Wednesday, August 17

My Family is Awesome

My sister, Auntie B, was in town last week helping me with our yard sale and then Saturday night the rest of my family was able to join us as well. This meant lots of fun family time along with some home improvement work. The project we they (I totally sat this one out. My parents & husband did a great job!) tackled this weekend was installing a vent in our main bathroom. It gets very steamy and damp in there when the shower is on and we are hoping to prevent any mold problems with a little ventilation! Here is a before pic of the ceiling above the shower where the vent will go.


It ended up being a bigger job than we bargained for (like so many projects!). We bought two vent kits at Lowe's. A Ceiling Vent Fan Kit which contained the vent fan for the ceiling, and an Exterior Wall Vent kit that included the ducts & valves to run the vent to outside (they also make roof vent kits, but that seemed much riskier to us!). There is a crawl space above the bathroom so we had good access to the ceiling, but the problem came when we were unable to vent through the wall from up there. Enter Plan B. There was much deliberation and we finally decided this was the best way to go. We installed the fan in the ceiling and made the exterior hole down in the bathroom wall. Then we ran the duct work down through the bathroom. I don't have a picture, but let's just say it wasn't pretty.


So after connecting the two square holes with one of those neat flexible duct pipes, we built out a box around it using 2x2s and drywall to hide all the uglies. It looks much better now, and it's definitely worth the funny little box to have a venting system in there! We still have to finish puttying the box, install the fan cover and paint it all but they made great progress for one weekend! I'm going to be changing the paint color to match the shower curtain of my dreams that I found at Target. It's going to be SO sweet.


My mom, the Electrician Extraordinaire, wired everything up for us and got the fan working beautifully! This is the one switch we had when she started.


And here is the new switch for the fan. She also put in an outlet (which we definitely needed) and put in a shiny new light switch (but that was after I took this pic. oops.). You can see some of the plastic tiles snapped in the process. I want to get them off the wall so bad and this just makes me want to take them off sooner! :)


Here you can see the little vent from outside, and can probably see why we had to run the vent so low on the wall because it's right under the eaves! And I didn't completely tell the truth earlier. I held the ladder once while my hubs worked. So I did help a little. :)


In between the work we enjoyed lots of good food, movies, ladder ball, a trip to the Indian Caves, and some chill time on the patio! Here are Gramps & Grammy enjoying Baby B's nap time:

And some of the aunties J, S, M & I:

 
 
 

 Ha! Auntie C hamming it up. Too funny. :)

And I don't have a pic of Auntie B, but this is what happens when I leave her alone with Baby B. I can't complain too much though, because I got a good nap while she was at it:

Three cheers for a totally awesome family!

2 comments:

  1. You are one blessed woman! May I ask--how many siblings? And your mom did the wiring--whoa! Woman power! (Fortuntely, I married a guy who knows wiring, but I haven't a clue.)

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  2. Yes I am! I have 6 sisters - so no shortage of aunts for Baby B! :)

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