Had an 8" limb drop on the house Sunday morning. Looked to be a previously-healthy limb, but the storm that came through proved that wrong. Roof looks good, ended up with nothing but a bent gutter. Dropped right on top of my 10 year-old son's bedroom.
Had the tree looked at by a guy from OSU Extension Office last summer, he told us it has oak mold and we are going to lose it - in 1-2 years, or could go 5 years, no way to tell. We paid about $600 to have a friend of a friend who has a trimming service clean out all the dead stuff last year, but it progressing faster now with this wet summer we've had - the mold is spreading like wildfire. Looks like it's gonna run about $2k to haul it out. It's about 3 feet across at the base, sits 15 feet in front of the house and is a good 50-60 feet tall, I'd guess. It provides a ton of shade on our house in the afternoons from the west side, so we're gonna lose all that help with our cooling bills, too, not to mention totally changing the entire character of the house and the curb appeal.
We picked this house when we bought in large part because of the older neighborhood and the character provided by all the big old oaks in the neighborhood. Mature growth and variety of the yards and landscape makes it a really pretty area to live in. And now we're going to lose a big part of our home's contribution to that. It's the only tree in our front yard and the last remaining "big" tree on our property - we removed a big one from the back about 4 years back to open the yard to more sun and help promote a better lawn and aesthetics, as half our back yard was in perpetual dense shade. After 2 or 3 attempts at sod and several more at various types of seeding, our yard has thickened, but there's still a big bare patch in the back we're trying to get the bermuda to spread into and it's still bare dirt - but it's getting smaller each year. Now all the fescue in the front lawn is going to die when this tree is gone and we'll have an even bigger patch to try to seed/sod with something to fill it in with.
<sigh> Always seems to be something... looking like we may have to cancel the family cruise we were trying to plan over Thanksgiving to pay for it. But we can't risk the big tree falling on the house this fall or winter... insurance guy says it wouldn't be covered, because we have knowledge the tree is dead or dying and know it's a hazard, so it would be failure to remove the hazard and thus not covered.
Had the tree looked at by a guy from OSU Extension Office last summer, he told us it has oak mold and we are going to lose it - in 1-2 years, or could go 5 years, no way to tell. We paid about $600 to have a friend of a friend who has a trimming service clean out all the dead stuff last year, but it progressing faster now with this wet summer we've had - the mold is spreading like wildfire. Looks like it's gonna run about $2k to haul it out. It's about 3 feet across at the base, sits 15 feet in front of the house and is a good 50-60 feet tall, I'd guess. It provides a ton of shade on our house in the afternoons from the west side, so we're gonna lose all that help with our cooling bills, too, not to mention totally changing the entire character of the house and the curb appeal.
We picked this house when we bought in large part because of the older neighborhood and the character provided by all the big old oaks in the neighborhood. Mature growth and variety of the yards and landscape makes it a really pretty area to live in. And now we're going to lose a big part of our home's contribution to that. It's the only tree in our front yard and the last remaining "big" tree on our property - we removed a big one from the back about 4 years back to open the yard to more sun and help promote a better lawn and aesthetics, as half our back yard was in perpetual dense shade. After 2 or 3 attempts at sod and several more at various types of seeding, our yard has thickened, but there's still a big bare patch in the back we're trying to get the bermuda to spread into and it's still bare dirt - but it's getting smaller each year. Now all the fescue in the front lawn is going to die when this tree is gone and we'll have an even bigger patch to try to seed/sod with something to fill it in with.
<sigh> Always seems to be something... looking like we may have to cancel the family cruise we were trying to plan over Thanksgiving to pay for it.
But we can't risk the big tree falling on the house this fall or winter... insurance guy says it wouldn't be covered, because we have knowledge the tree is dead or dying and know it's a hazard, so it would be failure to remove the hazard and thus not covered.
