Land Clearing
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Land clearing is the removal of brush, trees and stumps. For residential land clearing you want to have open land to work with, but maintain a certain level of foliage, brush and trees intact. Residential clearing is customized for each customer’s desires.
With commercial land clearing very few trees are left, usually just along property lines. Trees are knocked over with the stumps in tact, the timber is merchandised, and the debris is raked and piled. After the disposal of debris, the property is bladed to a smooth surface.
Daniel Dean has the right equipment and expertise to develop your property for the purpose you intended.
How much does it cost? To receive your free estimate, click Estimate My Job button:
Residential Land Clearing
Clearing land for residential development is the most sensitive type of property development performed, and a huge part of our business. Your land is perhaps your most valuable investment and it has to be developed in a specific order to meet your living expectations.
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Important Considerations
Your short-term and long-term property goals affect the decisions on how to best clear your land. Daniel Dean has the experience and creativity when starting with a rough product—such as a wooded lot—to suggest solutions to meet your goals.
When you are building a house on your property it’s incredibly important to consider:
- the elevation of your property
- the distance away from the street
- keeping the best trees to surround your house; not next to your house, where they can fall on your house. If you have nice mature trees on your property, you are only given one opportunity to keep them.
getting the right amount of space, as well as foliage, to meet your needs.
Daniel Dean provides all the site work (dirt work) and other services related to residential land clearing, including:
- underbrush, stump and tree removal
- house, barn or shop placement and pads
- driveway / road consulting and building
- culverts
- ponds and lakes
- drainage
- final grading
- riding arenas or trails for: four-wheelers, motorcycles, golf carts, jogging, walking or horse riding
Daniel Dean is a professional, experienced company, and truly cares about you and your property. For over 30 years we have been ‘doing it the right way’, and satisfying our customers with a beautifully developed property.
Brush Removal
Brush removal should always be the first step to clearing land. Some people believe they are in the land clearing business when they get a skid steer machine that just mows the brush. This process is what Daniel Dean calls ‘the mess making machine’.
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Important Considerations
It grinds and chips up the brush, vegetation and smaller trees into millions of pieces—small to large—and scatters them across the ground, leaving the stumps behind for you to often trip over. And, with the stump in route system remaining in the ground, the brush grows back.
When Daniel Dean clears land, they use a bulldozer. This knocks over and uproot the underbrush and smaller trees with the root system, so the stump is removed. We then rake and gather the debris, and blade the area so it is nice and smooth.
I cannot begin to tell you how many times when I met with people who said that they just wanted to clear out all the trees and clear the entire property. But after meeting and discussing the project, I convinced them to just start with removing the brush. Afterwards, they were so appreciative that they kept the trees and only removed the small vegetation. Taking out the brush enables you to enjoy walking across your property and viewing your trees.
Daniel Dean
Daniel Dean
Tree Removal
Trees are an incredibly valuable asset to your property. It is important to make the right decisions on what trees to remove and not remove, depending on your property goals.
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Tree Roots Under Your House or Pad
Where a house foundation will be poured, it is necessary to remove the stumps and root ball. You don’t want organics from rotting roots or wood grinds under the foundation. They can deteriorate and become voids over time. This can lead to an un-level foundation, or even a sinkhole.
Then use the existing dirt within the area to back-fill into the stump hole and compacted it in lifts as it is placed. Different types of soil should not be used to back-fill into the stump hole. Doing this may change how moisture reacts with the dirt, which can create a problem with your foundation.
Trees Away from Your House
Trees that are away from your house is more of a customers preference than necessity. Some people don’t like pine or sweet gum trees and want to remove them for obvious reasons (sweet gum balls, pine cones, needles, lots of pollen). Here it is best to grind the stump so the root systems of trees within that area are not damaged.
Trees on your property should be at least 20 feet away from your foundation. Leaving a tree close to your house gives it an opportunity for its root systems to grow underneath your house and potentially damage its foundation. Tree also take in the water from underneath your foundation, which creates an opportunity for shifting of your pad underneath your foundation.
If you are wanting to keep a tree that is close to your house, it is also a good idea to install a “root barrier”. Daniel Dean installs root barriers to prevent damage to your house’s foundation.
Other Reasons to Remove Trees
Obviously, if a tree is leaning over your house that is a big risk. The bigger the tree the greater the risk because it can cause more damage to your house if it falls on your house. You also need to consider the height of the trees. Some pine trees could be 80 to 110 foot tall within this part of Texas.
If trees have too many dead branches, or is diseased or in poor condition, you may have to have it removed. And, too may trees prevent grass from growing, making your property unsightly and prone to erosion.
Stump Removal
There are a couple most common ways to remove a stump: stump grinding or digging up the stump.
If the stump is underneath your house, you should dig and remove the entire stump.
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But, if the stump is next to tree that you’re wanting to keep, you definitely need to grind the stump so you do not damage the root system of the other tree.
