One of our pine trees, the one closest to our shed out back, was struck by lightning not too long ago. We didn’t notice immediately, but the strike killed the tree. We *did* start noticing when hunks of bark began sloughing off…
In looking at the tree we noticed gaping holes in it which indicated that all was not well. We also noticed similar holes in the nearby trees. All of these trees are pretty big. If any of them fell they could land on our house or that of our nearest neighbor.
So we decided to contact a tree cutting service. There are very few people I know of who has had a good experience with one of these outfits. They seem to either damage the property or they don’t haul away the debris or a myriad of other issues.
A friend put us in touch with “Yellow Ribbon Tree Experts”. Gary – the company owner – came by and we immediately liked him. He was able to answer all of our questions and quoted us what I felt to be a fair price.
I’d earlier been approached by a fellow who “was in the neighborhood and can give me a deal while he’s working on a nearby yard”. His price was somewhat lower than Gary’s but I wasn’t really able to nail him down on all the details so I decided to pass on him.
We had contacted two other tree companies, also recommended by friends. One had a child’s voice on their answering machine which was not very encouraging. It didn’t really matter since they never returned our call. The other, the woman who does the estimates was one of the illest sounding people we’d ever encountered. I don’t know what she’s really like, but she sounded really bad each time we spoke with her on the phone. And apparently her life is in a shambles (sick, problems, etc.) which she thought we’d like to know about. Hmmmmm… so we passed on them as well.
Here are some pictures showing the progression of the trees disappearing from the back yard:
It took them the better part of the day, they had to carefully pull down the tree nearest the shed. They did it with no damage to the shed at all! They *did* end up crushing one of our neighbors’ bushes when one of the pieces coming down had an unfortunate bounce and roll. Gary went next door to work out replacing the bush.Once they were gone, there was only a pile of wood shavings where the stumps used to be (which we have since used to cover our pathways – saving us having to pick up any pine bark nuggets this year..).
|
Overall everything went well, there were some scratches on the post at the corner of the patio and on our garbage box from the trees dragging past those but these were easily dealt with using some spare paint. |
|
|
|
|