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.

Are they insured?

Don't feel sorry for it, that tree committed multible instances of driving under the influence

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

Cutting down a tree in a forest is exponentially easier and less riskful than in the middle of a densely built up area.

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 removal, they would definitely be given an estimate for that.

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.

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

Different country, different costs I'd imagine.

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.

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.