Home (to be) Improvement

Here goes.

Today was a work-on-the-place day. The goal was to attach a hood vent to our microwave. Initially it was simply venting out front into our kitchen (read spewing grease all over the shitty cabinets) and after some very low quality duct work, it is not attached to properly vent up through the attic.

Attempts were made to perform clean cuts with a jigsaw, however I couldn’t get close enough to the edge of the cabinets in order to make the cut I needed. This left me with two options: gracefully take the cabinet bottom off and lay it on a smooth surface in order to make clean, straight cuts, or perforate the stupid cabinets with a drill and knock it off with a hammer. I chose the latter.

So the jigsaw rental was a waste, but at least it was only a waste of a day’s rental: maybe $18 or so. Little did I know that you can buy a corded jigsaw for <$30, but that’s beside the point.

What followed was the destruction of some 7-inch semi-rigid ducting and some liberal use of duct tape as connectors and repair. The testing process was to turn on the fan and feel for a draft. Those faults were repaired with more duct tape.

After finishing that I had gotten the materials to try replacing the dimmer circuit in the bathroom which has never worked since we moved in. Now it works! Not really sure what the next project will be, or if this will continue. If it does, maybe I’ll decide to write a quip about it.