was foolishness -- how could a forest move? -- until he saw his enemy approaching camoflaged in the branches of Birnham Wood.
So there was a little bit of Shakespeare this morning along with the annoying task of clearing out the foliage.
I've seen this kind of thing happen before when it's been very wet after a dry spell. If there are any faults or flaws in the wood, the water will enter, the branch will swell because of all the rain, and down it will come.
We didn't even have any wind last night, so it was just the weight of the sodden wood that brought it down.
Luckily, we had no damage.
The irony is that just yesterday the tree guy was at the house cutting down one of our trees and hauling away a bunch of brush.
He won't be back again for a month.
Still, it was a bit of a magical sight on a summer morning.

Median Home Size is Dropping

Good news for us. Maybe we'll be seeing few tear downs replaced by McMansions in our neighborhood.

The McMansioning of McLean

I live in a neighborhood in McLean known as Salona Village. We're a little backwater in the center of town, nestled between Dolley Madison Boulevard on the north, Chainbridge Road on the west, and Old Dominion Road on the south. The houses were built in the 1950s out of brick in ranch, cape, and split-ranch styles.

Here's typical Salona Village house.

Over the years, people have added on to their houses, or bumped up, or done a number of improvements to add to their value. Most of the houses were orginally built with only one or two bathrooms, and two to three bedrooms. Our master bedroom, for example, has its own bathroom, but it's as big as a shoebox; and we have to have the smallest so-called walk-in closet in the greater Washington metroplitan area.

It's all liveable and fine. We raised 3 boys here and they all reached normal height and width.

Everything pretty much went along as usual, until around 5 years ago, when stuff like this started showing up.

Here's how it works.

You tear a completely liveable house down. Then you spend a couple of hundred thousand dollars building a new house and then you sell it for an obscene amount of money.

This is an $800,000 teardown in Salona Village.

It just sold and the land is currently being cleared. We always know when a house is a teardown because the fire department shows up and uses it for practice maneuvers. So, when we see a fire truck in front of a house and the sirens aren't squealing and the lights aren't going around, and people aren't jumping out of windows with their pets, we know, "Ah-hah! Tear down."

In less than a year, the house above will probably end uplooking something like this and it will sell for over 2 million dollars.

I'm going to follow the progress of the teardown from demolition to open house. There's really nothing good that can be said about it. Our neighborhood, now, is a hodgepodge of old and new.

Some of the new is pretty hideous.