Did I listen? No, I did not.
Years passed. Seasons came and went. Countless thousands of baby elm seedlings sprouted all over my property. Countless hours were spent pulling them up.
Then, one spring, it began to snow, for real. A big monster branch split from the tree and sorta settled on my roof. It didn't seem like an emergency to me until Doug came by to look at it. Seeing aspects of the precarious branch/roof/remaining tree equation that were invisible to my tree noob eyes, Doug announced that we had a dangerous situation on our hands and proceeded -- in the dark, after a looong day of dealing with other peoples' post-storm tree troubles -- to rig an amazing contraption to secure the branch and prevent its fat end from completely detaching from the trunk, swinging down and wiping-out a major swath of our house. (This was a BIG branch.) The next day, he and his crew carefully detached and lowered the thing, hacked it up and got it out of there.
Later that season, I hired them to take down the rest of that elm, and, again, they did a fantastic job.