Friday night, Denisa and I woke up to some kind of noise. None of us were really with it (it was 1 in the morning, give or take). The power was out. Denisa headed downstairs and ran into Tomas, who had also woken up, though he couldn’t remember why either. Nothing appeared to be on fire or causing trouble, so we all went back to bed. Because sleep.
In the morning, the power was still out. I went down to investigate what the cause might be. One glance out the back window was enough. Our large silver maple in the backyard had dropped a huge branch right across the power line and brought it down. There had been no wind that night. No lightning or storms. The tree had just decided enough was enough, apparently. (We heard from a neighbor down the road that they’d actually heard the limb fall all the way over where they were. It was loud.)
I phoned in the outage and downed wire, and the electric company had someone out fixing it in about an hour, which was fantastic.
But now we have a tree limb that needs to disappear, and a tree that we no longer really want near our house. We had a guy come give us an estimate yesterday for what it would cost to make that tree just go away. Just wave a magic wand and make all the wood and leaves disappear. (Essentially.) The verdict? Thousands of dollars. Like, around four of them.
That’s . . . a whole lot more than I wish I’d have to pay. We have calls out with other arborists to have them come by and give estimates, but it’s kind of a downer of a way to begin the process. There are plenty of other ways I’d rather spend thousands of dollars.
But the tree needs to go away, and with how little effort it took the tree to drop the one branch, I have no idea what might happen when a real storm comes by. Especially with the tree leaning toward the bulk of our house.
The joys of home ownership, right?
I’ll just keep telling myself that . . .
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That seems like a lot of money. I know we had some trees cut down recently and I don’t think it cost anywhere near that much. I’ll check with my husband. The arborist that we used may not travel too far afield. We’re in Washington, Maine and you’re up in the Bangor area, right? It’s probably an hour and a half at least (depending on where you are it may be more like two) between us, so we may not be able to help. Will let you know if we have info you can use.
I’m over in Farmington. Still around 1.5 hours away, just in a different direction. We have calls in to three more places. Hopefully they bring better news . . .