fans and such
margaret and i passed the marriage stability test over the labor day weekend. we did a household project together, and we never raised our voices. let me set the scene for you.
our house had been progressively getting warmer. i was attributing it to the fact that it was REALLY hot outside--110+ degrees, but the house was never cooling off. never. the a/c ran and ran and ran. all day, all night.
i was really hot. i would sit around all evening in my boxer shorts on the floor praying for a wisp of cold air to cool my heated core.
on the thursday before labor day, meg and i stopped into our friendly neighborhood property management company to pay our rent and complain about the heat. they said don't worry about it. they'd get right on it.
friday passed and no one came out to look at the a/c.
saturday came and meg and i decided to install a ceiling fan in the bedroom because the room was too hot to sleep in. we went down to the home depot, picked out a fan, came home and installed it. that was easy.
of course it wasn't that easy. first off, we live in an old house. the beams in the ceiling aren't built the same way that they are now, so the easy ceiling fan installation went out the window. first i had to determine how the light fixture was actually attached to the beam. at first, i thought it was just nailed in there. that seemed precarious, and i knew that i couldn't just hang the fan from a light box that was just nailed into the beam. (i mean i could but that could get dangerous. :-) so i crawled up in the attic to try to get a look at it.
for those of you that know me, you know i am a man of few tools. thus, the fact that we don't own a ladder didn't dissuade me from piling our four dining room chairs on top of each other so that i could climb into the attic. wait. that's still not tall enough. so i opened up a camping chair from 1986 on top of these four chairs so that i could get into the attic.
did i mention that i'm afraid of heights??
anyway, even i could tell that this wasn't the sturdiest contrapment ever constructed, so i had margaret come and hold the stool on the chairs while i crawled to the top of this monstrosity.
still not tall enough. the attic was at least the temperature of the sun, so i
decided to do more investigating at the actual light housing.
the housing looked kind of funny. i tried to pull it out. this didn't work. i ran my screwdriver around and around it trying to see what was holding it up there.
finally, i remembered that wonderful invention--the internet.
i did a google search for "ceiling fan installation" and got a good number of hits. the first site i went to was discussing installing ceiling fans in older houses. it told me i had to go buy this contraption that looked just like the box in my ceiling.
eureka.
now i knew that the box could support the fan.
putting the fan together was easy. margaret did it. :-)
putting the fan together on the ceiling sucked. we gave up after a while and went to dinner with some friends.
dan came home with us and said he would help us finish this task. i think he was mainly tired of the ceiling fan tale, or he knew he would then become part of the legend.
it took us almost half an hour to screw in one screw. mind you the whole project took forty-five minutes. (margaret had assembled everything in advance.) there was this one screw that was about half an inch from the ceiling that you had to hold the fan in place while you screwed it in that almost was the death of dan and i.
we took turns. he would hold the fan. i would attempt to screw. then, i would hold the fan. he would attempt to screw. we began to sweat. we began to stink. we were working in close quarters. margaret stood far away from us.
we finally got it.
yeah! the room temperature dropped fifteen to twenty degrees when we switched it on. thank god. it was hot.
sunday, monday, ... on tuesday at around 4:30 i get a call from the a/c guy. i need to meet him at the house so he can diagnose the problem. so i do that.
he checks our filter. the filter is fine. he crawls under the house and tells me that the problem is that the a/c duct work is all over the ground and not actually connected to the vents in the house. then, he says that duct work is expensive so he's going to have to get approval, and oh! look at the time it's after five, so he's going home.
tuesday reached 112 degrees. margaret came home. she was not happy.
on wednesday, our property manager got a bright and early phone call from margaret. he then tried to foist the problem on us.
at some point, our property manager must have assembled a scenario in his head much like this:
- woman calls
- use air conditioning terms
- confuse her
- blame her and her husband for problems
- she acquiesces
- she and her husband then pay for the a/c problems
that's not how it went. margaret unloaded on him. and after he stammered too many times, margaret told him that if he didn't get someone out there right now she was reporting them to austin tenant council and city of austin energy waste. when she was through with him, she told him that she wanted to talk to his boss.
i got a phone call ten minutes later stating that an a/c guy was at my house.
he fixed the a/c, and told me that the real problem was that our property manager was "an asshole."
the property manager's boss called margaret the next day and told her that he was very sorry. he's paying for our ceiling fan and any discrepancies between last month's and this month's electric bill.
have i mentioned lately how much my wife rocks??
in the future
later this week, i'll give you my end of summer movie reviews:
- the cell
- cecil b. demented
- the eyes of tammy faye
- the tao of steve
