Stump Grinding in Chickering Valley, Forest Hills
Yes. Chickering Road, Chickering Lane, Chickering Court and Timberwood Drive are four minutes from us. Text a photo of the stump and a firm number comes back the same weekday, usually inside a couple of hours, with grinding dates three to five working days out.
A Chickering Valley yard maple is about done at sixty-six
Chickering Valley was built out in two years and nothing since has changed that. The houses on Chickering Lane, Chickering Court and Timberwood Drive all date to 1958 or 1959, which means the shade trees the first owners set out in their new front lawns went in within a season or two of one another. A silver maple planted then has reached the end of what that species reliably gives you, and when one lets go, somebody two doors down is usually having the same conversation before the year is out.
What actually lands in front of us is rarely dramatic. It is a trunk cut off at knee height last winter that the mower now has to swing around twice every pass. It is a soft dish in the lawn where a maple came out in 2019 and nobody thought to backfill it. It is a stub sitting in the middle of ground somebody wants sodded before fall. On a two-acre lot the thing is not in anybody's way, which is exactly why it sits there for three growing seasons before anyone picks up the phone.
The 1959 lawn trees and the hillside oaks are two different jobs
Split the trees here in half and you have most of what you need to know about pricing. The planted ones - silver maple, sugar maple, the odd red cedar along a property line - are soft, quick to feed and generous with chip. A 30-inch silver maple in reachable lawn is a job measured in an hour and a half, and the pile it makes will be twice what the homeowner pictured.
The other half was here before the bulldozers. White oak and shagbark hickory on the upper slopes are dense, slow and hard on teeth, and a hickory in particular will have us stopping to check the wheel partway through. Tulip poplar sits in between: fast to cut, but the stumps are usually the widest on the lot because poplars flare hard at the base.
On every one of them we take the wood down six to twelve inches under the surface, and further where sod, a walk or a patio is going back over the top. Grinding shallow to save half an hour is how a lawn ends up with a hard spot two summers later.
One way in, and nowhere to turn around at the top
The layout here is dead ends and cul-de-sacs threaded across a hillside, and that is the part of the job that changes the estimate more than the tree does. A truck and trailer that can be swung around in a normal driveway has to be backed the whole length of a Chickering Valley drive, sometimes three hundred feet of it, on a grade, with a retaining course on one side and a bank on the other.
So when you send a picture of the stump, send one of the driveway too - taken from the street looking up. We would rather bring the compact machine and plan on walking it in than arrive with the wrong trailer and spend the first forty minutes solving a puzzle we could have solved on the phone.
Nobody is coming to take the root ball away
Forest Hills runs its own chipper and brush pickup, and it is genuinely useful for limbs up to eight inches and bagged leaves. What it will not touch is a root ball still attached to a trunk, anything a contractor generated, or debris of any kind that is not already sitting curbside - the crews do not come onto private property. That is worth knowing before you assume the wood will disappear on its own.
So the grindings are a decision, not an afterthought. On these lots most people have us crown the hole with its own chip and let it settle, because there is room and nobody sees it. If the spot is going back to lawn this season, we load the excess out instead, since fresh chip tied into topsoil will starve new grass of nitrogen for a good while.
How a Chickering Valley job usually runs
- A photo of the stump, plus one of the drive from the street - the second one moves the price more often
- Wood taken six to twelve inches under the surface, deeper where sod or hardscape is going back
- A narrower machine whenever the only approach is between a garage corner and a cut bank
- Tennessee 811 filed and the three working days waited out before anything spins
- Your own markers on irrigation heads, dog fence wire and any propane run
- Chip crowned over the hole or loaded out - decided when we book, not while we are standing there
What we do in Chickering Valley
Nearby Forest Hills neighborhoods
Questions we get on the Chickering streets
Do I need a tree permit in Forest Hills just to grind a stump?
No. The city's permit covers taking down a living tree eight inches in caliper or more. A stump is what is left after the tree is already gone, so there is nothing for the city to review. Dead trees and storm-fallen ones are exempt from the removal permit in the first place. If the tree is still standing and healthy, that conversation happens at City Hall before we are involved at all.
The last stump we had out left a hole that keeps sinking. Can you deal with that one?
Usually, yes. A dish like that means the previous grind stopped at the trunk and left the buttress roots to rot in place over the next several years. We open the depression back up, take out what is still down there, and refill it compacted in layers rather than dumping loose chip in one go. It is cheaper than the original grind and it stops the annual top-up.
Can you reach a tree at the back of a two-acre lot?
Most of the time. The limit is not distance, it is the pinch point - the gap between the house and the bank, the gate, or a soft spot the machine would sink into. Tell us the narrowest thing we have to pass through and we will tell you honestly whether it fits, and if a slower narrow machine is needed we will say what that adds to the time.
Two of us on the same street want stumps out. Is that cheaper?
Yes, and it is worth coordinating. Most of the cost of a small job is getting the trailer there and off-loaded. Second and third stumps on the same visit drop well below what they would cost on their own, and if they are on the same street rather than the same lot that still holds, as long as we can do them in one trip.
How dense is white oak compared to the maples?
Enough that it changes the day. White oak and shagbark hickory feed slowly and take the edge off carbide teeth in a way maple never does, so a 36-inch oak can take longer than a 44-inch silver maple sitting next to it. We price by what the wood is, not just how wide it measures, and we will tell you which one you have when we look at the photo.