My wife and I bought a house with two GIANT trees in the backyard. At least sixty feet tall, four feet across. They were probably planted when the house was built in '72.

One month in, one of them dies. It cost $2,700 to remove it and leave the stump.

Then in March this year the OTHER ONE FUCKING DIES TOO. We went ahead and had the stumps ground this time. $4,400.

I spent $7,100 to have a backyard with 0 trees and 2 mounds where I would rather have trees. Fucking NOTHING to show for all that money. Those trees were gorgeous. I was pretty devastated when we had to have the second one cut down.

Apart from the trees, we have had:

A 50 year old toilet flush valve break ($35 plus the time it took me to repair the toilet because I do not want to figure out how to get rid of an old toilet);
The garbage disposal fail ($300 for a new disposal; $450 for the plumber because I got in over my head);
The gas valve on the heater break ($840 plus a weekend of it being 45° in my house before anyone in town could come with the part)
A garage door that hangs up as it closes. I'm gonna ignore that one for as long as I can and just pull it down while it closes for now. Maybe I'll get the hardware to convert it to a manual door while I'm young enough to pull it up and down.

I'd still rather own, but man, the cons go hard.

[–] Bluerendar@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I followed some arborist's ch on YT for a while and man, people really butcher trees when they don't know what they're doing. It's quite sad given how much a tree affects a property's price, I feel bad that you effectively got ripped off like that. I don't think many appraisers would know their shit either so that sorta thing is just being SoL I guess...

[–] spicytuna62@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm pretty sure the horrendous drought we had last couple years and the 105-110 degree summers did them in.

We're the second owners so the lady who lived here before us had to have loved those trees. She and her husband built this place and raised their kids here. She continued to live here until he died. She seemed genuinely elated to be selling to another young couple looking to build a family instead of some corpo or landlord or flipper. Nice lady.

I don't think anyone caught that first tree was probably dying at closing. Oh well. It sucks but what're you gonna do? As for the second one, the last few summers have been brutally hot and dry. We didn't do anything to the trees. We did cut back on watering the lawn because of the drought. I think the poor old thing just couldn't take it anymore.

We're in Oklahoma, and the Eastern Redbud is our state tree. One of the neighbors has one, and when it starts seeding again, I'm going to ask if I can collect some seed pods so we can try to get a few going. They're really hardy here and a local tree should produce seeds that are best adapted to the local climate. I miss those two trees, but for those couple weeks a year, when the redbuds are in bloom, I think the beauty of that will be an acceptable consolation.

[–] veroxii@aussie.zone 2 points 11 months ago

Those trees sound like a neighbour might've poisoned them once new people moved in. Just sounds suss to me the timing etc

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