Home Improvement (Ar...Ar...Ar!)

As much as I love my husband, home repair has not always been his greatest strength. When we lived in our trailer house in Bismarck, he tried to fix the plumbing when our bathroom shower sprung a leak. That became a disaster of such proportion that his dad ended up coming over to save the day, and the floor in the laundry room still had to be completely replaced. Of course, I haven't really him live that down, and the memory of what has become known as "the plumbing incident" always made the idea of doing home repair and improvement projects a little scary. (There really is something to be said for all of our years of renting apartments when I could pick up the phone and call maintenance when something broke.)

So, a week before Christmas, the girls and I were home one night and suddenly we heard a horrid screeching coming from the basement. Going downstairs to investigate, I found the source of the noise to be our central exhaust fan. Besides being the exhaust for the bathrooms, in the winter, it runs constantly since we turn on the humidifier system attached to our furnace.

Now, we've known for a while that the fan was going to bite the dust real soon. It's been rattling and making some really weird sounds practically since we moved in, but the fact that it chose that particular moment to break down completely was such a thrill for us. To borrow a thought from a fellow blogger who has been fighting with her clothes drier, we really love it when things break down just before Christmas because we are, after all, made of money.

The fact that the central exhaust is necessary to run the humidifier meant that our house has been exceptionally dry for the past couple of weeks. Mike has always been prone to nose bleeds, but has not had many since we moved in. Once the humidifier was out of commission, he started having them again just about every day. This, of itself, was bad enough, but with the fan broken, we also had no exhaust fans in the bathrooms. I won't even go into the details, but lets just say we used A LOT of Febreeze Air Effects spray over the past few weeks.

Wednesday, Mike decided he'd had enough of the nose bleeds and Febreeze, so he took the fan apart and made the ceremonial trip to Lowes to buy a replacement fan. Two hours later he came home completely frustrated. Not only did Lowes have no idea what it was, neither did Home Depot, Fleet Farm, or Menards. What happened to taking care of all my home needs? I know that central exhaust is a little bit unusual, but it's not completely unheard of! So yesterday, Mike continued his quest by trying home heating and cooling companies and had no better luck with them.

I'll skip the details because they involve alot of running from place to place, explaining what he needed, and receiving blank stare replies, but in the end, Mike found out that the only way he could get this part was to go to a company that sells parts like this to contractors. (HUH???? It's a stupid FAN, people! We're not trying to buy explosives or anything!) He goes to this company and they tell him that in order to sell to him, he has to be a contractor...so guess what? Mike now has a general contractor's account with this company. (I guess if we ever have to build, we can buy our own stuff now, right?)

Of course, buying the part was only half the battle. Once he got it home, he realized that the fan he bought was set up exactly opposite of what we needed. (I'm now having flashbacks to the plumbing fiasco.) He proceeds to completely disassemble the casing of this brand new fan and reverse it so that it fits. After a bit of swearing and fumbling, Mike had it reassembled. Amazingly, he took it downstairs, wired it, and it fit right into place and we now have a working exhaust. Our humidity is improved and the bathrooms smell much better!

So, Mike has now successfully completed his first major home repair, and his confidence has be lifted so much that he's been walking around grunting like Tim "The Toolman" Tayler since last night. Unfortunately, if you ever watched Home Improvement, you know how well most of his projects turned out. I have to give him credit, though. This was, by far the most complicated repair we've completed without calling someone to come do it for us, but for now, I still think I'll be keeping him away from the plumbing!