September: water heaters, and the parkway tree list.

The fall parkway tree list is posted, and your block may be on it.

First, the dreaded white X. You know the one. You walk out for the paper and there it is, sprayed on the trunk of a tree that has been there longer than your house has had you in it, and your stomach drops a little. I would love to tell you I put those there myself for the entertainment value. I do not. Public Works does, and it means the tree is coming down.

It is worth knowing why, because people assume the worst. A marked tree is almost never about convenience. It is dead or dying, or hollow enough that the next storm makes it somebody’s roof, or diseased in a way that will travel down the block if it stays. Ash trees have been coming out for years because of the borer. Occasionally a tree has simply outgrown the parkway and is lifting the sidewalk into a tripping hazard the Village is liable for. They are not taking down healthy trees to save money on raking.

Public Works published the fall removal and replacement list last week, organized by address rather than by block, so searching your own is the only way to know. Replacements go in the following spring, and if you call before the order is placed you get a say in the species instead of accepting whatever is next on the rotation. Worth doing even if your own parkway looks fine: a neighbor two doors down losing a mature oak changes the light on your side of the street more than anyone expects, and it changes what your air conditioner does in August.

And the annual reminder. If a marked tree sits between your sidewalk and the street, it belongs to the Village, not to you. Every fall a crew works the neighborhood offering to take one down cheap. Removing a parkway tree without approval is a violation, the fine is real, and the tree is not coming back for forty years.

Water heater replacements are running $1,650 to $2,900 in the village right now.

That spread is not brand. It is venting. A straight swap of a 50-gallon atmospheric tank into an existing flue sits at the bottom of the range and takes half a day.

The trouble is usually what happened upstairs first. When a high-efficiency furnace goes in, it stops using the chimney, and the water heater is left alone in a flue sized for two appliances. The draft goes bad. Now you are buying a stainless liner or a power-vent conversion, and there is most of your thousand dollars. Nobody brings this up while selling you the furnace. It is not a scam, just two jobs done in the wrong order.

The cheap estimate also tends to skip the expansion tank, which the code requires and which runs about $180 installed. So before you assume someone is gouging you, check the venting line and the expansion tank. Then check whether the low number includes carrying the old tank up your basement stairs, because in these houses the stairs are narrower than the tank and everybody discovers that at the same moment.

Flush the water heater before the furnace starts running.

Twenty minutes with a garden hose. Sediment settles at the bottom of the tank, the burner works through that instead of through water, and the unit dies years early. River Forest water leaves plenty of it. Do this before the heating season rather than during.

While you are down there, pour a bucket into the sump pit and confirm the pump actually kicks on. The one storm it needs to work is always the weekend you are out of town, and the Des Plaines does not care about your plans.

Then go outside and look at where the downspouts end. A good share of the wet basements around here are a downspout discharging four inches from the foundation into clay soil. Fix that first, before anyone sells you drain tile. And accept that the oaks will have your gutters full by the second week of November whether you got up there in October or not.

Trailside, a Halloween trial run at Keystone, and two campuses with their doors open.

Trailside Museum has something on most weekends this fall: bird walks, restoration workdays, programs with the museum’s animals. It is exactly the sort of building people drive past on Thatcher for fifteen years without once going in. Go in.

The Park District’s Halloween Hoot ’n Howl is at Keystone Park on October 2, with hayrides, live music and a bonfire. Dominican and Concordia both have talks, concerts and gallery shows open to the public, and both are easier to walk into than people assume. Dates and details for all of it are on the village calendar.

And somewhere a committee is already meeting about next year’s Memorial Day parade, which may be the most River Forest sentence in this newsletter.

Plumbers are not licensed by the Village, and that surprises people.

Most trades working here have to be licensed and bonded with the Village, and the Building Department publishes that list. Plumbing is the exception. Plumbers carry a State of Illinois license instead, which is why a plumber’s row on our contractor pages shows no Village expiration date. That is correct, not an oversight.

So when someone at your door says they are Village licensed for plumbing work, that is not a thing that exists. Plumbers are licensed by the Illinois Department of Public Health. Ask for the Illinois number and check it with the Department’s plumbing license lookup at dph.illinois.gov, which takes about a minute on your phone while they stand there.

One more wrinkle, and it is the one that matters most: a plumber digging in the parkway or the street for sewer work needs a separate Village excavation license and a $25,000 bond on top of the state license. Confirm that before anyone opens a trench in your front yard, because the yard is the cheap part to put back.