When removing trees in the proximity of where utilities are buried, we have to cut down those trees and grind those stumps as well.
Another benefit to grinding the stump is the cost savings of not having to haul off the stumps. If there are a lot of stumps, this can be a big savings from the cost of clearing the land.
Most stump grinders use a small machine, which is very limiting to what they can do. They take shortcuts and only grind the stump and not the ears—the edge of the stump—and the large roots underneath. We grind the stump really deep and go completely around the stump to get everything.
Why Remove a Stump
Stumps are an eyesore! That’s because they take up valuable yard space and can be very hazardous! No one likes gazing out into the yard and seeing old stumps littering the landscape. So they look even worse when other plant growth starts budding from them. Furthermore some insects decide to make it their home. These are among many reasons why the stump that’s littering your yard should be properly removed. At Daniel Dean we make every effort to make the removal process as short sweet and to the point as possible so you can keep your yard in the best shape possible.
Digging out a Stump
Removing the stump through digging requires removing the dirt and roots from around the stump and pulling the stump straight from the ground. Daniel Dean takes extra care to make sure that the hole created from removing the stump is properly filled and sealed so your yard is looking good as new. You can relax with peace of mind knowing that your stump is being removed by professionals hired by us who want to help you make your yard look better and care about your satisfaction and happiness from a job well done.
Stump Grinding
Stump grinding is one of the easiest methods of stump removal, but can be very dangerous. We take pride in training our employees on proper safety when handling these stumps with this machinery. A more modern way of removing a tree stump is to use a stump grinder. This is a mechanical device that has teeth made of titanium or another strong metal and just grinds away at the tree stump reducing it to mulch.
Why Stump Grinding?
Stump grinding turns your eyesore of a stump into mulch. Which you can then use all over your yard or even for barbecuing and cooking. Its the most painless way to remove your stumps without having to use chemicals or anything else that could compromise the health of the rest of your yard and the children or animals that live there. It’s the most economical.
Choosing to grind the stump yourself can be extremely dangerous, especially if you have no experience with the machinery, and much more costly. The machinery used depending on the size of your stump can also be very heavy and extremely hard to transport and maneuver properly.
We want to make the process as easy for you as we know it can be. Stump grinding doesn’t have to be a scary process. Contact Daniel Dean today for a quote and find out how easy it really can be.
Pasture
Usually pasture land is mostly cleared of all trees. Daniel Dean often suggests to leave an occasional clumps of trees. This gives shaded areas and having small islands of trees make your property look larger.
Fence Line
Want to build a fence, but too many trees? Daniel Dean clears fence lines. We can work with your surveyor, if needed, or can provide a survey service.
For acreage, we recommend clearing at least 25 feet wide: a few feet on the outside of fence and about 20 feet on your side of the fence. If you only clear a few feet wide, say 10 to 12 feet wide, you will need to clear the regrowth back a couple times per year.
Raking and Dragging
After we are done with clearing, raking with the bulldozer, and leveling off the property, Daniel Dean can also use a tractor to drag a change mat or an implement with a drag in roller to smooth off the ground even better.
Disposing of Debris
Dealing with the debris and disposing of it can often be a very large expense of the cost of land clearing. Customer options for this include:
- piling the debris in the most open spot so customer can burn it in future
- hiding debris in the edge of woods in the very back of property
- loading the debris into roll-off containers
- placing the debris into a tub grinder or a horizontal grinder, then hauling it away
How much does it cost? To receive your free estimate, click Estimate My Job button:
Commercial Land Clearing
Typical commercial land clearing contracts in Houston and the surrounding areas include:
- shopping centers
- auto dealerships
- apartments
- sub divisions
- malls
- restaurants
- and preparing the land for re-sale opportunities.
Land clearing for commercial purposes is pretty straight forward. There are usually no decisions to make whether to leave brush or trees on the property. If you’re not needing to utilize every bit of the real estate, you can often leave trees along the edges of the property. When a commercial site is built, the County and State require the site to be graded so the water flows to a detention pond. The outside edges of the property are a step higher and the detention pond area is lower. With all the dirt elevations being changed it pretty much kills the opportunity for leaving trees within the property
Trees are knocked over with the stumps in tact. The timber is merchandised, and the debris is raked and piled. When the debris is out of the way we will blade the property to a smooth surface.
There are two main options of disposing of the debris on a commercial clearing job:
- Load debris into roll-off containers/boxes. This is typically the most expensive option of commercial land clearing. This is done on the smaller jobs that are too small to do pit burning or debris grinding. Loading and hauling the debris into boxes are usually done at properties that are less than 2-4 acres.
- Place debris into a grinder and haul off the chips. Grinding and hauling is usually done on jobs that are too big to load into boxes and haul it off site, but too small to pit burn. When we grind, the debris it is turned into mulch and taken to plants