I am not sure how this is “for free”. He is paying in wood. If nobody bites, I guess he will have to switch to money. Good chance somebody takes him up on the offer though making it win / win.
Because kids sitting behind a computer don’t know how to value wood or other resources, so they think because it’s not “monies” it must be BS.
I know two guys that would take this down, cut it up, and have it stacked at their sheds for seasoning and eventual sale in half day. That’s a mature tree, so it’s not a bad deal at all. And I don’t see anything about stump removal, so they would get to skip the hard part.
And if the owner then wanted stump grinding, they would definitely be given a separate estimate for that.
But I wouldn’t be shocked if someone took them up on this. Usually you’d pay some small amount to bring them out and sign away the resources, but depending on height and the take-down options, I could definitely see someone taking this offer.
Entire forests are being razed and no one bats an eye. People want to free up space on their property and likely plant another tree elsewhere and everyone loses their minds.
Not at all. The money is in the work and time it takes to produce a quality wood product.
I build custom furniture and have had many people offer me a downed tree. It has cut to rough length, slabbed, prepared for drying, properly dried and stored for at least 1 year per inch of thickness before you start working with it. I can cut into a board and know when someone has rushed it, and it can be downright dangerous. Improperly dried wood has a lot of internal stress that makes it pop violently when cut. Then it curves and warps and you might not even be left with much good material at all by the time you joint and plane it to be straight and flat.
I met with a local forester hired by the district I live in (a city in Denmark ) on friday to discuss some options for a local forest area that had been unattented for many years.
He suggested we thin it out and although maybe 50 to 100 trees needed removing we would not have to pay for it but would make money on it.
He said that the craziest thing he had experienced was that they had been able to sell poplar tree to India!!! Because of COVID, a lot of empty containers were in Europe. Instead og shipping them back empty, they’re filled it with poplar tree to make matches.
The point is that we wouldn’t have to pay to have a week’s work of tree cutting but would be making money (mostly beech wood). I am sure that the value is increased manyfold during processing and woodworking but raw wood is worth good money too, and there’s a lot of wood in large trees
Good for you! Genuinely. The difference here is the market and volume. Europe vs US, and 50-100 large trees vs one right next to a house. I’m not saying raw wood is worthless, but people in the US get an overinflated sense of what they’re one 30-40 yr old tree in their yard is worth. You got a forest? That’s a whole different ballpark. In the US, that’s not a scenario where you pay, that’s when you take bids to buy.
Poplar is useful wood. I don’t know much about the Asian market, but it’s your go-to soft but still considered hardwood, often paint grade wood. Excellent for plywood, great for furniture (usually with veneer) and trim, and apparently matches haha. It grows straight, tall, and with minimal limbs and large knots. I love working with it.
Does your country have something like OSHA and would the tree guy piss off into the sunset instead of paying up if something goes wrong? See, that’s the difference.
Most companies in my neck of the woods (greater Seattle area) charge for cutting down the tree(s) AND keep the wood, unless you pay them more to keep it yourself or the wood is fairly worthless.
Also Greater Seattle Area. Friend had someone come out and verify a tree up the hill from his house was at high risk of falling onto the house. Some kind of maple.
Got immediate approval to take it down from the city without all the usual permitting process.
Quotes he got all included **paying extra **to haul the tree to the dump. He opted to keep it on his land so they left a bunch of rounds in piles around his house / driveway, and it took four of us a weekend to use a wood splitter and axes to chop into firewood (and even then we didn’t finish it all).
I guess they just dump it because land is too expensive in the area to store it stacked to dry to be usable firewood. Not to mention the labor costs.
Eh, the dump might still make pellets or woodchips and mulch from the wood people bring in. It’s probably just that the tree guys’ time is better invested doing his work on trees than processing the wood.
It depends on how close it is to the house. I’m in a low cost of living area in the US and my neighbor has a tree that’s going to be over $3k to bring down. If it can’t be felled they have to bring in a crane and take it apart one piece at a time. Lots of equipment costs and very skilled and dangerous work
We have huge oaks that sit between the house and the road. And a neighbor’s fence on a third side. If we ever wanted those taken down it would be a costly nightmare as they’d basically have to crane it out in pieces. And an oak has a lot of pieces.
Or just be very lucky. I cut a tree down when I was 15 between my mom’s garage and fence. No idea why she trusted me, maybe because we were on food stamps and couldn’t afford to have it cut down. I spent a day on the Internet looking at videos and guides. Thankfully after I had it down my neighbor helped me chop it up and wasn’t made I had it fall in part of his yard.
I had a tree like this, maybe a little thinner but close. An ash tree that started dying due to ash borers. I had it cut down (stump left) for only $800. Granted, I found a tree cutting service that didn’t use super fancy machinery. But they still did a good job and got it done in like 30 minutes.
Being closer to the house and garage might affect it. We had five ash trees killed by borers. There was a place near me that briefly had been taking the wood, and would come take the ash trees down if they were above a certain size. But after a few months, they had more wood than they could use in a lifetime. Those beetles killed a lot of trees.
It’s also worth noting that the arborist offered to haul away the lumber for a fee, or they would cut it up and leave it for firewood. We put a sign up, and it was gone by the end of the day. We even had one guy bring a splitter and left us a small stack for our firepit.
I don’t know how you’re going to make an accurate estimate based on this single pic. One of my best friends is an arborist and it can get very complicated in ways that aren’t obvious to non-experts.
Generally, wood within human spaces isn’t usable in construction. The issue is nails and such that the tree grows around and incorporates. The human-made objects lodged within tend to chip the very expensive saws and such used to commercially process large trees. Artisans often don’t mind it and work around the issues if they want a particular piece of wood, but you’d need to advertise harder than a single Craigslist post to find one to take your entire tree.
I used to work on a tree crew, 99% sure this was posted by someone ironically. Surprising amount of memes related specifically to arborist related stuff.
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