Stump Grinding in Lakewood, Old Hickory

The drive the maple roots lifted, and no map of what's under

The classic Lakewood job is a 1950s or 1960s ranch on a flat platted lot with a silver maple that has spent sixty years pushing surface roots under the concrete. The drive is cracked and heaved, a tree service has already taken the tree, and now a stump three feet across sits eighteen inches from a slab you are about to replace.

Here is the wrinkle nobody warns you about. Lakewood incorporated in 1959 as Dupontonia, renamed itself in 1961, held its own charter as a satellite city straight through the 1963 Metro consolidation, and did not surrender it until a court-ordered re-vote went 458 to 447 on March 15, 2011. For half a century its street, utility and permit paperwork lived in its own filing system, and Metro inherited it late and incomplete.

So under these particular yards there are service runs, old taps and light circuits with no tidy record anywhere. That is not a reason to worry. It is a reason to spend ten minutes in the yard before the wheel turns.

How we locate on a Lakewood lot

We file the Tennessee locate ticket three working days ahead, same as anywhere, and that brings out marks for gas, power, water and communications. What it cannot account for is fifty years of work permitted by a city that no longer exists.

So we add a step here. Before anything starts we walk the yard with whoever knows the property best and ask the awkward questions. Where is the old septic tank if the house predates the sewer tie-in. Where did a previous owner run the wire out to the shop. Is there a hose bib on a post in the middle of the lawn, and if so what feeds it. Two times out of three the answer is that nobody knows, and that is fine - knowing we do not know is what changes how the first few inches get taken.

Silver maple, pin oak, sweetgum and the last white oaks

The mass plantings from the Kingsway and Dabbs era are mostly silver maple and pin oak, with sweetgum scattered through and a few mimosas that were a mistake from the day they went in. Silver maple is the driveway lifter and the limb dropper. Pin oak holds on longer but sheds heavy wood and rots from the middle out. Sweetgum is the one people remove out of sheer annoyance at the seed pods, then discover it resprouts from the roots for a season if it was only cut flush.

Scattered around Hamblen, McArthur, Anthony and Gayle you will still find remnant white oaks that predate the subdivision entirely. Those are a different proposition - dense, deep, slow - and usually worth keeping if an arborist thinks the tree is still sound.

Flat lots, easy grinding, one pinch point

Access here is genuinely straightforward. The ground is level, driveways are proper width, and there is normally room to back a trailer in without blocking the street. The pinch is almost always a single side gate between the carport and the fence, and on these ranches it tends to be a 1960s gate that has settled on its hinges and no longer swings clear.

Measure the opening at its narrowest point, at the latch rather than the posts. Around three feet is where we switch machines. If the gate itself is the obstacle we can usually pull two fence pickets and put them back the same afternoon - say the word and we bring a driver.

If concrete is going over the stump

Half of these jobs are the prelude to a new driveway, a carport slab or a patio. When something is getting poured over the spot, six inches is not enough. We take the wood down twelve to fourteen inches and chase the major laterals out past the pour edge, because wood left under a slab rots, voids and cracks the finish - typically right about the time the concrete contractor's warranty runs out.

Mark the pour outline for us. It costs a little more time and it is the cheapest insurance on the entire project.

Lakewood, street by street

• Locate ticket filed three days out, plus a walk-around for the old city-era service runs
• Silver maple laterals chased along cracked and heaved 1960s driveways
• Sweetgum taken under the collar so it stops resprouting through the lawn
• Twelve to fourteen inches of depth wherever a slab or a patio is going in
• Narrow machine for settled side gates near three feet, with pickets pulled and replaced if needed
• Seven minutes from the Village off Old Hickory Boulevard, and no travel charge
• Several stumps on one visit priced per stump rather than per trip