Stump Grinding in Hermitage Hills, Hermitage
Yes. Hermitage Hills is about three minutes from where the truck parks, which makes it the neighborhood we roll through most in 37076. Send a photo and a firm number comes back the same afternoon; the grind itself usually lands three to five working days out.
The stump is at the back of the lot and there is one way in
A Hermitage Hills lot is an odd shape to work in: roughly 79 feet of frontage against a little over 200 feet of depth. That is why the front yards look modest and the back yards run on forever, and it is why the tree that finally came down is almost never the one by the driveway. It is the silver maple or the water oak that went in the season the house was finished, out past where the clothesline used to be, and the stump it left is what your mower deck clips every third pass now that the dirt around it has settled and the wood has not.
Then there are the fence jobs. Plenty of yards along Bonnabrook and Bonnafair are trading their original chain link for privacy panels, and no contractor is setting a line post through a root collar the size of a dinner plate. Those come with a date already on the calendar, so tell us the date and we will work to it.
What got planted in 1962 is what we are grinding in 2026
The core of this subdivision went up between 1962 and 1972, and the planting reflects it. Silver maple was the fast-shade default, water oak filled in behind it, sweetgum showed up on the lots where somebody wanted fall color and did not know about the seed balls yet, and white pine went in along back fence lines as a screen. A few mimosas are still hanging on out front.
They do not grind alike. Silver maple is soft and spreads wide and shallow, so the wheel moves quickly but the pile it throws is enormous for the trunk size. Water oak is the opposite: dense, slow feed, hard on teeth, and worth an honest quote rather than a guess. Sweetgum comes apart in stringy fiber that packs into the cut. White pine is the one that surprises people, because the resin gums the wheel and the sap will mark a concrete pad if the chips sit on it overnight.
One gate, 180 feet of turf, and sometimes a fence panel off
A walk-behind grinder wants about three feet of clear opening. A fair number of gates in here measure less than that once the latch hardware and a sagging post are accounted for, and the original chain link has usually been in the ground since the Nixon administration. Pulling three panels and the two posts between them takes about twenty minutes, and we put it back the way we found it before we leave.
Where the fence can stay, it is a long walk instead. Two hundred feet of turf between the trailer and the stump is not a problem in July; it is a real problem two days after rain, because a loaded machine will print tracks in soft fescue that take a month to grow out.
Houses here are crawlspace with carports, not slab with side-entry garages, so there is rarely a drive-around route to the back. We walk the path before we price the job, not after.
Chip volume on a deep lot is a decision, not an afterthought
Grinding a stump produces two to three times the material homeowners expect, because you are turning solid wood into shavings and mixing in the soil around it. A 34-inch silver maple out of one of these back yards is several wheelbarrow loads before you count the root runs.
The advantage of a 201-foot lot is that there is almost always a back corner past the shed where a mound of chips disappears entirely and quietly rots down over a season. Plenty of people here take that option and spread it around the beds themselves. The other half want it gone, especially if the stump was pine and the chips are resinous. We settle that before the machine starts, and the price reflects which way you go.
Hermitage answers to Metro, and so does the strip by the curb
There is no Hermitage city hall. Every permit, right-of-way and tree question in 37076 routes through Metro Nashville-Davidson County, which matters most for the houses fronting Old Hickory Boulevard, where the strip between the sidewalk and the street is public and the tree standing in it is not strictly yours to hand us. We will tell you which side of that line your stump sits on before we quote it.
Tennessee 811 gets a locate request from us on every job, and the utilities take three working days to mark. What they mark is gas, water, electric and cable. What nobody marks is the irrigation somebody added in the nineties, the invisible fence loop that runs the perimeter, or the low-voltage wire out to the landscape lights. You know where those are and we do not, so we ask.
One practical note: if the stump is on Bonnamere or Plantation and the trailer has to sit at the curb, we schedule around Hermitage Elementary drop-off and pickup rather than blocking the street at the worst hour of the morning.
What we look at before quoting a Hermitage Hills back yard
- Clear opening at the narrowest gate, measured at the post and not at the fence line
- Distance from where the trailer can park to the stump, and what the turf is doing underfoot
- Species, because a water oak and a silver maple of the same width are not the same job
- Whether an old ground stump nearby is settling and should come out in the same visit
- Sprinkler heads, invisible fence wire and lighting cable the homeowner knows about
- Whether the tree fronts Old Hickory Boulevard and sits in Metro right-of-way
- Where the chips end up: the back corner, the beds, or the trailer
What we do in Hermitage Hills
What people on Bonnabrook and Bonnafair ask us
My gate is narrower than three feet. Do I have to take the fence down myself?
No, leave it. We carry the tools to pull chain-link panels and set them back, and on most of these yards it is three panels and twenty minutes of work at each end of the job. Wood privacy fence is the same deal if the pickets are screwed rather than nailed. Just mention the gate width when you send the photo so the right machine comes on the trailer.
How deep do you actually go? I want to plant something else in the same spot.
Standard is six to twelve inches under the existing grade, which clears turf and most shrubs. Planting a replacement tree in the exact footprint needs more than that, because what is left down there is a mass of shavings that will rob nitrogen while it breaks down. Tell us it is a replant and we will go deeper, dig the chips back out and let you put clean soil in.
The stump has been there since the eighties and it is soft. Cheaper or harder?
Usually cheaper, but not always. Rotten wood feeds fast and the wheel does not fight it, so the labor drops. What runs the price back up is the dirt and gravel that has worked into a decayed stump over forty years, because grit is much harder on teeth than clean oak. A photo showing how far it has collapsed tells us which one you have.
Can you do my neighbor's stump the same trip? Two houses, one street.
That is the cheapest way to buy this work. Most of the cost of a small job is getting the trailer here and unloaded, so a second stump next door comes in well under the first one. We have done four in a row on one side of Bonnafair in an afternoon. One of you books it, we price it as a single visit, and you sort out the split however you like.
A limb came down on my carport in a storm and the tree has to go. How fast can you be out?
Anything leaning on a structure gets looked at same day or the next morning, and being three minutes up the road is the reason we can say that. Understand the order of operations though: the tree has to be felled first, which is a different trade. Once it is on the ground and cut low, the stump work slots straight in.