How Elite Tree Service Knoxville Handles a Job

Elite Tree Service Knoxville takes down, prunes and grinds out trees for homeowners in Knoxville and the surrounding parts of Knox County: the older streets of North and East Knoxville, the river peninsula of Sequoyah Hills, the ridge subdivisions of West Knoxville and the newer neighborhoods spreading toward Hardin Valley, Powell and Halls.

Knoxville sits in the Ridge-and-Valley country between the Smokies and the Cumberland Plateau, and that shapes nearly every job here. Houses are built on side slopes, at the bottom of ravines and along the top of ridges like Sharp's Ridge and Beaver Ridge. A tall tulip poplar on a hillside can lean toward a house that sits twenty feet below its base. A backyard that drops off toward a creek may have no flat ground for a truck at all. So before we talk price, we look at the ground as closely as the tree.

What the visit covers

We walk around each tree you are asking about. We note the species, how it leans, any dead or hanging limbs, cracks, cavities, fungus near the base and signs of insects or disease, which in this area means looking for things like emerald ash borer on ash, thinning crowns on black walnut and the white cottony specks of hemlock woolly adelgid on hemlocks. Then we look at what the tree could hit: the roof, a deck, a car, a fence, the neighbor's house, the street. We check for overhead lines, and for anything that suggests the tree may stand in the public right-of-way rather than on your lot. Inside the city, a tree on city property or in an improved right-of-way, including the treelawn strip between sidewalk and pavement, counts as a public tree under Chapter 14 of the city code, and pruning or removing it needs authorization from the city's urban forester first.

What the quote says

You get a written quote. Each tree gets its own line with the work described in plain words (take down, reduce, thin, remove deadwood, grind stump) and its own price. The quote also says what happens to the wood, the brush and the chips, and how the yard will be left. If something changes once the work starts, such as rot found inside a trunk that looked solid, we stop and talk to you before going further.

How the work is done

• Limbs over roofs are tied off and lowered instead of dropped.
• On slopes, sections are cut small enough to control and carried or winched up to where the chipper sits.
• Lawns and soft ground are protected with mats or plywood where equipment has to cross.
• Lines carrying power are left to the utility; we work on the tree once the line is clear. For the single service wire running to your house, KUB will lower it at no charge so pruning can be done safely, then reconnect it.
• Walnut and ash wood is kept local rather than hauled across the region.

To set up a visit, call (865) 401-8827 or send the form with a few photos.