Twenty minutes, every tree
The tree inspection you keep meaning to book
You walk past these trees every day and they look the same as they did last year. That is exactly the problem. An inspection is Chris walking the whole lot on purpose, looking at the six or seven things that actually change, and handing you a short list of what to watch and what to deal with now.
Six things a trained eye checks that you walk right past
An inspection is not mysterious. It is a fixed set of looks, done in the same order every time, on every tree in the yard. Doing it in order is the whole trick, because the eye finds what it is hunting for and skips everything else.
Canopy, read from two angles. Standing under a tree makes almost any canopy look full, so we walk out and read it from across the yard, then again from ninety degrees around. Density that is even from one side and gappy from the other is telling you which half of the root system is in trouble. It takes fifteen seconds and it is the check almost nobody does from their own driveway.
The trunk flare, where the trunk should widen into the ground like a boot. If it goes into the soil straight, something is buried, and if we scuff back an inch of mulch and find a root wrapped across the trunk like a belt, that is a girdling root quietly cutting off the tree’s plumbing. Young and middle-aged trees on graded lots get this constantly, and caught early it is a twenty-minute fix with a hand saw.
The base, for fungal fruiting. Shelf brackets or clustered mushrooms coming out of the flare or the lower trunk are the outside of something that has been working on the inside for a while. Mushrooms out in the grass are usually chewing on a buried old stump and mean nothing.
Bark cracks and seams. A vertical seam running up from an old wound, a sunken patch where bark sounds hollow when you knock it, or a long crack that has opened wider since last year all say the same thing: check what is above it and what is under it.
Old pruning cuts, closing or not. This one surprises people. A cut made right, just outside the branch collar, grows a doughnut of callus over it and seals. A flush cut or a stub does not close, and water tracks straight into the trunk for a decade. We can tell you roughly when a tree was last worked on and whether whoever did it knew what they were doing.
Hangers and deadwood, which is the only check that changes week to week. A broken limb caught in the crown is not a tree problem, it is a gravity problem with a schedule of its own, and if it is over a walkway it comes out that day.
The three visits worth scheduling on purpose
Most people call about a tree once, and it is usually the wrong once, because by then something has already happened. There are three moments where a walk-around actually earns its keep.
The routine look, every year or two. Nothing is wrong. That is the point. You get a baseline, and next time we can say “that seam was half this size two years ago,” which is the single most useful sentence in tree work. Trees over a house, a driveway where cars park, or a play set are worth the annual version. Everything out at the back of the lot is fine on a longer cycle.
The after-storm check. This is the fast one. Pittsburgh gets a line of wind through in July, everybody looks at the ground, sees no branches, and calls it lucky. What we look for is what stayed up there: hangers wedged in the crown, fresh tears at limb unions, a lean that reads different than it did, soil cracked or lifted on one side of the base. A storm mostly reveals damage instead of finishing it, and the finishing happens in the next storm. If it is already down or dangling over the roof, that is not an inspection, that is emergency work, and we come out day or night for it.
The before-you-buy walk. Your home inspector is excellent at furnaces and roofs and will write “mature trees on property” and move on. Nobody in that transaction is qualified to tell you the eighty-foot silver maple twelve feet off the back corner has a split union and is now your problem in thirty days. We walk the lot before closing, tell you what the trees are, what they are worth keeping, and what the first two years of ownership will realistically cost in tree work. It has changed offers before.
What you actually get
Chris walks the property with you, talks through every tree out loud, and answers questions on the spot. Then a short written list, split into watch items and act items, so you know what needs a decision now and what just needs another look next year.
No pressure to book anything. Plenty of these end with nothing to do.
Fully insured, 25 years in the trade, military discount for those who served. See the work in the gallery, or read about ongoing tree health care.
“Absolutely a great worker! Professional and knowledgeable about our trees. Quick response time. 10/10 would recommend!!”
Erin Auvil, Google reviewWatch it or act on it
Every item on the list you get lands in one of these two columns. Nothing goes in a maybe pile.
