This is a copy of the add I ran when I was looking for fruit and nut trees to mill into furniture wood.
.................
Fruit wood wanted.

 Looking for apple, cherry,  peach, plum etc. Also certain nut trees and hawthorn.

I will cut down suitable specimens and cut up the log portion. I can haul the junk away but I don't do that for free. Further processing,  clean up and trucking $40 per hour.

You could save a lot of money on tree removal, if your tree happens to be the right one for my purposes.

Call Dale at 250-588-3366. Thank you.
...............................
I received a call from a lady who had a dead Douglas fir tree that has been standing for six years. She also has a dead laburnum and a plum tree.

I was only willing to cut down the plum for free. She was insistent that I should cut down all three trees and remove all of the waste in order to get the little plum log. This would be about $1000.00 worth of work for a little log that might be worth $10.00.

 I declined her offer and suggested that she run an ad trying to give the trees away for firewood.  I explained that firewood is a byproduct of my work that I often give away, so I would never do a big job to obtain more wood.  She accused me of false advertising and said that she did not want to deal with someone who is extremely greedy. And that's how it ended. 

I had a similar experience with a relative of mine who had an apple tree that had fallen over. She wanted to pay us £20 to cut it up for her.

We had a very good friend, who was elderly and disabled and short on cash, who used apple wood for turning. We said we'd do the job for free if we could take some of the wood to our friend.

We were told that if we wanted to take any wood, then the tree would have to be cut into 6" lengths, stacked in the woodshed, our friend would have to come over in person to help, and we could take one 4' piece of wood.

She paid someone else to do the job eventually. I hope that 4' piece of wood was worth it to her.

A building that is in the wrong spot, almost always has a negative value. This means that it costs more to remove it than it is worth for salvage value.

I regularly receive calls with people trying to sell me their old buildings in order to clear a  building lot.

If I'm doing just a salvage deal,  your average three bedroom house is worth about $100.00. I take only the good salable stuff and leave all of the rest of the mess. It cost about $10,000.00 to remove such a house.

On several occasions,  I've been told that because I save the stuff instead of throwing it in the dump,  I should do my jobs for much less,  or for free.

I agree that there are several flavors of crazy. I'm not quite sure about the wording, because idiot ad crazy don't convey the same tone. Anyhow, many comedians are able to make quite a lot of money from the lack of common sense that some people in society display today. One good example is Russell Howard's Good News series. Warning, some of his jokes may contain adult humor. Also, the Police Blotter reports are pretty funny, too. It makes you wonder if these people are real; they are.

I experienced a similar situation when clearing out land to put in my orchard / food forest. Some people where surprised when they realized my ad for "standing firewood" (with pictures of standing trees) meant that there wasn't a nicely stacked pile of free seasoned firewood waiting for them to pick up. At first it was rather annoying, but eventually I came to realize that 4 out of 5 people who contacted me would not actually show up and dealing with them was just part of the process. So Dale, only three more idiots to go before you find a good one.

Dale, out of curiosity (and since I'm always looking for more income streams from my orchard) what size do the peach and plum logs need to be before they are valuable for furniture making or wood working?

I put a sign up at the post office offering to take organic material rather than them taking it to the dump and paying the dump fee. This was the year a bunch of hay in the county was heading to the dump because it got moldy. I can't tell you how many people called me and wanted me to buy their hay. I finally started using the same line to everyone: I don't pay for trash. That generally stops their gob; people around here, especially women, usually aren't so direct.

Even so we have a huge windrow of wood chips, spoiled hay and tree trimmings that have been dropped off, thanks to the folks that understand what we were trying to do.

John, I'm brand new at milling fruit wood. I've only done a couple trees. I'm willing to cut anything over six inches in diameter,  but I doubt that it would be truly profitable. It's definitely a hobby at this point.

We are always looking for compost fodder and have the rule you have to deliver. We get wood chips when the utilities do tree trim, the tree removal places know we'll take CHIPPED. We take lawn clippings and leaf vacuuming from the four lawn places in town.

Before us the guy that owned the property we put that stuff on, generally took scrap metal and trash, including tree chunks (he recycled, cut and split, and sold firewood. And would leave the trash branches around, when I bought the shop from him I removed waist high solid mat of branches as he pollarded (awkwardly) all the trees on the property, took the firewood and left the rest--the city was not amused at a 25'x125' waist high pile built twice and left at the curb for them to remove) I am still chasing people away with poor English (I now speak the language they do) that say the fellow said it's okay to dump their scrap metal there. No it's not, he sold the place to me and he's long gone. Take their picture and the license plate shot of their rig. If I find a bent paperclip I'm giving this to the sheriff. They leave. I will outwait them as they have a tire or trailer problem they need to fix right now, I'm not leaving until they do. They leave.

Locals that were used to being able to dump stuff there instead of the rolloff or haul it somewhere else, also are still being reeducated, you can't dump your general trash into my compost pile. No. Where are they supposed to get rid of it then? I don't know but not here. (also take the pictures and license plate shot) We don't take general yard trash.

We need horse and cow manure, usually horse, to compost down as well. A few places, when they clean the barns will swing by and drop it off. That's fine. We will help with the unload. The fellow that called us and got massively upset because we didn't want to come scrape out his barns and haul it ourselves... we'd do it for pay, but not for free, just for the fertilizer.. IF he did it and brought it by (his stables are about a mile away, other fringe end of town) we'd take it, but we weren't going to be his free labor. I cleaned barns and paddocks (ours) growing up on the farm, if it's not my critters I'm not doing it unless I'm paid. He still won't give us the time of day at coffee a year and a half later.

Dead hay and straw, we take if you deliver. We got 18 big round bales late last fall, was beyond feed quality. It is becoming mulch this year after we peel a few layers and get to the good core left. The rest will hit the compost windrow. I have a picture of that delivery of round bales to show someone that suggests I buy hay or straw from them, on my phone. Oh.