Barry, you have my empathy and sympathy. The first winter after moving my family to our "this old house project, " a 1954 ranch styled house, we had to endure the whole winter without any use of the driveway or garage. In the Fall, the contractors tore out the old concrete garage floor and more than half of the driveway. This was required to comply with code requirements. The old garage floor and kitchen floor (part of it was formerly a true breezeway, later a covered breezeway) were the same elevation, and the building code required the garage floor to be a minimum of 4 inch below the floor of the house on the other side of the common wall. The garage floor had to be lowered, which necessitated redoing much of the driveway and all of the drains. Very expensive!! The garage has a common wall with the kitchen of the house. They also had to tear out most of that wall and half of the concrete floor of the kitchen in order to run the plumbing for a large laundry closet that I decided to place in the wall between the kitchen and garage, and a sink in the garage. And erect temporary end support for the main beam of the garage until the new flooring and footing for a support column could be instralled in the wall of the laundry. Before they could finish tearing out the old concrete and installing the new, heavy rains and winter came. My temporary "wall" to seal out the cold air and critters until the next summer primarily was a sheet of plastic. The house is in a heavily wooded area that is continguous with a city park that is contiguous with Cuyahoga National Park. My some of my tools suffered a lot of corrosion damage that winter (more than in the previous 30 years), and my cars sat outside until next summer. I wouldn't wish a repeat of that experience on anyone. And the next Spring, one of he contractor employees using a jack hammer decided there was too much dust in his work area from his co-worker using a gasoline powered concrete saw, he uncoupled the air hose from his jack hammer to blow it away. That high pressure (200 psi), high volume air stream immediately ripped down the plastic barrier and caused concrete dust to go everywhere throughout the house!! That air hose was being fed by a rental v-8 compressor like the road crews use. The cleanup was left to my family. It's a wonder the marriage survived.
Dave R.