Watch
A seam we want measured against next visit. Deadwood high in an old oak that is over nothing but lawn. A slight lean that has been there since the tree was planted and matches the way it grew toward light. A mushroom out on the grass. These get written down with what specifically would change our answer, so you know what you are watching for.
Act
A hanger over the driveway. A limb rubbing the roofline. A girdling root we can cut this week while it is still cheap. Fresh fungal brackets at the flare on a tree standing over the bedroom. If any of these turn out to be a sick tree rather than a structural one, we point you at disease diagnosis to find out exactly what it is before anybody spends money on treatment.
Left: the cut face is where you find out whether the outside read was right. Right: a North Hills lot where the inspection list came back short and the trees stayed put.
What we find on North Hills lots
Every neighborhood up here has its own recurring problem, and after 25 years of walking these yards the patterns are predictable enough to look for on the way up the driveway. In Wexford the housing is newer and the trees mostly went in with the development, planted a few inches too deep into graded fill, which shows up fifteen years later as a buried flare and a girdling root. That is the single most common act item we write there, and it is also the cheapest one to fix.
Older stock in Allison Park gives us the opposite set. Big legacy oaks and maples that predate the house, often with pruning history from the 1980s that was done with a chainsaw and a ladder. Those trees get read at the old cuts first, because a stub left forty years ago is now a decay column running down into the trunk. Around Hampton Township, the mix of wooded back lots and open frontage means one property can hold two completely different inspections: hedgerow ash and wild cherry along the tree line, plus a couple of specimen trees out front that somebody has been fussing over for decades.
The soil is the constant. Allegheny County clay holds water all spring, packs hard by August, and puts trees through freeze-thaw all winter, which loosens root plates gradually rather than all at once. That is why the same tree can pass a look-over three years running and then show heaved soil on one side the fourth year. Nothing dramatic happened. It has been happening the whole time, slowly, which is the argument for going every year or two instead of waiting for a crisis to make the appointment for you.
If your property already has a tree that genuinely worries you, say so when you call. A specific worrying tree is a different and more formal conversation than a routine walk-around, and we would rather set that up properly than fold it into a twenty-minute pass. Get on the schedule and tell us which one keeps you up.
Before you book one
What people want to know about the visit itself.
How long does the walk-around take?
About twenty minutes for a typical lot with a handful of trees, longer if you have an acre of woods or a lot of questions. Chris talks the whole time, so you hear the reasoning as it happens rather than reading it later. Wooded properties where you want everything covered can run an hour.
Do I need to be home for it?
You do not, and we can leave the written list and follow up by phone. But being there is worth it. The verbal walk-through is most of the value, and half the useful information comes from you telling us what got dug, planted, or built near a tree in the last ten years.
How often should I have this done?
Every year for trees over a house, a driveway where you park, or a play area. Every two or three years for everything else. Plus a quick check after any storm that took limbs down anywhere on your street, since what matters is what stayed up in the crown rather than what landed.
Can you inspect trees on a house I am about to buy?
Yes, and it is one of the more useful calls we get. Your home inspector is not going to look at the trees in any real way. We walk the lot before closing, tell you what is out there, what the first couple of years will realistically involve, and whether anything on the property is a genuine problem rather than just large.
What if you find something that needs work?
You get an up-front number in writing for it, and no pressure attached. Plenty of our inspections end with nothing to do at all, which is a fine outcome and we will say so plainly. If the fix belongs to somebody else, like a utility line issue, we tell you that too.
Will you look at the neighbor’s tree hanging over my yard?
We will look at it and tell you what we see, since a failure over your roof is your problem no matter whose trunk it grows from. What we can do about it is a legal question about property lines, not a tree question, so we stick to describing the condition and let you handle the conversation next door.
Book the look-over before the storm books it for you
One walk-around, one honest conversation, one short list. Chris does the whole thing himself, and if there is nothing to do you will hear that first. In sawdust we trust.