Nellie-Mae had some dead trees that needed immediate attention! We had kind of overlooked them until 2 weeks ago when one dropped a 25 ft long dead branch across the yard 5 minutes before going out to play (Thank you Lord!) Anyway, that plus the tornado season, we decided to get them taken out! This is one DIY that I would NOT recommend. Out of all the things you can pay someone else to do, pay someone to chop trees down! We had a bad experience with this at our first home! That’s another story for another day!

I had 3 different quotes. Always get three. And make sure they show you proof of being licensed and insured. We had most companies wanting between $1500-1750 to take down 3 trees and haul away. Finally, we found Xtreme Tree Worx, my parents had used them years back. They were fantastic! He only charged $650 to get the trees down. He gave us the option of us doing our own haul away.

We had a plan. We would burn the branches (small brush fire) and chop up the logs for firewood. My dad has a log-spliter (you can also rent them cheap at Home Depot). And bam! We’d be done!

The owner really helped us out. For an additional $100, he used his chainsaw and sawed off all the branches and cut the tree into firewood sized logs we could split. The whole thing went streamlined. Awesome.

However, did I mention they were INSANE?!! This tree was 60 ft. tall. They climb it, rope it, and saw down chunks of the tree. Unbelievable. Seriously. No fear in tree removers.

Obviously, David had the time of his life. The owner also said we had about $2000 of Red Oak firewood we could sell this fall from these trees. So, not only was this project super cheap, we will actually make a profit. I wish all projects could work out like that.

And that is how its done!

Cost- $750 for tree removal and chainsawing them up

Log Splitter- free, borrowed from my dad

Profit from firewood- $2000.

Total project profit- $1250.

That’s why you get 3 quotes. Can you imagine if I paid the first guy $1750 for removal and haul away? So funny.

Here is the tree, and David with his chain-saw.

  Insanity.

Mackenzie found her home on the tree stumps and here is me sitting next to the log to show the comparison of how huge the tree was!  

David also used the logs as balance beams.

And here is Lumberjack Tim. He was a firewood splitting machine. Can I just make one side note *** Our neighbors probably think we have lost our marbles b/c

1. Its May and we are chopping firewood

2. We have no fireplace.

Just wanted to note that. Anyway, our firewood will be seasoned Red Oak, ready this fall!