Deck Stairs in Pleasant Ridge, OH

Pleasant Ridge (ZIP 45213) has mature street trees and plenty of yards where one has come out over the years. Where the stump was ground rather than dug, the root ball stayed, and a root ball is several cubic yards of timber sitting under ground that looks entirely ordinary.

It matters differently at each end of a deck. A pier can be taken down past it or moved a few feet, and either answer is easy. A landing pad is shallow and wide and it has to be where the flight comes down, so it is the element with the least room to avoid anything. Ground over decaying timber does not fail suddenly. It goes down slowly as the wood breaks up, over ten or fifteen years, which is precisely long enough for nobody to connect it to a tree that was removed before they moved in.

Finding it is straightforward. The old position is usually visible as a slight dish in the lawn or a change in the grass, and a probe settles it in a couple of minutes. Once it is known, the flight is turned to land beside it, and on the majority of these lots there is no cost in doing so. Where the arrival has to be over it, the answer is to bypass the ground entirely: a framed landing carried on piers taken past the root zone into undisturbed soil, so nothing bears on material that is going to change.

We probe the landing footprint at the estimate on any lot where a tree has come out, which around here is a good proportion of them.