Last night I dreamed that after taking down the trees the lot looked really nice… somehow I don’t think that will be the reality immediately. My friend Adam and I will be taking down the smaller trees on Feb 25th. I am meeting tomorrow (2-16-10) with another friend Sonny and a classmate of mine John to discuss when to do the bigger trees. My plan is to hire someone with a portable band-saw mill to come on site to mill as much of the wood as reasonable. There’s going to be a big pile of brush afterwords and I suppose I will have to rent a chipper. I have fantasies of having a workparty where everyone brings a pair of loppers and we go to town on the brush. It would be a couple hundred to rent the chipper and it would make a ton of noise and cause some pollution. Thoughts anyone?
-S
Design & Construction of Spartan & Hannah's Home 
I’d come to a workday!
Julie
Be sure to save the woodchips for landscape use– the young branches of deciduous trees are particularly beneficial for fruit trees and woody shrubs (they’re called “ramial wood chips,” and are quite popular as a permacultural mulch/ammendment)
Or you could do a woodchip clay wall!
Are you going to grind the stumps out as well? I imagine some of those trees are going to want to sucker with a vengeance.
I was already planning on keeping the chips–I didn’t know that they are particularly good for fruit and woody shrubs though.
The lot is flat so a clay-woodchip wall would probably go indoors.
Whomever I hire to do the excavation/sitework will be grinding the stumps.