pour améliorer: It's all the Range

Do I get the award for the worst punny post title? Does that even qualify as a pun?

Never mind. Let's move on, shall we?

So! While we were very impatiently waiting for our freshly enamel-painted kitchen cabinet doors and drawers to cure (see here), we decided to keep ourselves very busy.

With something else that has been sitting around waiting for too long. Two years, in fact!

It's the rangehood that we got with our kitchen cabinets and stove, and that's been sitting around making a nuisance of itself ever since!

We've had the perfect spot reserved for him for a while between the two kitchen windows, and above the stove!

So, we decided that it was high time to get it up there!

But it's not as simple as that, is it? Of course not!

Because what good is a rangehood if it doesn't actually suck up smells and move them somewhere else - i.e. outside? Not good at all.

So, I bought a flexible foil duct hose and a vent so that we could make all the smells go outside. And then we had to figure out how we would actually install the thing!

Tom set up the ladder on the neighbours' driveway and made his way up to the area between those two windows where the rangehood needed to be.

We had a big conversation about where the vent should be, and decided to locate it almost half way between the tops of the window awnings and the top of the weatherboards under the eaves, so Tom started drilling a hole in our chosen spot, and I got to catch the falling debris.

Which wasn't particularly eventful from the inside until the very end.

Then he pulled out the drill attachments designed to cut big circles, which were labeled appropriately during my garage-organising stint...

Leaving us with two perfectly circular chunks - one of the outside weatherboards and one of the inside VJ boards. And thankfully only a tiny bit of framing timber from between the two, since our hole's location happened to just graze one of the vertical framing pieces inside the wall.

And of course, a perfectly circular direct channel through the wall from inside to out!

Then we pulled out the flexible foil vent and The Claw pulled it through the hole in the wall.

My role on the inside still wasn't very exciting.

And then we were left with this. Elephant wall!

Which we had a bit of fun with, because... well... why not? Daniel even enjoyed a conversation with Tom through the vent.

So with the foil duct in place, Tom then attached it to the external vent piece, screwed it in place, and voila! Just like a bought one!

He was proud, in case you can't tell.

And I am too. It looks beautifully centred.

And thankfully the stainless steel colour blends so nicely with the colour of the house that you'd hardly even notice it unless you were looking for it.

So then we were back to the inside! Tom lifted up the rangehood piece and held it in position while I marked where its screws needed to go into the wall with a pen...

And then Tom pre-drilled each screw hole so they'd be fairly easy to screw in.

Success! It stays up!

So then we had to deal with the top area of the duct. Even though we had decided not to go all the way to the ceiling with our vent hole, the cylindrical duct that the rangehood came with would look best if it ran all the way up to the ceiling. So, that section of the cornice had to. Let's just say that a circular saw is not the appropriate tool for this job, as those over-extended cut lines on the wall and ceiling testify.

We then attached the foil duct to the metal one that came with the rangehood and duct-taped them together so that there would be no air gaps...

And inserted the more decorative cylindrical duct piece over the top. Hooray! Finished!

Well actually, no, not finished. In the trip from the house where we got the rangehood along with the kitchen, we lost any little brackets that would have held the duct to the wall. So although we managed to just rest it on top of the rangehood for the above picture, it was at risk of coming toppling down without something to fix it to the wall at the top.

So, we had a look at the top section of the duct to see what we could come up with.

And when we had a closer look, we found this channel running along both sides.

We toyed with various ideas, including screwing timber in there, but each solution had an inherent problem - we couldn't screw anything through the duct and into the wall, because with the duct against the wall, it would block all of our access!

Eventually, I came up with the brilliant idea of bending this metal strapping into a kind of clip that we could screw to the wall, so that this channel in the duct could then slide up and through it and gravity would do all the work for us.

I know, that's not a very helpful explanation. But stay with me here. Tom got bending...

And then we screwed our little homemade clips to the wall. This shot still doesn't help you much, but imagine that the bent part of the metal strapping is in a very thin U shape facing the wall. The channel on the inside of the duct slots inside the open end of that U, and is that holds it against the wall.

You can see in the above photo that we also added a little power point of sorts for the cable to plug into, since the length of cable isn't enough to make it all the way into the ceiling. You'll be relieved to hear that this didn't actually involve any live electrical wiring, that conduit containing the wires isn't actually connected to anything. We've just run it into the ceiling so that the electrician can connect it all up properly (and legally!).

In the meantime, until we get the electrician out, we've just popped that plug out and are running the power off an extension lead. You can just see the cable down on the right here.

This job falls into that same category of "I can't believe it's taken us this long to do this!". Aside from the cost of buying the little external vent and flexi duct, we already had absolutely everything we needed to do this job, and it only took a couple of hours. And now we're that little bit closer to a finished kitchen!