Timber!

So this was our tree a week ago in the morning.  Looks perfectly normal...

All green and leafy and summery

But this is what it looks like on the other side...rotted...so they told us it needs to come down.  
There's a lot more to the story of how we found this out but it just makes me mad so I won't get into it.

Where's Waldo?
We used Tree Doctors and this was our first guy out in the morning.

And it begins.  Piece by piece.

They were really careful (as much as they could be) not to disturb the neighbours.

That was just the small branches.

So lonely looking without branches!

Our great crew!

Most of our tree is in there!!!

Hacking away at the pieces to put in the truck

The next day...with damage.  1 hole in fence and in shed (they will fix that).  1 big dent in ground...which they said they couldn't fix as it wasn't covered.  That was annoying as they told us that day it WOULD be fixed for us.  They also still need to come back and clean up a bit this week.

So overall Tree Doctors did a great job.  They finished everything in 10 hours!  They scaled the tree, they brought things down carefully, they worked really hard, and they were very friendly.  Their quote was about half the cost of a few other places that were recommended to us.  As I mentioned, they are fixing the damage to the wood, but they won't do the stone, so please be aware of that.  No real way around it in a small space with a big tree anyway!  I should also mention that they organized everything beforehand as well - they sent an arborist out, they submitted all the paperwork to the city, they scheduled everything once we heard from the city (about 10 weeks due to the ice storm backlog this year), and kept us informed as the actual day progressed.  

We are also planning to plant a sugar maple in the corner by next year (as we must) to replace our sadly missing tree.