How a tree job works in Sarasota
Five steps, and you get paper at three of them. Most complaints about tree companies are really about not knowing what was going to happen.
Five steps
The same order, every job
Nothing here is unusual. It’s written down so you know what happens before it happens.
1 · The walk
Someone walks the property with you, half an hour to an hour. We start at the bottom of each tree: root flare first, looking for a stem that goes into the ground like a utility pole instead of flaring out, for mushrooms at the base, for a trench somebody cut through the roots two summers ago. Then the trunk, the unions and the crown.
2 · The written scope
Before anything is priced as a lump, the work is written out tree by tree: this oak, this limb, this much clearance. Reductions get a target, “eight feet off the roofline”, not an adjective. If you asked for something we won’t do, it goes on here at $0.00 with the reason.
3 · Your approval, line by line
You can strike a line, and the total moves by that line and nothing else. We don’t hold a date against an unsigned scope, and nobody will ring to say a crew is “in the area anyway”.
4 · The day
Before a saw starts, the ground worker walks the drop zone and moves what can be moved. Ropes go in from a throwline, not spikes. Anything over something that can’t move is rigged and lowered. Before the truck is packed, every cut is checked and the yard is raked.
5 · The card
Each tree by species and position, what was done, what it cost, and any line refused. Anything we found up there that you can’t see from the ground goes on the back. Keep it: if you sell the house, it shows the trees were looked after.
What helps us
What we need from you
- Somewhere to put a truck and a chipper, or a warning that there isn’t one.
- Gate width, if the only way to the back is through a gate.
- Where the septic tank and drainfield are, if you have one.
- Irrigation heads and low-voltage lighting marked, if you know where they are.
- Dogs inside. Ropes and dogs end badly.
Florida weather
Why dates sometimes move
Climbing stops in lightning, which in Florida is most summer afternoons for twenty minutes at a time. It stops in sustained wind too, because a rigged piece behaves differently in a gust.
If your day moves, you get a call, not a no-show. After a hurricane, order is set by danger: a hanger over a bedroom goes ahead of a stump.
That’s the whole of it.
Tell us about the tree and the owner will call you back to set a time to walk it. You’ll leave holding whatever we wrote down.