Oak Trees in Oakton, VA

“Doug, these trees are wonderful!” exclaimed a client last fall as we drove along Miller Heights Road in Oakton, VA looking for a home to buy.

For those of you from San Diego or Colorado, we have very large Oaks (hence “Oakton”), Maples, Sycamores, and Sweetgums that can give the impression we have forests amongst our manicured suburban landscaping. Many of these trees have grown unchecked for 50 years as Northern Virginia transformed from farmlands to residential subdivisions. And the fall season can be a wonderful site with the trees blazing yellow, red, and orange from late September into November.

Arborists will agree that your trees grow and need maintenance

This brings up the situation of what happens when you need to cut back or trim your neighbor’s trees overhanging your yard?  It is okay to do this as long as you don’t kill the tree and know that any work is at your expense. Just to keep on good terms, it is best to tell your neighbor that your tree guys are going to prune it back. Never assume that your neighbor knows a tree is overgrown or is a nuisance  since they are only seeing it from their yard, and will probably agree that the tree needs attention when they see it from your yard.

Virginia home owners should know that they can still trim back those branches or cut those nasty roots, but if your neighbor’s tree has started to cause more serious structural problems to your house, like aggressive roots that have broken through your foundation or water pipes, then you can take them to court. Yes, lawyers!

Virginia rules for tree trimming

The Virginia Supreme Court’s  ruling in Fancher v. Fagella (9/2007) dealt with a big old Sweetgum tree in a new townhouse development in Fairfax County, VA. These trees grow big, look fantastic, provide shade, are our “breathing buddies”, but also need lots of water. To find that water, they send sturdy roots everywhere. In this specific case, this nice old Sweetgum tree was a holdover from the old farm and was now stuck in between some townhouses.

As it turned out, that old tree continued to grow and impacted the neighbor’s house in search of water. One neighbor asked the other to remove the tree (which probably would have cost $3,000 to $5,000) because of the structural damage being caused by the roots. Well, things didn’t work out as planned and it wound up in the Virginia Supreme Court… and eventually the tree was cut down.

A perfect Virginia shade tree… just in the wrong place

Let me be upfront that I am not a lawyer, but I am a licensed Virginia real estate agent and a home owner who has large Oak trees on my own property. There really isn’t any change here when dealing with the above ground issues of pruning a tree or trimming your neighbor’s tree that crosses your property line. The only emphasis is that you have the ability to go to court if your neighbor’s tree is causing damage to your house such as root damage to your foundation.

If you live in Reston, VA where the Reston Association has guidelines for tree removal, you should know that they require Association approval before work can be performed.

When I was President of the Vienna Commons Association, I would get an occasional phone call from a neighbor complaining about another neighbor’s tree that hung over their yard, was hitting the roof, or dropping fruit in their yard. Back then I would respond that they had the right (in Virginia) to cut back the encroaching portion of their neighbor’s tree that overhangs the property line.

And that policy is still true today, but remember to be a good neighbor and tell your neighbor before the cutting begins. Leave a comment to share your experience trimming a neighbor’s tree.

Read More…

If you are interested in tree issues and want to learn more about the Massachusetts Rule, the Hawaii Rule, the Virginia Rule, Smith v. Holt or Fancher v. Fagella, you can read more in an article by Victor  D. Merullo.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Man fatally falls from ladder while trimming tree (mysanantonio.com)
• The value of trees (mysanantonio.com)
• Earth Day in Vienna, VA 2010 (dougfrancis.com)

Well here is this week’s tip from Roto-Rooter Plumbing and Drain Service:

~ watch the pumpkin pulp and seeds ~

It seems that while we are enjoying pumpkin pies upstairs in the dining room with the family,  the pulp that we shoved down the garbage disposal is coating our sewer laterals waiting for more debris to catch. And then, typically on a weekend, clogging up and causing a dreaded back up in the basement. Yes, a plumbing nightmare!

Here are Roto-Rooter’s tips:

	Never put pumpkin pulp or seeds down the toilet, sink drain or in the garbage disposer. The stringy, sticky gunk hardens and clogs drains and disposers. Carve pumpkins on a thick bed of newspaper. Wrap up pumpkin-related materials and throw away in the garbage can or compost pile. Separate the seeds, then roast for a tasty treat. Or grow your own pumpkins by planting this year’s seeds early next spring.

… look at the interior photos! This home is not asking a 3rd party for approval! Not a foreclosure either… super clean and ready to settle by the end of the year!

Mint condition town home located close to Fair Oaks, Fairfax, and some of the best shopping on the East Coast including Wegman’s, Whole Foods, REI, Costco, Target and the Merrifield Garden Center. Walk to an almost new Fairfax County Elementary School (Eagle View), Fairfax County parks and walking trails and so much more.

3 level, rear load two-car garage, almost new condition. 3 bedrooms, 2 full and 2 half baths

All ready to close quickly. But we need to set up a time to see it this weekend… 703-304-6827.

Equal Housing Opportunity!

View Larger Map and settl

I took a sip of coffee. “Dominion Way, don’t I have clients on that street?”, I thought.

“Right, I should call Scott and Jeannie to see if they saw it.”

So I hopped in my car and drove over to see which house it was. It was theirs!

Since then, I have reminded clients during National Fire Protection Week to check their smoke detectors, replace old smoke detectors with new ones that include hall lights, replace 9-volt batteries, make an escape plan, and be careful when grilling or using candles.

