The humble end of the trade
Small tree removal, done before lunch
The ornamental pear that split down the middle. The dogwood that has been half dead for three springs. The four maple volunteers behind the garage that were ankle high when you moved in and are now taller than the gutters. None of it is dramatic work. All of it is work, and we would rather do it than watch you rent a chipper on a Saturday.
Under thirty feet, and still not a Saturday project
Small tree removal covers everything that never got tall enough to scare anybody. Crabapples and callery pears at the end of their run. Dogwoods that caught anthracnose and never came back. Arborvitae planted as a privacy screen in 1998, now bare on one side and leaning off the other. Mulberries and box elders that seeded themselves in a fence line while nobody was watching, plus the whole category of trees that were planted three feet from a foundation by somebody who did not think about year fifteen.
The reason we have a page for it is that people write this category off far too easily. A twenty foot tree still weighs a couple thousand pounds green. Its top is still above your soffit, its trunk still pinches a bar if you cut it wrong, and its drop zone in a typical Pittsburgh yard is a lane about as wide as a car. The tree is smaller. The garage, the fence, the neighbor’s sunroom, and the gas meter are all exactly where they were.
Where the weekend version goes sideways
Ask anybody who works in this trade where they have seen the worst homeowner injuries and you will hear the same thing: not off the eighty foot oaks. Nobody rents a ladder and takes a swing at an eighty foot oak. They take a swing at the twenty footer, because it looks manageable from the driveway, and that is the whole problem. Chainsaw kickback does not scale down with the tree. A pinched bar in a leaning sapling puts the chain right back at your face, and a ladder plus a running saw is a combination the trade retired a long time ago.
The second thing that goes wrong is aim. Small trees lean, and the lean is usually toward whatever they were reaching around for light, which in a city lot means the house, the fence, or the power drop. A tree that falls twenty feet in the wrong direction still takes out a bay window. We have cleaned up more than one Sunday afternoon that started as a favor and ended with a tarp over somebody’s shed roof.
And then there is the part nobody plans for, which is the pile. Cutting a small tree down takes twenty minutes. Getting rid of it takes the rest of your weekend and a rented dumpster, or six trips with a trunk full of brush, or a burn pile your township has opinions about. Our truck eats the whole thing on site and drives off with it. That is what most people are actually paying for.
Several at once beats one at a time
Here is the honest economics of this service. The expensive part of any tree job is getting a truck, a chipper, and a crew onto your street. Once we are parked, the difference between one small removal and five is mostly saw time. So if you have a dying pear out front, two volunteers along the fence, and a shrubby thing by the back steps that stopped being a shrub years ago, group them. One visit, one cleanup, one up-front number covering the lot of it. That is where the savings live, and we will tell you so on the walk-around instead of letting you book us three separate times.
The same goes for pairing this with other work. If we are already on the property for a standard removal, adding the small stuff barely moves the day. Chris looks at the whole yard rather than only the tree you pointed at, and tells you what makes sense to knock out now versus what can wait a couple years.
Small job, same outfit
Insured, PA HIC #163598, twenty five years in the trade, and a military discount for those who served. The little jobs get the same crew as the big ones.
Stump work is the usual add-on. See how the grinder handles it on the stump grinding page.
Finished yards and mid-job shots live in the gallery.
“Triple T came and fell a broken pine tree in my front yard. They were in and out in about an hour and left my yard looking better than ever.”
A Google reviewerSometimes the right answer is to leave it standing
A removal is permanent. Plenty of small trees only look finished.
Worth keeping
A young tree with one bad leader, storm damage confined to a couple of limbs, or a crowded ornamental that just needs light and air. Half the dogwoods people want gone are shade-starved, not sick. A crabapple that has never been touched in fifteen years looks terrible and prunes back into a decent tree in one season.
When that is the call, we say so and quote the pruning instead. Talking somebody out of a removal costs us a job and buys us the next three.
Time to go
Trunk decay at the base, a split union, root damage from a foundation or a driveway pour, or a species that was simply planted in the wrong spot and will fight the house forever. Bradford pears past their teens fall apart on schedule. Ash that missed treatment is done. Volunteers in a fence line only get harder to remove.
Those come out, stump ground or cut flush, and the ground gets raked back to something you can mow.
Left, the cut face that explains why a healthy-looking little tree came down. Right, the same kind of yard an hour after the truck pulled out.
Old boroughs, narrow lots, tight fence lines
The river boroughs are full of this work. Lots in Avalon and Bellevue run narrow and deep with a garage at the back and a fence on both sides, so a fifteen foot volunteer maple is sitting in the only clear lane on the property. Up in Ben Avon, the ornamentals planted alongside those older homes have reached the age where dogwoods, pears, and Japanese maples all start giving up at once, usually two or three per yard.
Pittsburgh’s clay soil and freeze-thaw winters are hard on shallow-rooted ornamentals, and every wet spring loosens another one. Add whatever the birds planted along your fence and most properties around here grow a small-tree list without anybody deciding to. Point at all of it during the walk-around and it goes away in one morning.
Small tree questions
The ones people ask sheepishly, as if the job is too small to call about.
Is my tree too small to bother you with?
No. We would rather clear four saplings and a dead dogwood than get called next spring after somebody tried it with a borrowed saw. If it is genuinely a one-shrub job we will tell you that on the phone, and usually suggest you group it with anything else on the property so the visit earns its trip.
Where does small tree removal end and regular removal begin?
Roughly thirty feet, though access matters more than height. A twenty five foot tree in an open front yard is small work. The same tree behind a fence, over a patio, with no gate wide enough for the chipper, gets handled like a bigger job. Anything taller belongs on the tree removal page.
Can I just cut it myself?
Plenty of people do, and plenty of people also end up with stitches, a dented shed, or a brush pile they cannot get rid of. Small trees are where most chainsaw injuries happen precisely because they look easy. If you are set on doing it, at least keep the ladder out of it and know which way the lean is pulling.
Do you take the stump too?
Your choice. We cut flush by default so you can mow over it. Grinding below grade is a separate machine and a separate step, and on small trunks it is quick, so most people add it and reseed the same week. Details are on the stump grinding page.
Will the truck fit down my alley?
Usually. If it does not, we hand-carry brush out to the chipper at the curb, which adds time but not drama. Chris checks access on the walk-around so nothing about the work day is a surprise, including where we park.
What will small tree removal run me?
It depends on how many, how close to the house, and whether the stump goes with it, so we do not guess over the phone. Chris walks the yard, counts what is coming out, and hands you an up-front number in writing. Set up a visit and you will have it in a day or two.
Make the little list disappear in one morning
Count up the dead ornamentals, the volunteers, and the ones planted too close to the house. Then let somebody with the truck and the chipper handle the whole lot in a single visit. One and done. In sawdust we trust.