A Tale of Home 'Improvement'

1. Move into house. Note strange, unattractive, huge fan embedded in ceiling.

2. For the following 8 years, walk under this behemoth and speculate idly how much thermal leaking was happening. Run fan twice (causing great consternation both times) in those 8 years.

3. During recent heat wave reach up and touch metal slats and gather unambiguous data that the thermal leakage is enormous.

4. Decide to remove fan and put in insulation. Look at huge, heavy fan and change plan.

5. Electrically disconnect fan (protecting yourself from forgetful future you or innocent future owner). Stuff in left over insulation from cousin Roger (Thanks, Roger!) between fan and (missing) ceiling.

6. Randomly saw left over drywall from Roger with jig saw (jigsaw saw?) borrowed from Roger as well until that drywall has been rendered into small, useless pieces. However, successfully nail in scrap pieces of 2 by 4's in random locations about the hole as attachment surfaces for drywall.

7. Run to home depot. Purchase 4' x 8' drywall for 3'x3' hole. Realize in parking lot the Sienna can not fit a 4 by 8 of anything. Tool-lessly (cluelessly?), clumsily snap 4 by 8 in half and haul two 4 x 4 sections home.

8. Measure once and cut 6 or 7 times until drywall resembles hole. Screw drywall to 2 x 4's as carefully as they were placed there earlier.

9. Watch 14 youtube videos on how to repair holes in your ceiling.  Ignore all of them and run back to home depot to buy 'mud'. (I know buying the premixed joint compound identifies me as a noob but the single tub cost less than the multi-lifespan amount of the smallest bag of the dry stuff you mix yourself!)

10. Slap mud all along the joints. Happily call in the family to bask in their praise.

11. "When are you going to finish it and paint it white?" was not the desired reaction. In response I slather a Rothko inspired layer all over the surface.

12. Suspicious that this mud dries white I mount a campaign to convince the family this is an improvement to the house.  When I get to the equations of heat transfer, they give up.

13. Victory

14. Consider relabeling disconnected fan switch "countdown to the apocalypse". Too much?  Not sure, I will take the next 8 years to figure out what to do with this switch...