One of the things that we have needed to do to the house since we have moved in is replace the bathroom fan. So yesterday I was bored and I decided that I’d quickly replace it. Hah….quick was the wrong word. It seems like most of the projects I undertake that are out of my realm seem to take double the amount of time I think they should.

I had to crawl up into the attic, after fitting our 8 foot ladder in the only place it will fit in the house (we have 8 foot ceilings!). And then I had to crawl through about 18 inches of insulation. Glad that I have the insulation, but without a face mask it was kind of a pain. Removing the old fan was fairly quick (there has to be some correlation between destruction and construction). Back down and up to install the new fan. I got the new box in there, then decided that I had installed it incorrectly so took it out. This was after I looked at the instructions and it said I should be able to insert it through the bathroom hole. Yeah I don’t think so. There was no way the box was going to fit back through that hole. So I went back up and installed it again.

After that I had to connect the wires so that it would run. That required a run to the hardware store again for wire nuts. Connecting the wires was a cinch. What was the hardest part and the most frustrating was trying to jam this electrical bit back into it’s corner and getting it to stay. I ended up making to many “modifications” (and yelling so loud that I’m sure the neighbors heard me!) to the new piece and had to revert back to the old piece. Once I did that it worked just fine and we now have a new fan in the bathroom. It’s not as loud as the old one (still not as quiet as my parents and my brothers), and it works a lot better with pulling out the steam.

Next up…getting rid of the wallpaper. That’s something that the wife is going to do.

I was going to do a whole post on recycling, but I’ll just leave it at this. Please recycle if you can. I think when we were traveling back home it came out that global warm is being caused by humans. Well yeah…we knew that without some doctor with nothing better to do telling us so. When we were back home both my wife and I asked our parents if they recycled and they said no. We both found it odd, but went about it. Where we live has made it so easy to recycle. So I suspect that this is part of the reason that we recycle. But I’d like to think even if it wasn’t so easy to recycle we’d still do it. After all we have to live with this world and so do our kids (for those that have them). I can’t help but wonder how much smaller the dump at my home town would be if the town was more proactive about recycling. I remember when I was growing up you couldn’t see the dump from the road. Now I’m pretty sure you can see it from the road if you know where to look. Any how please recycle if you can. Also this is not to point fingers at anyone. It was just an observation that we made while we were home!