Choosing Beggars

The boot may be your problem.

Pssh, amateur.

I know four guys

They don’t tend to respond to many social media ads, though.

Or the Japanese.

The guy who lived across the street from me when I was a kid lived on a decommissioned farm and was a bit of an arborist, among other things. Apparently he had some kind of ornamental tree that was valuable. One night the fucking Yakuza busted through his back gate, cut down his tree, and stole it.

At least that's how he tells it. Some shady Asian looking dudes had approached him about the tree earlier and he'd told them to get lost. They may not have actually been the Yakuza, but the story sounds much better if they were.

I live near Amish country, and they won't come out for one smallish tree. They will give a discount for quality wood, but they won't do it completely free. Lumber isn't that expensive around here.

It can be a hazard next to houses. I've seen many health looking trees fall on them after storms/ice storms.

There's no economy of scale in suburbia

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.

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.

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.

Different country, different costs I'd imagine.

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.

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.