Outdoor Removal in Gates, NY

Removal work in Gates

Most Gates properties date from the post-war build-out: modest ranches and cape cods on lots of sixty to eighty feet. The concrete patio behind the house was often poured at the same time as the driveway, and both are now at the point where patching has stopped working. The decks are typically smaller than their Greece equivalents, which makes them faster to remove but no less rotten at the ledger.

Access is usually better than the city and worse than the outer suburbs — a driveway to the side of the house, sometimes a detached garage at the back, occasionally a fence gate that is the only way in. Gates also has commercial frontage along the main corridors, but our work there is residential: tear-outs behind the house, not parking lots.

A lot of Gates housing went up fast in the 1950s, and the detached garages that came with it were often poured as a slab-on-grade with the driveway apron tied straight into it. When one of those slabs fails, it usually fails at the apron joint first — a crack that runs from the street in, then spiderwebs across the floor. Removing the slab means dealing with the apron and the driveway edge too, which is why we price them together rather than as separate items.

Settling is common on the older streets. Fills placed before modern compaction standards show up decades later as a patio that slopes toward the house or a walk that has dropped an inch at every joint. You are not imagining it, and patching the surface does not fix what is happening underneath.

What we remove here

• 1950s–60s concrete patios and driveways
• Smaller wood decks with original stairs
• Detached garages and their slabs
• Sheds on skids and gravel
• Chain link and wood fences

Access notes for Gates

• Typical side drive to the rear yard
• Detached garages can block the deepest part of the lot
• Narrow gates on older properties still mean a hand carry

Gates questions