As I have previously posted, Jim and I have been looking into having some of our trees removed. I never did receive the email estimate from the 2nd arborist, and the 3rd one was a no-show. We got a tip to look into a 4th tree service guy. He did come out and gave us a great estimate ($1,600), but he wasn't going to use a crane to remove the huge silver maple. This didn't sit well with us, so we ended up chosing the first guy that had come out. We called him to set up an appt time to meet to go over details and sign a contract. We got a call a few days later saying that he had to cancel because his crane just broke and he wasn't sure when or even if it could be fixed. He sounded so dejected on the phone. Well, that put us back to square one. We have since looked into other arborists, and have decided to go with Davey Tree Service.
He came out last Friday for a free estimate. We told him what we wanted, and he gave us some good info about some of the other trees on our property. It turns out that we have quite a variety of trees. We have silver maples, red maples, red oak, white oak, green ash, and black walnut. We also have various pines, but we didn't ask him about those. He gave us an estimate that turned out to be less than the guy we were originally going to use, plus he is going to do a little extra stuff. So, in the end, it works out for us that we had to look elsewhere. He told us that he'd have a huge crew of workers come in, and that they can remove the huge silver maple in one day! I think we'll have to see that to believe it. We were standing in the drive just chatting with him when we found out that he was recently the consulting arborist for the White House. He told us stories of the secret service shooing the arborists out of the trees whenever Obama was returning to the White House from a trip and also of playing with Obama's dog. That is kinda cool. We're glad he waited to tell us this until after he gave us an estimate or we would have been worrying about just how expensive he was going to be. lol. I mean, if he was good enough for the White House...
In other news, Jim and I have finally gotten around to chopping down the 2 trees that were small enough for us to handle on our own. My dad loaned us his pole saw, and Jim practiced using it on my dead stick bush.
Good thing he practiced. lol.
After gaining experience points, Jim moved on to the first tree...the mulberry tree in our backyard. This tree was too close to our foundation as well as our well. Why the previous owners planted it there, I have no idea. If they didn't plant it there, why the heck did they let it continue to grow?!
Anyhoo, here are some pictures of the process.
This is during...
I think Jim had fun.
And to give you faithful readers a good idea of what we did, here are the before and after pics.
Before
After
I think it looks a lot better without the tree. I wish the tree had been somewhere else on the property because it was a cool looking tree. The leaves were quite interesting.
After the mulberry tree was taken care of, we moved onto the dogwood in the front yard. This was a beautiful tree as well, but it was unfortunately too close to the foundation.
Here are some pics during the unfortunate murder.
Blame the previous owners, poor tree, for planting you too close to the house.
Here are the before and after pics.
Before
After
We were laughing at the poor confused squirrels the next day because they used both the mulberry tree and the dogwood to go back and forth. We had just essentially destroyed their main highway between the front and back yards. Whoopsie!
However, I did feel a smidge sorry for this little guy. He sat on our front stoop this morning and mournfully squeaked at the dogwood stump. He sat there for at least 5 minutes squeaking. It was as if he was giving the dogwood's eulogy or something. He didn't stop until Jim opened the window to try to get a better picture.
I call the first pic, "The Chipmunk's Lament". :p
That's about it for now.
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