I'll try to keep it short, unfortunately I'm rather excited to learn about milling and litchenberg. Born and raised on a Christmas tree farm and always been interested in cutting big timber. I ended up getting to work personally with some of the best ranked and sponsored competition tree climbing champions in the world. Washington d.c. around Fairfax County, Loudon County VA and surrounding is the highest dollar residential removal tree work that I know of. Its high dollar, steep competition, too humid and hot to work, no good trees to cut, and the worst snotty customers ever. Im 28 years old and I'm a pure bread contract tree climber, and a certified master arborist. Usually I only take calls for the really nasty leaners over structure that we dont want to hit because that's where the money is, risk and liability. The last of a dieing bread I'm afraid....

After my asplungh days I started traveling to cut for other services for the money at first. Highest I've made steady working for others was 600 a day cash in Richmond virginia. That's 365 10/7 if you want it and you can make it out alive, customers house including. That's literally pushing me to my limits like Lance Armstrong would know about. Working for myself with one man I dropped a tree over structure for 3500 cash in 8 hours. I've done a 2500 day too. Lots of 1000 days. Traveling like this allowed me to see alot of different geographical variations of different species, as well as local markets, supply and demand and local operation of the business procedures there. I have literally cut everything up and down the warmer parts of the east coast, and I did a solid 6 months of select cutting timber with an old cable timberjack. When i couldn't sustain local demand for my own services, I would fill my schedule with climbing for other services, mostly to make sure I stayed steady. It took a lifetime to learn. I wanted to constantly practice and stay fresh but also stay learning. The only time I do travel now is to chase hurricanes with a big boy crane for trees on structure, where we bill the home owners insurance directly privately. Its emergency response as well as a extremely precise extraction when tree work is performed with the use of a crane, so they will write you a blank check basically.... Got tired of building everyone else's dreams so I finally settled where the most money, per cutting needs done. Smaller trees, more demand and more money. I own The Tree Man LLC in Greensburg pa. I moved from Lynchburg, Virginia to Pittsburgh, pennslyvania and opened shop 3 years ago. Lynchburg has huge, tall oaks, sycamores and poplar. I always seemed to make more money in a big city with lots of trees over houses in tight yards, lots of power lines, and hills too. So far, I Haven't died yet, and it's been a huge success. Only just recently have I finally realized that I'm not superman, as it turns out, and I must look forward to other horizons.

I own 2 husqvarna 3120xp saws with a 32" with 3/8 gauge, 44 and 60" blades with .404. I just bought my first crane truck, its a gmc Kodiak 21ft bed 10ton dump and I found and mounted a 15ft powered 2ton auto crane cable winch setup. Currently Thinking about mounting a 6ton winch to the front of the bed and putting a log arch on the back. I Have a 10 ton 21ft dump, a 5ton f450 12ft dump, and a 8 ft dump trailer.

God blessed me with a best friend too, he owns a local mechanic shop in town where I can fix and fabricate anything. Hd introduced me to the guy I just bought my first house on 60 acres from. It's a 5bedroom 3 story with walk out garage, big 2 bay garage detached, and a massive 2 story 5000sqft barn all on concrete driveway, with room and water source for a small log pond.

I get mostly pin oak, spruce pine sharp short needle, white pines long fluffy needles,a ton of chunky silver maples, black locust and some honey locust, and a huge amount of cherry and wallnut. Everywhere I ever been, seems to me like I'm always cutting wallnut and cherry in pennslyvania....

My questions are which steps should I take at this point? I have no idea where to even put the goal posts anymore man....

I want to work towards doing custom litchenberg pieces. I want to make my dad a custom multi level computer desk for his office because he enjoys bragging about being a white collar suite all the time. Eventually hoping to open a gallery downtown to show off our different pieces and store the lumber after its dried.

I honestly don't know if all that extra work is worth it though when I could just sell and dry the lumber and maybe just do select pieces for my family members. Next year I will hope to be pushing 6 figures in firewood especially with the way the market is....

If you stayed this long add me on Facebook I'll buy you a beer haha

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