The jobs that make up most weeks
Photographs of finished work tell you very little on their own — a stump ground flat looks the same whether it took twenty minutes or half a day. What follows is a description of the job types that come up most often around Sydney and what makes each one harder or easier than it looks.
Sectional dismantle over a roof
The most common serious job. A mature Sydney blue gum or forest red gum has grown over the back half of a house, and there is no room to fell it. The climber sets a rope, takes the canopy off in pieces small enough to lower by hand, then rigs the trunk down in sections against a friction device. It is slow and methodical. The cost is in the rigging, not the cutting.
Where the street allows a truck-mounted elevated work platform or a crane, the same tree comes out in a fraction of the time — which is why two quotes on the same tree can differ so much. One has assumed a crane can get in; one has not.
Camphor laurel clearance in the Inner West
Camphor laurel is a declared weed through much of NSW and it is everywhere in the older Inner West and lower North Shore suburbs. The approval is generally straightforward. The work is not: the timber is soft and wet, the canopies are enormous and wide, and a mature camphor produces a startling volume of chip. Expect several tipper loads from a single tree, and expect the stump to be a wide, shallow plate rather than a neat cylinder.
Stump grinding before paving or a pool
Grinding for turf and grinding for structure are different specifications. Two to three hundred millimetres below grade is fine if you are laying soil and rolling turf over it. If a slab, a pool shell or a retaining footing is going in, the stump and the major buttress roots have to come out properly, which usually means excavation rather than a grinder. Say which one you need at quoting time — see the stump removal service page for the difference.
Bushland-edge fuel reduction
On the sandstone edges — Hornsby, Berowra, Menai, the upper Northern Beaches — a lot of work is clearing within the 10/50 entitlement or simply reducing fuel around a house before summer. The constraint is almost always access: the block falls away behind the house, the material has to come uphill by hand, and the mulch cannot simply be blown back into the reserve.
Storm response
After a strong southerly or an east coast low, the calls change character entirely. Split unions in large eucalypts, whole trees on fences, limbs through roof tiles. The first job is making the site safe, not making it tidy. Anything involving a powerline goes to Ausgrid before a crew is dispatched.
If your job looks like one of these, ring (02) 9000 1943 or send through some photos. The services overview covers what each job involves, and the cost guide explains the pricing.
Frequently asked questions
Can I see photos of a job like mine before I book?
Ask on the call. Crews generally have before-and-after photos of comparable work, and a photo of a similar access problem is more useful than a portfolio of easy jobs. What matters is whether they have done your type of removal — a sectional dismantle over a roof is a different skill set from felling in an open paddock.
Do you take on strata and commercial maintenance?
Yes. Strata blocks, schools, industrial estates and body corporate grounds are regular work, usually as a scheduled programme rather than one-off calls. Those jobs tend to need traffic control, a documented risk assessment and out-of-hours scheduling, all of which should be in the quote rather than added later.