Jose Lopez came with a crew to Elm Street Monday for a quick job: take down an outdoor dining patio to make room for a new mural. It seemed like a quick job. Until they encountered the screws. Lopez, who’s 49, works as a supervisor for the downtown Town Green District. He had Monday off for the national holiday. Then he was called in to help out with removing the patio (pictured above) outside Elm Street’s Icaru Peruvian restaurant. Icaru had a permit to keep the patio up from April through the end of October. Owner Jose Diaz (pictured) said he’s come to count on the space for 10-15 extra diners at a time to keep his business humming. Town Green asked if they could come take it down earlier to get started on a graffiti removal project: replacing the tagged side upper floor exterior walls (pictured above) of next-door 51 Elm St. (where, among others, the Independent rents space) … … with the above-sketched mural (rendered above, not yet actually painted), entitled “Woven Through New Haven,” by artist Sophie Groenstein. Diaz said OK. Lopez arrived on site in his multi-colored Town Green pickup truck with Town Green colleagues Berto Lopez and Justin Kelly, who normally would be watering flowers or picking up trash on a work day. They got to work around 11 a.m. removing the patio’s lattice walls … … and posts … … and wires. Didn’t seem like a long job ahead. “Who has gloves?” Lopez called out. He reverse-drilled the screws with a 30-volt electric DeWalt screwdriver. The others grabbed the beams and cross beams, then brought them to the curb. Some of the boards resisted. An occasional mallet tap was needed to pry them loose. Some screws weren’t cooperating, period: It turned out the Icaru-hired workers who had originally built the dining deck had used a variety of different screws and nails. Lopez had a Phillips screw head. He had a regular flat slotted head. But no star-shaped one. At 11:20, the crew hopped back in the truck. Next stop: Home Depot. Lopez returned an hour later with an extra two crew members and a six-pointed star bit.  The work still required some finesse. It took all five men to finish extracting a posts. But by 1:15 the walls and posts were all done, which left the floor. Seventeen attached boards. Where would that go? The owner had requested that the crew place it on the restaurant’s roof. Hmmm. The crew went out back to investigate. But it also had other items on it. Was there room? And how would they get the patio floor up there? Could it fit in the crowded back lot amid the dumpsters? “That ain’t happening.” “It’s going to damage the integrity of the roof.” “Imagine we all hurt our backs.” The crew reassembled out front, sat on orange dividers waiting for word. He called Icaru’s Diaz (who had left and then later returned). Lopez called his boss, Town Green Special Projects Manager Tara von Schmidt. Would they need a flatbed truck? “Whatever the boss says, we do,” said fellow Town Green employee Bertie Lopez with a shrug. “We’re the muscle.” Meanwhile a Genie brand lift appeared right past the driveway, in place for the Town Green to start power-washing the priming graffiti wall later this week so artist Groenstein can start painting the mural next week. Once the patio was fully removed, of course. Supervisor Jose Lopez emerged from the truck with the word: We’re taking apart the boards. And taking lunch orders. “Chicken nuggets” came one cry. Lopez and a colleague resumed removing screws and pulling apart the floor boards. Crew members carried them to the side of the building … … and handed them to colleagues up a ladder to a roof. Lopez’s supervisor, von Schmidt, arrived to place everyone’s orders inside Icaru. The work was all done by 2:20. The home stretch proved a snap. Now that they had all the screw heads they needed. 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