Welcome to another round of Saturday Morning Home Repair Blogging, where experts and amateurs gather to share advice, war stories, and encouragement. Every so often, there's a little mockery, but only of homeowners long past as we fix up their stupid messes.
When you buy a 100-year old 2-family, fixing teh Stupid takes on a whole new meaning. Over the years there have been numurous upgrades; some good, some.....well, not so good. Like Stupid on new levels.
The first winter we were here, my wife and I noticed something odd. There were ducts in every room for the forced hot air heating system except one: the kitchen. The house was originally designed with the heat source as the kitchen stove, so it is the largest and most central room, with all others attached to it. A few minutes tracing the ducts in the basement let me know a new level of Stupid had been achieved.
At first, I could not believe the ducting came out on the wall where it did. Nobody would be dumb enough to put a base cabinet in front of a heating duct, right? Here's the wall of the kitchen where I had traced the duct to:
Looks pretty nice, dishwasher and all, so the duct couldn't really be there, could it? Back to the basement with a tape measure...and then a peek behind the fridge.
That triangular-looking thing is the side edge of a heating vent. Now I know why the room was cold, but all my pots and pans seemed to be preheated. After emptying the cabinet, pulling the drawer out and unscrewing the counter top, I finally got the cabinet out of the way. The previous owner's remodelling skills immediately went, in my opinion, from not horrible to Stupid.
The dishwasher, it turns out, was a rolling apartment type that he had taken the wheels off, and used a few plumbing adapters on. In order to bring the top of the cabinet to the same height as the diswasher, he laid the two strips you see in the picture; they are actually the rails for adjustable shelves. Not a bad get-around. This still left the problem of the duct, though. Luckily, I happened to have some ventilation duct in the garage I could use. Have pliers and tin snips, will fabricate:
Using the $4 vent cover from the hardware store as a template for the ducting size, it took about an hour to cut down and reshape the aluminum ducting to fit. Inside the original vent itself (with the cover off), the top of the fabricated ducting curves downward the help the air flow smoothly into the new channel, while the bottom portion stops at the vent entrance. To hold everything in place and seal seams....duct tape! For all the millions of uses, I had never actually used the stuff for it's original intended purpose.
Finally, after a quick cutout of the cabinet baseboard, I scrubbed the floor and dropped every thing back in place. Ironically, it took less time to re-install the cabinet and counter than it did to put away the cookware. A full days work, and all I have to show for it is a small, beige vent cover.
It still amazes me that anyone would add cabinet space at the expense of the heating bill. The best part is, after shoveling snow I can take off the boots and warm my feet back up just by standing in front of it and sipping coffee. Just one story of Stupid from many in the past few years.