The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) supports all of those programs that your children learn in school or read about during those fire station open-houses… there is probably one in your community this weekend and you should stop by and get some fire safety tips or suggestions. Click on “Sparky” to see all of their material.

As it turned out, Scott and Jeannie were sound asleep at 2:30 in the morning when Jeannie smelled smoke. She sent Scott to peek out the window and he saw flames leaping up the side of their neighbor’s town home. They hopped out of bed and ran out of the house safely. I can clearly remember asking her about the experience and she did not remember hearing her smoke detectors going off.

Please do me a favor, check those smoke detector batteries, press the test button, and consider replacing any smoke detector that is over seven years old.

The Vienna Volunteer Fire Department open-house is October 10th from 10-4.

Better call Miss Utility first!

Yes, that familiar RE/MAX Presidential sign in your front yard is going to require a bit more effort (and spray paint) to install. The Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) is turning up the heat on enforcement of the Virginia Underground Utility Damage Prevention Act which was enacted thirty years ago, and the lowly real estate sign is a prime suspect.

At the heart of the Act is that natural gas lines into homes have been installed without a minimum depth requirement. To make matters worse, older lines may not be as deep due to settlement of the ground over the years allowing some lines to be only 4”to 6” below the surface of the lawn. And, since most utility easements are in the front of a home coming in from the street, they are in the exact spot that most agents stick their signs in the ground.

Anytime there are incidents of damage to underground lines they are photographed and used as examples. Some of the lines are so shallow that your average homeowner could easily put a shovel into the line when digging up a new spring flower garden. As you can see in this photo, the gas line is next to the front porch pillar and marked as a line found just 2 inches deep… heck, my kids could have found this one!

In my 18 years of selling homes in Northern Virginia, I have not heard of anyone hitting an underground utility line when placing a real estate sign in someone’s front yard. But on the other hand, I have not thought about hitting anything other than rocks as I have pushed my sign into the lawn of a client’s home. So maybe this raised awareness of this issue is a good idea before anyone else gets really injured.

The consequence of non-compliance may be a gas explosion or a $2,500 fine, whichever you consider to be worse. To add to my listing activity checklist or sequence of events, I am now going to call Miss Utility at 811 to come out and mark your property before I place a for-sale sign in your yard. The guidelines say that I need to call at least 48 hours, excluding weekends, before doing any sign placement so they can do their work marking up your yard with yellow and orange spray paint .

In the mid 2000’s, Verizon started to offer FiOS. According to Wikipedia,”noted in Verizon’s trademark, fios is a Gaelic word, translated into English as “knowledge.” Simply put, FiOS is fiber optics direct to your house and provides high speed internet, TV and a land-line phone line.

My story begins a little over two years ago when I had FiOS installed in my Vienna home replacing the basic COX cable service. It was a nice upgrade since there were a ton of channels, on-demand movies, and much faster internet. I had been using Verizon DSL but having the “bundled package” gave me better service at a lower monthly cost.

This summer the two year agreement ended and my monthly charge increased – bummer! And in early July I came home to hear my son tell me that “something” happened to the internet connection. Of course I know some tricks to try, but discovered that the FiOS router was out, and no re-boot or re-set seemed to engage the device.

And yes, it was plugged in!

Verizon tech-support quickly understood that the router was “fried” and put in an order to send a replacement via UPS. It arrived a few days later and I quickly installed it… up and running!

Like any seasoned geek, I logged onto “speakeasy.com” to perform a speed test on the line only to see that my numbers were low compared to what Verizon is now advertising on the radio (yes I still listen, except to WJFK for canning Mike O’Meara). Let’s just say that the slow results bummed me out since it probably meant that I must have done the installation wrong.

Why was I only getting a download rate at 4.9mb and upload rate at 1.9mb?

I stopped by my local Verizon Wireless store in Tyson’s Corner yesterday for a mobile phone issue, when a nice Verizon CS guy named Scott asked me about my FiOS service. Scott deserves the highest honors here because he listened to me, understood my numbers, asked a few excellent questions and had a solution that would make my day.

When I had FiOS installed, home service was at 5/2 which matched the numbers in my line test. In 2009 that basic service has been upgraded to 15/5 but the change needed to be made by the Verizon tech people… and now my upgrade is scheduled to be done next Tuesday at no cost to me.

So, if you had Verizon FiOS installed two years ago, you may have the 5/2 service too, and all you need to do is contact Verizon to change to 15/5 and agree to keep the service for a year or two just like a mobile phone contract. Good luck!

So, let’s consider the regular sales to be 40% of the market in the under $425k price range that we were walking through at a furious pace. At first we weren’t walking so quickly, but so many of the homes were in less than showing condition that we were both eager to get a move on. Things like piles of laundry, dirty dishes, food on counters, odd food aromas, smelly bathrooms, big dogs, well I consider real estate sales an adventure sometimes.

I noticed that the homes with the most updates were literally flying off the market with multiple offers and escalation clauses. These homes were the creme de le creme (top 1% of the 40%) of the market because they were priced low to compete, and then looked like bargains against the homes that needed fixing up. Hey, who has the cash to do that stuff anymore?

For all of you looking for a sign that the market has turned, well, this is not it. These homes were just selling quickly at 99-101% of asking price. The trend that I recognized was that updated homes in very good condition and priced well are selling at list price in less than a week. If these same homes had been priced higher, then they probably would still be sitting on the market.

Market trends are market trends.