Stump Grinding in Hermitage Woods, Hermitage

The stump is a full story below where the truck parks

This is seventies and eighties split-level and ranch country with a lot of finished basements, and the way these lots were graded means the back door on the lower level opens onto ground that sits four to eight feet below the front yard. Between the two there is usually either a set of railroad-tie or block steps or a retaining wall with a slope beside it.

When a sweetgum or a silver maple in the back finally comes out, and both species planted with this subdivision are now at the age where they start shedding limbs into the yard, the stump left behind sits down on that lower level. From the street it is invisible. From the kitchen window it is the thing you look at every morning.

The reason people call is rarely aesthetics though. It is that the lower-level patio is right there, the kids or the dog use that yard, and a sweetgum stump surrounded by a crop of seed balls and a ring of sprouting suckers is not a surface anybody wants to walk on barefoot in August.

Getting a grinder down a grade change safely

There are only ever three answers here and we work out which one applies before quoting. The first and best is a driveway or a side slope with a gentle enough fall that the machine walks down under control on mats. Plenty of Rockwood and Raintree lots have that on one side even when the other side is a wall.

The second is a neighbor's flatter access, which sounds cheeky but is common and usually fine if you ask them first. On a street where the houses step down the hill together, the property two doors up often has the gentle route in.

The third is disassembly. Some walk-behind machines break down into sections light enough to be carried down steps and reassembled at the bottom. It costs more in labor and it is slower, and we treat it as the last option rather than the default. What we will not do is drive a loaded machine down a set of tie steps and hope, and if that is genuinely the only way in we will tell you the job is not practical rather than damage your yard finding out.

Sweetgum and silver maple, the two trees this subdivision has too many of

Sweetgum was planted everywhere in Middle Tennessee in the seventies for the fall color and the fast growth, and homeowners have regretted it ever since. The seed balls are the famous complaint. The relevant part for us is the root system, which is broad and shallow with big surface runs that lift turf, and the wood, which shreds into a stringy fiber that packs the cut and needs clearing more often than clean hardwood does.

Silver maple is the other volume species and it is the one that fails structurally. Fast growth means weak wood, and a forty-five-year-old silver maple over a basement patio is a real hazard rather than a theoretical one. Grinding it is easy work by comparison with an oak, which is one small mercy.

Water oak, white pine and the occasional sourwood round out the list. Water oak is the slow one. White pine gums the wheel and drops sticky material you do not want on a concrete patio. Sourwood is small, hard and rarely a problem.

Townhouse sections and shared ground

Not everything in Hermitage Woods is detached. The townhouse portions come with their own question, which is whether the stump is on your ground or the association's, and the answer determines who pays and who authorizes the work.

We are happy to work either way. If it is common area, get whoever manages the property to contact us and we will quote it to them in writing. If it is your patio strip, the job is small and quick and we can usually slot it into a day we are already in the neighborhood, which keeps the cost down.

Where townhouse yards get tricky is access, because the route to a rear patio may pass along the back of two other units. We coordinate that rather than showing up and improvising, and we lay boards over any turf strip we have to cross more than twice.