Stump Grinding in Bluffview Addition, Ashland City, TN
Bluffview, yes — barely two minutes from us, down past the square toward Riverbluff Park. Text a photo of the stump on a weekday and a firm number follows, usually inside two hours, with the grind itself the following week.
The back yard is a storey below the front door
The parcel file puts most of Bluff View St and McQuarry St at sixteen to nineteen hundredths of an acre, built between 1958 and 1971 with 1971 the most common year on the plat. That is a small lot to begin with, and a good share of it is the drop toward the river.
What that produces is a two-level yard: a flat apron at the house, then a bank, then whatever bench is left below. The tree that shaded the deck was almost always planted at the top of the bank or on the bench under it, and the stump is now somewhere a wheelbarrow can reach going down and not coming back up.
So the question on a Bluffview quote is rarely the diameter. It is where a machine can safely stand, and how the material gets from there to the truck.
Steps Are Not a Route
Half these houses have a walk-out or a partial basement, and the way people get to the lower yard is a flight of steps off the deck. Steps are the one feature that cannot be improved with boards or a mat, so a stump reachable only by them is reachable only by hand.
The workable approaches on this plat are the side of the house where the grade holds longest, a neighbour's flatter lot with their say-so, or a slow diagonal traverse across the bank rather than a straight run down it. A machine driven straight down a fall line has nothing left to arrest it, which is why we work across a slope in stages and cut a level pad to stand on before the wheel ever touches wood.
Where none of that is available, we will tell you the stump is a hand job and price it that way rather than pretend otherwise.
Everything Comes Back Uphill
Grinding at the bottom of a Bluffview bank generates a pile that has to travel up, not down, and that single fact sets the price more often than the wood does. A barrow load up a fifteen-foot bank is a different unit of work from a barrow load across a lawn, and there is no way to make it faster.
The tempting alternative is to push the surplus over the edge toward the water, and that is the one thing that does not happen here. Loose material tipped on a steep river bank does not stay put through the first heavy storm; it ends up in the yard below, in the drainage line, or in the river, and all three of those are somebody's problem afterwards.
So on the lower benches we plan haul-off from the start, or we agree a flat, off-drainage spot on the upper apron where it can sit and break down.
Rock on the Shoulder, Silt at the Toe
Bluffview is one of the few places in town where both of the county's ground types show up on one parcel. Along the upper shoulder, where the red cedars are, limestone sits close enough to grade that the wheel can find it in the first foot. Down at the toe of the bank the material is soft and deep, and the wheel goes wherever you ask it to.
That means the finish is decided by where the stump is, not by what species it is. On the shoulder we take a stump wider and shallower and level it out to what the rock allows, and we say so on the quote rather than promising a depth we cannot reach. At the bottom the depth is easy and the machine's footing is the problem instead.
If you have stumps in both positions, they will not price alike, and anyone quoting them as a matching pair has not walked the lot.
Sources
- Cheatham County GIS parcel service (Austin Peay State University)Parcel layer records the subdivision name, year built and calculated acreage for the Bluffview Addition lots
What we do in Bluffview Addition
Bluffview questions, mostly about the slope
Can you get to the stump at the bottom of my bank?
Usually, but the answer depends on the bank and not the stump. Send us two photographs: one down the slope from the house showing the whole drop, and one back up from the bottom. What we are looking for is a line the machine can traverse and a place at the bottom flat enough to stand on. If both exist, it is a normal job with an extra hour in it. If neither does, we will say so before you have taken a day off work.
Will the machine damage the bank?
It can, so the route is chosen with that in mind. Grass on a river bank holds it together, and a machine turned on the spot tears that cover open and starts a scar that widens every storm. We cross a slope on a planned line, we use boards where the turf is thin, and we turn on flat ground rather than on the fall. Anything we do open up gets seeded before we leave.
My neighbour's yard is flat and mine is not. Can you go through theirs?
Yes, with their agreement in advance, and it often makes a job cheaper by an hour or more. Ask them yourself before the day rather than leaving it to us on the morning, and let us know what their surface is — lawn, gravel drive or pavers — so we bring the right protection for it. We treat a neighbour's ground as carefully as the customer's, because that is the whole basis on which the favour gets extended a second time.
How deep can you go on the lots up near the bluff edge?
On the shoulder lots, as deep as the limestone lets us, which is sometimes eight inches on the uphill side of the same stump where the downhill side takes fourteen. What we do is level the finish to the shallowest point the rock sets and take the stump out sideways instead, so the surface is flat and you can turf it. Chasing depth against rock costs teeth and buys nothing.