brilliant solution

Choir last night rocked. We are really coming together! The soprano soloist, who moonlights as a voice teacher, did her bit with us for the first time and I nearly swooned, we all sounded so great.

But that wasn’t the most fun part.

The most fun part was yelling at Jonathan about the sealed-up vent to the bathroom. He reminded me that when the air exchanger system went in last year, they put an intake thingy in the bathroom, thus – he claims – obviating the need for a fan. “I TOLD you that, remember??”

Now of course I’m aware of this intake thingy. It’s the round hole up there next to the new fan that Kevin is helping install. It’s connected to some soft-sided piping that runs the length of the attic and eventually makes its way to the air exchanger down in the basement.

You may remember that soft-sided piping from yesterday – the gray wormy tube up there. The random lunar surface stuff is insulation.

Well, that’s all well and good, Jonathan (says I to him last night) but we told you then we still wanted the fan. REMEMBER??? Because we turn the air exchanger off in the summer, when the windows are open. Whatever. Blah blah blah. We got all snippy with each other (because that’s how we roll) and then we got down to more important business, like practicing samba moves to get in the spirit of the piece we’re working on in choir.

Anyhow, Our Hero Michael had the most brilliant idea for how to vent the new bathroom fan without having to chop a new hole in the roof. 

See, last summer, as part of the addition project, we had the roof of the existing house totally redone, since it was like, 40 years old or something, and was starting to sprout new life forms. And at one point the idea was that' we’d put in a ridge vent, which is apparently A Big Deal, or at least, a Bigger Deal than what we wound up doing, which is, we used a magic whirligig thing instead. It catches the lightest of breezes, and spins, drawing hot air out of the attic. Brilliant, no?

Well, Michael realized we could vent the bathroom fan up to the whirlygig.

Here’s the PVC pipe that runs the length of the old part of the house and which used to vent outside…(he has unearthed it from under the fluffy insulation).

He found an elbow joint sitting on the shelving above the drier – something I have stared at as I have loaded up the laundry over the past three years – thank god I never bothered to toss it. Michael put it to good use and gave it a generous coating of duct tape.

And he’s pointed it right at the hole for the whirlygig. HAH! Brilliant!

In other news, he worked on fixing a wee leak in the shower. And then got to work on the floor. The reason I left so suddenly last night – practically mid-sentence – was that we realized we needed to go select and purchase flooring Toute Suite yesterday afternoon.

Without further ado, here’s where things stood partway through this afternoon:

Cherry laminate. And hey! it was ON SALE!

 

In the meantime, the house is a flippin’ mess.

From left: random bits of wood, tools, underlayment for new flooring, shop vac, box of new flooring, old fan, random crap that used to live on the vanity, bathroom door…

Tools, extra piping, electric cords, random wood scraps, boxes that things came in, shelving unit that used to fit in bathroom…plus all the crap that used to live in the old vanity, just out of sight on the left, on the floor.

 

The cats wish they had their normal daytime sleeping places. Charlie on the left, Maggie up top.