My adventures as a new homeowner

I am done with a very big thanks to my girlfriend's dad. I could not have done it without him. We started outside. He cut the soffit and through the board to install the soffit ventilator. I then crawled up into the attic and pushed the pipe through to him. There was only a 3 1/2" gap between the roof and the frame of the house. We had to squish the pipe a little. After connecting up the pipe to the soffit vent we went back inside.

The next part was the electrical work. We had to drill another hole to thread the electrical wire down. Whoever previously did the electrical work in the house decided that they would use the box for the light fixture as the junction box to who knows where. That was no big deal, but we had to go fishing for wire. It took some time, but we finally got it. One thing I learned was that when fishing for wire, it helps to make the wire as straight as possible. The wire is rigid enough making it fairly easy to direct it to the hole for the junction box.

Now we had to cut a hole in the ceiling for the fan. I drilled several holes for location and my girlfriend's dad cut the opening in the ceiling. Next we connected up the wires. After we installed the mounting bracket we ran into another snag. I think we got it backwards: we should have mounted the fan first and then connected the wires. Oh well. We had to move the mounting bracket to get everything to fit. We then sealed up any gaps in the opening with duct tape.

Now the rest was up to me. I crawled back into the attic to install the pipe insulation. It was not easy sliding the sleeve over the duct work, but after a bit of wrestling on a bed of insulation it was finally in place. I tried to attach the pipe to the fan using a plastic tie, but no such luck so I sent my girlfriend to buy a metal one. She came back with a 5" one because the store was all out of 4" ones. Once again, I went back up into the attic and connected everything together. Then a little bit of duct tape to seal things up and we were done.

The final thing to do was to restore all the insulation. This was quite a chore as there were mountains of insulation in some spots and bare patches in others. Whoever was up there before didn't bother cleaning up after they were done. Moving around in the attic was like playing twister with a bunch of 2x4s but if you make a mistake you get jabbed by a roofing nail. This was the messiest part of the whole project. I finally had a relatively level layer of insulation but I was covered in insulation fuzz.

After a bit of cleanup and showering I was finally done. My skin still feels some minor irritation from the insulation. It feels like thousands of very tiny pin pricks. I probably breathed a bit in and swallowed some too. In the end, it was worth the satisfaction of taking that shower and having the fan on instead of the window open.

Labels: attic, bathroom fan, electrical, insulation

# posted by Wing-Leung Chan @ 11:13 p.m.