Act Quickly
July 29th, 2009
Found On: Memphis Craigslist By: Molly
We have three large oak trees that were uprooted from the recent storm. If you act quickly, you can have it FREE for cutting and hauling away.
And if I act slowly? Will you charge me for the privilege of performing the service you require? I need to ask my surgeon how much he’ll pay me for my burst appendix, then offer him a discount if he’ll take it out today. It’s a bit uncomfortable, I’m willing to let it go for less than top dollar.
Probably means if you act slowly someone else will have beaten you to the punch. Good oak wood is fairly valuable, so I’d imagine someone would jump on that.
@Aggrazel
I’d imagine not.
You do realize Oak fireword is worth a good portion of money. Being right of the road like that you could cut this and haul it to a happy buyer and make some pretty fast cash.
I agree with Aggrazel. A number of people would be willing to do that around here. From looking at the size of the tree and the fact that there is 3 of them you could probably get at least a cord of good wood out of those trees. If you cut it and let it dry you could get $100 per cord easy.
*face palm*
No, you guys. The value of the wood is NOT the point. The fail is saying people have to come and chop it up themselves. If you chop it into firewood yourself and sell it, that’s a whole seperate deal. But saying people have to go out there, cut your tree for you, and take the pieces home is a little ridiculous. You should get off your lazy ass, do it yourself, and give away the firewood. xD
What they said. It’s one of those things that seems absurd if you don’t know any better, but there are plenty of people who would jump on that. It’s a good deal.
Yeah, see, what this guy has on his hands is an asset, not a liability. We aren’t missing the point; you are — if the effort required to clean the thing up is less than the value of the commodity you produce by cleaning it up, then there’s no fail in saying, “Hey, I have a profit opportunity that I’m not interested in exploiting, and if you want to exploit it I won’t ask for a cut of the profits.” You might as well say that if I don’t want that nasty coal seam defacing my scenic cliff, I should get off my lazy ass, dig out the coal, and give it away for free to a coal mining company. Why not just say — as this guy is doing — “I don’t want it; if you do, you can have it as long as you clean up behind yourself and leave things pretty”?
Not that it’s that important; I was amused by the “fail” picture even though I knew it wasn’t really a fail. So as far as I’m concerned it was worth posting.
Yeah.. When I was living with my parents, we used to heat the house with a wood stove. (No we were not hicks or anything, it was just a really cheap way to heat the house in the winter.)
Anyway, if there were fallen trees the park department didn’t want to deal with, we would go and cut it up and haul it off to split and dry.
Buying firewood is very expensive. Any free tree is a damn good offer.
I’m not quite sure that Clyde gets the real point. It’s simply a service exchange situation. “I don’t want to cut up this tree, but I know that it’s worth a good deal of money, so if someone is willing to do the work, they can have the wood for free.” That is the deal. Happens all the time. Not really that uncommon.
“Act quickly” is a little silly to say, they should have said “First Come-First Dibs, otherwise I will be hiring a tree removal company and you’ll miss out on some potentially valuable wood”
At least this would better explain the urgency.
That’s close to $5k of tree right there, even if you’re just burning it. Being permitted to cut it up and take it away for free is a damn good bargain.
Most people who rely on a fireplace to heat their house tend to jump on things like this very quickly. (We know a guy who builds pallet crates, so we burn those. It’s like living under a bridge in our own house).
Yeah it’s obvious someone never grew up in the country where everything is a valuable resource and not a particularly large weed to be removed. Hell, firewood we be the least way to make money off of timber like that, oak is great furniture wood too. I’d go out, buy/rent a chainsaw and truck and get to work.
Sorry, i don’t need wood. Get it every morning …
Despite their value, surprisingly, they have not been claimed after three long weeks. A heads up for any Memphis tree scavengers: http://memphis.craigslist.org/zip/1263647643.html
Well my father has a wood stove, and would of gone to get it. Its not like he has not done it before.
Doing work to get something out of it… never heard of it… in my life… I have to goto work tomorrow to get free money
Forget firewodd, I’d cut that up and mill it and do some woodworking with it. You know how much oak costs for larger projects? Especially sawn to spec!
Old growth timber is worth money. A big elm fell in my yard 6 years ago, slightly larger than the oak in the picture. We did find a company that was willing to take it away for free. This was in a part of NC where there are many furniture factories. But still, not a ridiculous idea.
Oak is one of the best woods to use as heat. If you heat your house with gas, how much does that cost you in a year? It’s not that hard to chop up a tree and load it on a trailer. I know people who would drive 100 miles to get that.
My parents had an oak tree drop in their yard and had a guy cut it into boards. They got $6k for them. Nuff said.
No, they just didn’t bother to take down the post on craigslist. I absolutely guarantee you that that tree is no longer there.
The poster of this one missed the boat, as this is fairly commonplace. Trees like this are valuable to the right people, and when they fall, saying “you can have it if you come get it” is the usual deal. You see a lot of this sort of thing after a big storm, and a fair number of people make some good cash by cleaning up the big trees after a storm and selling the wood.
It would not be unusual for a property owner with a particularly large tree to not only require the people to cut and remove it themselves, but to charge them for it as well. The tree is way more valuable than the effort required to remove it. Giving it away for free only occurs when the owner wants it removed immediately, instead of haggling over the price.
I guess I should give a little back story to this post. This ad was placed after a tornado ripped through our area. While I understand the value of the wood issue, this was merely an attempt to get the tree removed without having to pay someone to do it. You couldn’t give away firewood around here if you wanted to right now.
This probably went quick. firewood is valuable, and that tree is most likely worth about $300-400 once its cut up. for 2 hours of work, i’d do that! theres nothing wrong with this ad.
