The main reason we want to get rid of the trees is the pine needles. They're tracked into the garage, the house, our vehicles - everywhere.

Every wind storm we have brings down debris all over our driveway, and our gutters are constantly filled with needles. Plus they've grown through the powerlines.

If they were smaller and I had the opportunity to keep them trimmed, I'd probably be willing to keep them around. But as of right now, they're too big of a hassle.

I don't need help with the trees, though - we may not even take them down this year. For now I'd be happy with just getting the area around them cleared out, which is what I'm struggling with.

I suspect that if the OP wanted to live in the midst of a "very natural PNW habitat" he would have bought a cabin in the woods.

@OP: nevermind the environment nazis. We'd still be living in caves if it were up to them. It's your home and you should be happy living there.

I'd start with the trees. Once those are out of the way you have the light you need to grow stuff, and I think it will also help your curb appeal. In the meanwhile, you can start spraying triclopyr on the vines - it will take many apps to kill them. Take a soil sample at 3" deep from under the pine needles and send it in to Logan Labs - you can start amending the soil to prepare for grass.

I'm afraid that ultimately you will need some sort of heavy equipment to strip and level the soil. Don't till, it's not necessary and will make things worse with the weeds/vines. If you can get it all done by mid-August you'll be in a really good position to seed a lawn at that time.

If it makes you feel any better I'm in the Seattle area and I have 6 douglas firs in my backyard plus a very nice lawn that is growing quite well. I cleared the area by mowing/bagging, raking, and removing as much loose crap from the surface as possible. This took several weeks here and there. It didn't look pretty but it was no problem for grass seeds to grow there.

Some tips: My douglas firs are trimmed up 30ft or so, and that opens things up a ton. I pick up branches and any other debris frequently off my lawn. And I use a snapper hi vac in between mulchings to pick up needles and pine cones when they do fall. But I wouldn't hesitate to remove the pine, because those things are messy...

I am not an "environment nazis", but a person who has lived with pine trees for decades. If you have pine trees in your yard the odds are that so do your neighbors. If you remove your pine trees you will not remove the pine needles as they will blow in from the neighbors trees.

You can control the pine needles with a rotary lawn mower, and a leaf blower. There are people in your neighborhood who would love to have that pine straw to mulch the flower bed and trees. (Lowes charges about $3.5 for a 14" X 14" X 28" bale or enough to cover about 20sqft. and they bring it in by the truck load.) I put items like this on the curb with a sign "free to good home" The stuff usually does not see sundown of the following day.

From the pictures it looks like at one time the yard was nicely
landscape with several of what appear to be flowering
bushes. There maybe some nice perennials plants that will show up once
the brush is gone. So it would be cheaper to find how it was
originally landscaped and work from that rather than destroying
everything and starting over.

If it were me I would pick the tool of the day and the spend a day in the yard and remove what ever that tool would cut. I would not cut indiscriminately but look for what can become a good plants and trees and take those that are dead or not what you want. My tools of the day includes a Rotary mower, weed eater, mattock, axe, hatchet, loppers, and a knife.

Plus they've grown through the powerlines.

Call the power company ... they may remove them for you, for free.

But the first step would be remove any trees that you don't want.

For the rest, first figure out what you have growing and whether it's in a good spot.

Thanks for the advice all. From the sound of it, looks like I'll have to do some work with heavy machinery after all. Appreciate the help!

If you have Doug firs - and that's what your photos show - then you have fir needles, not pine needles :-) Fir needles are tiny compared to pines and are pretty much a fact of life in the PNW, as are western red cedar pollen cones. And as noted previously, they do not need to be located on your property to create debris issues.

j4c11, if you have never lived in the PNW or are not familiar with the area, I'd suggest you refrain from making comments about it. You don't need to live in a "cabin in the woods" to have a landscape that looks like the OP's. Sites like these are common to even larger urban areas where enormous native conifers abound virtually everywhere outside of the downtown core. And the landscape philosophy is really quite different than elsewhere in the country because of the proximity to waterways and salmon spawning creeks - which run through parts of very urban Seattle!!

I also resent be termed an "environmental nazi" - I have lived in this area my entire life and as a consulting horticulturist (and landscape designer) I am intimately familiar with the area and its flora and fauna. In many areas, there are restrictions about trees that can be removed, even on private property, so it is worth investigating that aspect before a wholesale removal is undertaken.

If you live within the city limits of Seattle, the trees and their interference with powerlines are your responsibility IF they are on your property. Outside of Seattle proper or in unincorporated King County, you might get some assistance from your local power company or who they lease out the powerline trimming contract to :-)

@gardengal

I'd also suggest you refrain from proselytizing. Can't expect to start talking smack about lawns on the Lawn Care forum and not get any push back. There are many options for responsible environmentally friendly lawn care, no need to dismiss lawns altogether.

Get over yourself!! Regardless of where it this is posted, it is only very tertiarily a lawn care issue so I can talk whatever smack I like. And if you wanted to get right down to it, it is this attitude of a few of the "lawn care nazis" - to borrow your terminology - that deter other, well-intentioned posters and responders away from this forum.

btw, if you read a bit more carefully, I didn't dismiss a lawn altogether. But I will say that it will take a considerable amount of work to get what can be seen of that property into anything close to the condition necessary to plant a lawn. This is my business and something I deal with on a daily basis - I don't just spout off on an online forum. The OP said all he wanted was a grass yard - I was just encouraging him to explore other options that are less labor and money intensive and more in tune with the locale and less of a drain on the environment. Nothing wrong with a smaller patch of lawn accented with ornamentals but this is not the midwest and large tracts of manicured lawns are just not popular or common.