Big Ed Says My Ducts Are Too Small

So. I'm working on a little construction project at Chez Carly.

About 10 years ago we put on an addition onto our tiny house. We added a 3rd bedroom, a half bath with laundry hookups, made the kitchen about 50% bigger, and added a family room, which is about 13 x 20'.

This might seem to a LOGICAL person to be big enough... until you consider what we cram into it:

• a small, NOT widescreen tv on a giant (dated...) entertainment center
• a stereo (about 3 feet tall with the tape decks and radio tuner etc)
• about 200 CD's I do not actually ever play because the ones I like are on my ipod
• five million disney movies on VHS and about 100 dvds, each watched once
• a recliner and a loveseat (note, comfy seating for THREE, and we have four family members)
• a desk with the main computer, piles of PTO stuff, other financial records of organizations Mr C works for, and plenty of other peep's tax info come February & March
• a bookshelf, a coffee table, a side table, my scrapbook table (which my great Aunt used to play bridge on, I'm pretty sure)
• two sets of Target / melmac/ stackable drawers for my scrap stuff and beads
• two "CM" type tote bags full of more scrap stuff
• a set of plastic drawers to hold the overflow of miscellaneous computer / camera / phone cords, USB adapters, and various pictures and things I haven't "scrapped" yet.

I can NOT, therefore, have a decent bikini volleyball match in my family room. Even using a Wii. I won't talk about what happens when the Christmas tree and presents MUST be crammed into the room. Things go away. My things. My sanity preservers.... my pretty paper and punches and stamps and inks...and the coffee table, and also.... well now I'm talking about it. Anyway.

It's the room I spend a few hours every day in, and I CAN'T BREATHE in it.

So I'd hoped to build a loft over the kitchen, part of the living room, and the garage, as we have this great big unfinished attic (which is full of other crap, but that is beside the point right now because in my mind it's EMPTY space). It was a great idea - in my technicolor imagination. I had a window seat built for my hermit teen, a BIG scrapbook area, with beach colors and big prints of my favorite vacation pictures, and so on. One problem. The BOYS who came to look at the house to do such a project had no vision and talked about how the new roof rests on the old roof and silly things like headroom for staircases and building codes not allowing a door only four feet tall passing under the point where the two roofs join. Building codes. Which, of course, were all written by boys.

Soo we decided, can't go up, go out. Make the addition the size it should have been per our family's needs for the room. Which, potentially, adds many many muddy footprints to the whole project.

Just for fun the builder I was working with called "Big Ed" (I swear) and another guy, to come look at the furnace and electric box. They pointed out that if I buy a new hot water tank (cha ching) I can avoid having to do extensive work to my electric service box (converting from an electric hot water tank to high efficiency gas). So now I have to have NiMo run gas to the house - which, apparently, they do for free if you convert one appliance to gas. HAH! Free. So there, Internets.

This lead to a question I'd anticipated. "Do you want a gas fireplace?" Well. I do. But really what I NEED is to have room for all of the furniture already in the room, and not add space hogs like a fireplace. Thank you. I shared this thought with my family members and somehow the conversation got to "well we could hang a flatscreen tv over the gas fireplace.... but our current tv still works fine" - at which point I saw my 10 year old mentally making a bullet list of ways to cause the destruction of our current television. I pointed out to him that any such actions would set the acquisition of a new set back by a minimum of 12-18 months. Killjoy.

Big Ed and friends looked disparagingly at my old furnace - it's a huge old oil hot air furnace, and we throw a virgin in there every fall, pay for the "best" service plan (which is still less than the repairs would be, and we do repair the thing annually) and hope for the best. I'm not sure I can fund a new furnace on top of everything else. Hmm. This sounds like a potentially good diet for me - the "I can't afford food anymore" plan.

The best part was when they said they'd have to redo the ductwork running the length of the basement. Apparently the guy who built my house used leftover pieces from other building projects. He used the size that normally run to an individual room rather than proper "trunk" pieces which are quite a bit bigger. For a scary, breathe-in-a- paper-bag moment I thought that they'd rip apart the ENTIRE house to redo all the ductwork. You can just make me Britney's roommate right now.

Another discovery which really wasn't much of a surprise to me was that when we added the bedroom in round 1, no one put insulation under the floorbooards. They pretty much put a vapor barrier in and ran away. Leaving me to sleep on plywood over a crawl space (for all you girls, THAT"S THE DIRT UNDER MY HOUSE. It's winter here and I hate waking up with icicles on my face.)

This is only going to get worse, kids. I haven't seen ANY numbers yet.