We had a maple tree in front of our house cut down recently. We had large blocks of wood that we couldn’t do anything with. If we had the tools to chop it into firewood we would have done that and sell it. Instead, we had a sign that said “If you can chop it, you can have it” I don’t see what makes this any different.
Whoever posted this thinking it was a fail, fails. That tree is worth a lot of money. It is OAK. Go to home depot, and ask about buying oak. You’ll see what I mean. As several people have already pointed out, even as firewood the tree is probably worth $500. We are not talking about a broken washing machine or a dirty mattress here, we are talking about OAK. Have you ever wondered why it is cheaper to get carpets installed than hardwood floor? Because OAK COSTS A LOT OF MONEY.
@Clyde
You would be surprised Clyde. Around my town, its not uncommon for landowners to charge people to cut firewood. I’ve been charged to cut it and I’ve charged for others to cut it. I live in the country and a nice fire is a good thing to have in the winter, although firewood doesn’t come cheap, and hey, who needs trees in the yard anyways, why not leave a bunch of ugly stumps everywhere and let the trees fall wherever(for those who think chopping all the trees in sight is a good idea, not like there’s a house around or anything)
@Clyde
Absolutely legitimate ad. Firewood is valuable.
I have a friend with a battered landrover pickup who likes to stop at the side of the road and cut up fallen trees (or even better, pick up logs that someone else has cut (he’s lazy like that)) – he likes to imagine that people think he’s working for the forestry commission. really, they just think he’s a thieving little monkey.
O.M.G. If you don’t have a chainsaw already and don’t know what you’re doing, don’t even.
Please. We run a tree service, and what these people are saying is: “We’re cheap asses who won’t pay to hire someone who knows what they’re doing, because we’d rather have any ole Tom, Dick, or Harry, who wants firewood but probably doesn’t know diddly about safe tree removals or storm work, to come by and *get rid of it for us*.”
Yes, “good” wood can be worth some money. But not every tree is, even if it’s oak.
This reminds me of the callers we have all the time, particularly with walnut, who ask us if we “buy” trees. Yeah, sure, buddy: we’ll come by and pay YOU for the service we provide, for which you should be paying US. 95% of the time, the tree is some scraggly-a$$ thing that no reputable company would buy from us, with whorls and twists and limbs about 5′ up. For decent rough-cut lumber, even, it has to be at least 8′ of straight wood with no twists or limbs. Even then it’s not a huge amount of money, like so many seem to think.
It’s probably very desirable as firewood, but even that is not exactly gold or oil. We GIVE it away.
Oh! It also reminds me of an eBay listing I saw once: A guy had 3 larger, knotty, ugly oaks–standing near his home–and was listing the opportunity to come take them down–for him–and haul them away … for $10,000. Ooooh, act quickly, before someone snatches that up!
I’m shocked. Well, no . . . how much did they pay the guy to *saw it*? We did sell a huge white oak log recently for about $300. We calculated the board feet and found out what logs were going for, and went a little under that. After he mills it, I’m sure he’ll get quite a bit out of it. Still, $6K?
@nih
That tree is NOT worth 5 grand, and you’re a moron for saying so. You can MAYBE get 10 stacks out of that tree worth about 10 dollars each.
Also, to respond to Tony:
“a really cheap way to heat the house in the winter” and “Buying firewood is very expensive” don’t add up at all. So either you/your family are burning a precious commodity, or its a bit cheaper than you let on.
The bottom line here is that the owners are attempting to get out of work by “letting” someone take the wood off their hands. While this is seems shady to a lot of people (myself included) there are a few who would take them up on this offer.
Um, my dad does this for fire wood. He has a wood boiler. He owns a 6 bedroom house that would cost him about $800 a month to heat in the winter. He gets heat for free, by just taking care of trees that people don’t want in there yard, or trees that got knocked over in a storm. He also has a wood splitter, so this isn’t very much work for him, and since he runs a construction business, he has all of the equipment to make things easier. In fact, most people pay him to take the trees away, because that service also goes with his business. I don’t really see how this is stupid. Also, some people said that fire wood isn’t expensive. My dad’s neighbor buys his fire wood in the winter, and he says that it’s not really that much cheaper than heating your house with gas. Oh, and the wood boiler also heats the hot water as well. Don’t ask my why it’s called a wood boiler, got not clue on that one big dog.
look, dumbasses. if you buy some firewood at the store, it is cut up into pieces, right?
that means someone found a tree, cut it down, cut it into pieces, bundled it up and hauled it to the store to sell to you. they thought it was worth it, and you thought it was worth it to pay enough for the wood to cover their costs and probably a little extra for profit.
that means it would be worth it to alot of folks to cut out the middle-man, do the cutting and hauling themselves, and get the wood for free. the guy who lets the wood go owns the land that grew the trees. he did his work by earning the money to buy the land.
there is nothing shady about this. some people farm trees as a business for god sake. lumber companies pay them for trees they have to cut down themselves.
I love this blog.
Not everyone who doesn’t own a chainsaw is clueless about how to use one. I have two large maples and an oak tree which drop a branch occasionally. Not often enough to *buy* a saw, but often enough to *need* one. Luckily, I also have a neighbor who is willing to loan me his saw when there’s wood to be cut. I’m not ready for Timbersports or anything. But, I could make short enough work of that fallen tree to make it worth my time in wood.
oak trees are rly valuable and worth a shiny dime
No you’re not getting the point. This wood has value more than just for firewood. Anyone who makes furniture would jump on this and they get a good deal because they don’t have to buy it. Of course you have to chop it, they’re getting it for free! My family sold a peacan tree accross several states to someone who wanted the wood.