Opossums and ducts and beams-oh my!

We finally got around to calling the duct guy to come over and give us an estimate on replacing our opossum-eaten ducts. So the guy came out and looked at it and said that I should do the job myself and save some money. He said it would be about 5 or 6 hundred dollars for him to do the job, and I ended up spending right around $30 for me to do it. (So it's a really good thing we had all of that possum urine smell to scare him off with.) Anyway, here are some happy snaps of the old ducts and their beautiful status.

It was a lot of fun trying to fix these ducts. I couldn't find this stuff in the stores. The smallest stuff I could find was 6" duct, but it was also R6.0, which means it has much more insulation than these ducts that were in there before. So, I had to push & pull & squeeze the ducts through this little hole that someone had drilled through my (interior) cement wall (picture included).

Of course, I had to do all of this while in a tiny little cubby-hole space in my basement, which made it all the more exciting. I did need my complete height so that I could reach the boot at the top of wall in the next room over, and so I could stuff the duct into the bathroom upstairs.

Anyway, all of the ducts are safely attached at both ends using duct tape (which Karen just realized was why that tape has that name) and now the air flows properly to all of the registers in our house, so the peasants rejoice.




Next on the docket is the floor in the bathroom. What a lovely floor it is too. We had to remove all of the previous floor because it was rotted through. (Who puts hardwood in a bathroom anyway?) So we pulled out all the fixtures, including the 8000-pound tub, and tore out the floor. A guy in our ward helped us move the plumbing around so we could have the toilet next to the tub and the vanity on the other side of the toilet. Anyway, we're now getting ready to put the subfloor on. I just wanted everyone to witness how lovely the beams and supports are that are going to be holding our floor up. Of course, off to the right you can see my beautiful hand-pushed duct that's just kind of "hanging around" for now.